We Outta Be In Pictures: Marvel Movie Magic circa 1981

After so many years of high profile superhero movies, it's easy for us comic book fans to get a little spoiled.  In fact, fat budgets and CGI wizardry have made the adaptation of superheroes to film so commonplace, movies that would have paralyzed me with glee twenty years ago receive the ever-critical eye of the discerning fan (such as my recent tomato-tossing review of The Dark Knight).

However, while I stand by my Dark Knight review, I have to admit that sometimes I forget just how far we've come since the "bad old days" of comic-to-film adaptations.

In fact, for many years, one of the running jokes following the success of Superman: The Movie was how Marvel Comics just couldn't seem to get any traction when it came to getting their comics translated into movies.  Sure, they had a handful of characters that made it onto TV in the late 70's (most prominently The Incredible Hulk), but on the movie front, it was all talk and no action.

To give you younger fans a taste of this purgatory of vague plans and underwhelming development deals, I thought I'd run some excerpts from Amazing Heroes #1 (1981).  A refreshing alternative to the cynical and stuffy Comics Journal, the staff of Amazing Heroes actually seemed to like comic books and the people who created them. Covering the New York Creation Convention, they reported on Stan Lee's Marvel Movie Update to an eager convention crowd.

Here's a few of the highlights (or, more accurately, lowlights):

Fantastic Four: "Some guy, young guy like a George Lucas who's in the business, bought the rights to it. I've been meeting with him for the past three months and he's planning to do a major, big budget motion picture of the Fantastic Four."

Got that?  "Some guy" wanted to do a big budget F.F. movie. 

Good enough for me! 

Ghost Rider: "Believe it or not, Dino De Laurentiis took an option on the Ghost Rider. How he's going to do it, I don't know, but it's in the works."

Translation: "I have no idea how they're going to light a
guy's head on fire for an hour and a half, but I'll let the
guy who directed 'The Towering Inferno' figure it out."

Thor: "Major motion picture. We're talking Orson Welles playing Odin. Anyway, Orson Welles hasn't heard about it yet, but we were sitting there as if he's in the bag."

"We will make no Thor movie before it's time."

Spider-Man: The guy who produced "Beatlemania" wanted to do Spider-Man as a Broadway musical. Anyway, now we're talking about doing it as a movie, a musical but a serious musical."

(cue music) "With great power comes great responsibilite-ee-eeeee!"

The Silver Surfer: "The Silver Surfer is still on the way to being a big movie. Lee Kramer, who's going to produce it, is at this very moment in Australia and I think he's renting the whole continent as the setting! He found a scientist in England who is working on something called linear induction. At the moment he has this linear induction worked out so it can make a surfboard go this high above the ground and really travel with a man on it. They promise me by the time the thing is filmed, they'll get the surfboard that high. They get the camera underneath it, they paint the sky--it'll look like he's out in space!" Lee also said he'd be "closely involved" with the making of the movie and that the Surfer "will probably fight Galactus" in the film.

"They get the camera underneath it, they paint the sky--
it'll look like he's out in space!" Bada bing, bada boom! 

I'm an eternal fan of Stan Lee, but how many of you think
there was even a pixel of truth in that entire paragraph?"

Captain America: "There's a guy doing a Captain America Broadway musical. It's not what you'd expect. It's not an action-packed thriller, although it will be thrilling and there may be some action. We're going to pick Captain America up in middle age. His hair is thinning, he's getting a little bit of a pot belly. He's living in a furnished room somewhere with a little light bulb that hangs on a chain over the little iron bed and a sink in the corner of the room. And he's saying 'How did I come to this? What happened to my life?' And then we get him involved in an adventure. I think it's going to be a hit. That's about a year off."

No details on who this mysterious "guy" was, but a nosebleeding
amount of detail on what Loser Cap's apartment would look like?

Yeah, and who'd think a Broadway show about a fat, balding Captain America wouldn't be a "hit"?

Other plans included a possible X-Men movie ("Now as soon as I get one of the books and learn who the new X-Men are..."), Howard the Duck (by "the guy who wrote Bronco Billy"), and (I kid you not) a country-western superhero named "Denim Blue".

Thankfully, none of these absurd treatments ever made it into movie theatres (or onto Broadway stages).  After several near-misses in the early 90's (such as Roger Corman's aborted Fantastic Four and the dreadful, direct-to-video Captain America), 2000's X-Men movie finally broke the spell...sparking nearly a decade's worth of Marvel movies ranging from decent to excellent (with no end in sight).

Comments

[Rich]

No love for the '98 Blade flick? X-Men hit it July 2000, according to IMDB.

Great stuff here from that magazine. I'm glad none of that worked out, really.

[ploni van almoni]

Hey there was a howard the duck movie!
And it was ridiculus....
Oh and I'm pretty sure there was a punisher movie in the 80's..

[phillyradiogeek]

The Punisher movie starred Dolph Lungren in the title role and was released in 1989 or 1990. They started from scratch with the Thomas Jane film a couple of years ago, and now I understand the new movie is yet another reboot?

[De Baisch]

Linear induction is real. It's the principal driver for maglev trains and particle accelerators. It's a means of guiding an object along a path without friction. I suppose it could be used to levitate a surfboard but the apparatus required would no doubt be incredibly expensive; it would be much cheaper to use a green screen.

Does anyone else remember the ad in Marvel's comics back in 1986 looking for a girl to co-star in the Captain America musical? Does anyone know what happened to that production or was it quietly canned?

[Mark Engblom]

"No love for the '98 Blade flick? X-Men hit it July 2000, according to IMDB."

Thanks for the reminder on the X-Men date. I've changed the text in the post. As for Blade...yeah, that was definitely a step in the right direction for Marvel films. As good as the first Blade was, I still consider the X-Men movie the thing that really got the comics-to-film process kick-started.

As for the Punisher movie, we can probably file that in the same fumbling-bumbling category as the aborted F.F. movie and the Captain America direct-to-video disaster. In fact, wasn't the Lungren Punisher movie also direct-to-video?

"Does anyone else remember the ad in Marvel's comics back in 1986 looking for a girl to co-star in the Captain America musical? "

No...never heard of that, but I'm certainly intrigued! My guess is that, yes, it was probably quietly canned due to the usual reasons stuff like this falls through. Geez, what was it with Marvel properties and musicals?

[suedenim]

From the bits and pieces of info I've come across over the years, it sounds like the 1986 Cap musical that was advertised and the one mentioned by Stan here were probably the same project. An "aging Cap" was apparently part of that one, too.

There's a Spider-Man musical apparently in serious development now, by the person who did the Broadway "Lion King" musical. It sounds like they *might* just be able to pull it off... one thing that I like is that the musical will have a "Geek Chorus" that will interrupt the proceedings to nitpick continuity issues and such. I figure any project that has that idea can't be all bad....

It's reading stuff like this Amazing Heroes article for *years* during the '80s and '90s that has made me a hyper-skeptic that any comic book movie will ever get made. Even after seeing the trailer and cast photos and all, my gut reaction is *still* "A Watchmen movie? Yeah, right, that'll happen, just like all those other Watchmen movies, and the Plastic Man movie, and the Blackhawk movie, and...."

[Johnny Bacardi]

Orson Welles would have rocked as Odin. Yes he would have.

[Wes C]

http://goodcomics.comicbookresources.com/2007/05/10/comic-book-urban-legends-revealed-102/

That address leads to an entry on the Comic book Urban Legend site about the Cap Musical
(and some funny Liefeld stuff).

The Urban legend site is always pretty informative and entertaining.

Man, ALL of those projects sound terrible!
Ok, actually Orson Wells as Odin sounds great, everything else sounds like pure garbage.

But hey, at least that's a great Byrne FF cover!

[De Baisch]

"In fact, wasn't the Lungren Punisher movie also direct-to-video?"

It was indeed. There was a bit of talk in early 1988 about the film being released theatrically at the end of the summer but New World Pictures went bankrupt before that could happen.

[Mark Engblom]

"Orson Welles would have rocked as Odin. Yes he would have."

I don't know...by that time he was incredibly fat and probably wouldn't have fit the part (or Odin's throne). The voice of Welles could have been perfect for Odin, but physically he was closer to The Voluminous Volstagg!

Just thinking about Orson Welles wearing some of that elaborate, unweildy Odin headgear makes me crack a smile.....

[Ralph C.]

I have a copy (somewhere) of that Corman "Fantastic Four" film. For what it was, a way to keep from losing the copyright, it wasn't a bad film. Yes it was cheap and such but I thought it had some fun parts in it, and the costuming wasn't bad, and Dr. Doom looked okay.... I didn't think it was any worse than the first "Fantastic Four" film done a few years ago-- and that movie had a much bigger budget!

"Blade" was pretty darn good but "X-Men" did get the whole "cha-ching" aspect of comic book movies. I didn't like any of the "X-Men" films, either. Also, after watching "The Dark Knight", actually the next day, this past Sunday morning, I felt the need to get my thoughts out onto a computer screen. ... let's just say I wasn't so happy about that movie, either.

[Mark Engblom]

Yeah, I remember liking the first Blade quite bit, although the grandiose ending seemed at odds with the nice little street-level vibe they had going earlier in the film.

I thought the second X-Men film was the best of the lot, though the first one had its moments (like seeing Wolverine for the first time), and I didn't mind the third one as much as the "weeping and gnashing of teeth" crowd.

"Also, after watching "The Dark Knight", actually the next day, this past Sunday morning, I felt the need to get my thoughts out onto a computer screen. ... let's just say I wasn't so happy about that movie, either."

We're not the only ones, Ralph. I'm noticing more and more commentors across the web taking a harder look at Dark Knight and finding it lacking. Not the worst movie ever made, but certainly not the Manna from Heaven so many are hyperventilating over.

[Nimbus]

I found Dark Knight to be a good film but not exactly brilliant. Iron Man, for me, was a much better.

Anyway, stretching things a little here, but wasn't "Men In Black" the first (ahem) Marvel comic book film to be a hit and start the ball rolling?

Men In Black was originally an Aircel book, but they were bought by Malibu who, in turn, were bought by Marvel in 1994. Admittedly, Men In Black wasn't a superhero comic book but I think it's success together with Blade and then X-Men pretty much sealed the deal with Marvel.

[Kyle]

There's a Spider-Man musical apparently in serious development now, by the person who did the Broadway "Lion King" musical.

Okay, that's finally the first reasonable explanation I've seen for this Spider-vid. Scary!

[chris w.]

Bully has a scan of the Captain America musical ad:

http://bullyscomics.blogspot.com/2008/03/roar-of-greasepaint-smell-of-cap.html

Oh, and I love the Lundgren Punisher movie. It's worth watching, and deserved better than the direct-to-video treatment.