Tripping the Light Fantastic
Via ebay, I have acquired a DVD of the Fantastic Four movie made by Roger Corman in 1994 for a budget of about thirty-six cents. There are varying tales of why/how this movie came into being. As far as I can tell, there was a company who had the rights to make a movie featuring said characters, and their option was about to expire, so they very quickly threw a couple mil at Corman just so they could have a Fantastic Four movie on the books. It was never intended to be released, and rumor has it they even burned the negatives. But of course a few bootlegs got out, as they always do, and in this digital age where we're able to rip and burn a thousand illegal copies in the time it takes to say "it's clobberin' time," all it takes to get your hands on this little gem is a few mouse-clicks on ebay.
I wanted a copy because just the fact that it exists hits a lot of my buttons as far as things I love. Primarily, I've long had a minor obsession with products that didn't quite make it, fads that never caught on, scenes that hit the cutting room floor, and products that should have been released but weren't. Brilliant But Cancelled, which airs on Trio, was made for people like me. I bought all three Beatles Anthologies on the day they came out.
It's the same reason I'm such a fan of alternate history and spec-fic tales, actually. (One of my all-time favorite novels is Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee, which speculates on what New York City would have been like had the South won the Civil War.) Not that I yearn for a world in which Crystal Pepsi is the number-one selling soft drink in America, but I think it's fun, in an odd way, to daydream about the road not taken.
Also, I finally have to come to terms with the fact that I actually do sort of like superhero comics. Not that you'll ever see me purchasing them, or knowing all of the minutiae of every origin story, timeline, sidekick, costume change, and archnemesis of every superhero in the Marvel and/or DC stable, but I recognize, finally, that superheroes are fun. I should probably stop pretending I hate comics in all their various forms. I spend way too much time in Brooklyn Superhero Supply for that to be believable, anyway. I've seen both Spider-Man movies, and all of the Superman movies, and they brought about warm fuzzy memories of being a very small child and getting four colors of cheap ink all over my grubby little paws. The Fantastic Four, in particular, were favorites when I was younger. I've had a crush on Reed Richards since I was old enough to find fictional characters attractive.
Combine these things with my love for low-budget cheese in all its various forms, as well as my fascination with the various quirks of American copyright law, and this was a film I definitely had to own.
My copy arrived yesterday, and I watched the first half-hour or so last night. Surprisingly (and I assure you, I say this in the purest nicemodernist spirit possible, without a trace of irony or sarcasm), it's legitimately entertaining. It's goofy and cartoonish, like the best superhero comics often are. The villains are larger-than-life caricatures, and the scenery and costumes look as though they've jumped right out of the Silver Age books in all their "pow! bam! thud!" glory. In places, it reminds me of the live-action-cartoon aesthetic of Power Rangers or the Ninja Turtle movies. And while the effects are as terrible as you'd expect from a movie with a budget of $1.5 million, the other aspects compensate to some degree - the score is fairly decent (and the fact that they used a real orchestra lends a touch of class), and the script is reasonably good, if cheesy.
Mainly, though, the entertainment factor comes from the fact that the movie isn't deliberately awful. Any irony in this movie has to be brought to it from outside. The idea that the actors and crew involved in The Fantastic Four had no idea it wasn't intended for release is kind of bittersweet. Cutely heartbreaking, if you will. You can see in their eyes that they're not phoning it in - they're a bunch of unknowns thinking that this might be the thing to make them known. Even though there were people who knew from the outset that this film would never see the light of day, they still managed to make it with the intent of entertaining someone.
Bottom line, if you were a little kid who spent your allowance money on frivolous superhero comics, you might have gone to see this movie and you'd probably have liked it. This movie absolutely appeals to my inner ten-year-old - ten-year-olds are old enough to follow a reasonably complicated plot, but not so old that they can always distinguish the high-quality entertainment from the low-quality cheap fun and routinely choose the former over the latter.
Unfortunately, there's not a place for this kind of comic-book movie in mainstream America anymore. The majority of comics consumers want to see the most literalistic, convoluted plots that explain the humanity of their superheroes as if the superheroes were real people. They want it both ways - they want it to resonate with the characters they grew up with, but they also want it smart, layered, and believable in our own realm. These are the same people who come out of every comic-book-based movie grousing about how it didn't follow the chronology exactly.
The way I see it, though, it isn't real. I don't want it to look real. That's not what comic books are about for me. I like them one-dimensional. My own love of superhero comics involves a certain suspension of disbelief that I actively embrace. I don't need to delve into Batman's psyche and then watch a full-scale epic battle that takes out half of Gotham City in spectacular pyrotechnic fashion - I'd rather see him beat up a bad guy (pow! bam! thud!) and scale a building using the Batarang and some string. I want spangles and spandex and bold primary colors. I want the purest black-and-white distillation of good versus evil. There's a certain joy in that.
If that's your bag, then I recommend the Corman DVD. If it's not, I hear Batman Begins is pretty decent.
But just about everyone in both camps seems to be roundly panning the NEW Fantastic Four movie, so you might want to hold off on that until it comes out on DVD. (Even though I hear that Ioan Gruffudd makes an extremely sexy Reed Richards.)
I wanted a copy because just the fact that it exists hits a lot of my buttons as far as things I love. Primarily, I've long had a minor obsession with products that didn't quite make it, fads that never caught on, scenes that hit the cutting room floor, and products that should have been released but weren't. Brilliant But Cancelled, which airs on Trio, was made for people like me. I bought all three Beatles Anthologies on the day they came out.
It's the same reason I'm such a fan of alternate history and spec-fic tales, actually. (One of my all-time favorite novels is Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee, which speculates on what New York City would have been like had the South won the Civil War.) Not that I yearn for a world in which Crystal Pepsi is the number-one selling soft drink in America, but I think it's fun, in an odd way, to daydream about the road not taken.
Also, I finally have to come to terms with the fact that I actually do sort of like superhero comics. Not that you'll ever see me purchasing them, or knowing all of the minutiae of every origin story, timeline, sidekick, costume change, and archnemesis of every superhero in the Marvel and/or DC stable, but I recognize, finally, that superheroes are fun. I should probably stop pretending I hate comics in all their various forms. I spend way too much time in Brooklyn Superhero Supply for that to be believable, anyway. I've seen both Spider-Man movies, and all of the Superman movies, and they brought about warm fuzzy memories of being a very small child and getting four colors of cheap ink all over my grubby little paws. The Fantastic Four, in particular, were favorites when I was younger. I've had a crush on Reed Richards since I was old enough to find fictional characters attractive.
Combine these things with my love for low-budget cheese in all its various forms, as well as my fascination with the various quirks of American copyright law, and this was a film I definitely had to own.
My copy arrived yesterday, and I watched the first half-hour or so last night. Surprisingly (and I assure you, I say this in the purest nicemodernist spirit possible, without a trace of irony or sarcasm), it's legitimately entertaining. It's goofy and cartoonish, like the best superhero comics often are. The villains are larger-than-life caricatures, and the scenery and costumes look as though they've jumped right out of the Silver Age books in all their "pow! bam! thud!" glory. In places, it reminds me of the live-action-cartoon aesthetic of Power Rangers or the Ninja Turtle movies. And while the effects are as terrible as you'd expect from a movie with a budget of $1.5 million, the other aspects compensate to some degree - the score is fairly decent (and the fact that they used a real orchestra lends a touch of class), and the script is reasonably good, if cheesy.
Mainly, though, the entertainment factor comes from the fact that the movie isn't deliberately awful. Any irony in this movie has to be brought to it from outside. The idea that the actors and crew involved in The Fantastic Four had no idea it wasn't intended for release is kind of bittersweet. Cutely heartbreaking, if you will. You can see in their eyes that they're not phoning it in - they're a bunch of unknowns thinking that this might be the thing to make them known. Even though there were people who knew from the outset that this film would never see the light of day, they still managed to make it with the intent of entertaining someone.
Bottom line, if you were a little kid who spent your allowance money on frivolous superhero comics, you might have gone to see this movie and you'd probably have liked it. This movie absolutely appeals to my inner ten-year-old - ten-year-olds are old enough to follow a reasonably complicated plot, but not so old that they can always distinguish the high-quality entertainment from the low-quality cheap fun and routinely choose the former over the latter.
Unfortunately, there's not a place for this kind of comic-book movie in mainstream America anymore. The majority of comics consumers want to see the most literalistic, convoluted plots that explain the humanity of their superheroes as if the superheroes were real people. They want it both ways - they want it to resonate with the characters they grew up with, but they also want it smart, layered, and believable in our own realm. These are the same people who come out of every comic-book-based movie grousing about how it didn't follow the chronology exactly.
The way I see it, though, it isn't real. I don't want it to look real. That's not what comic books are about for me. I like them one-dimensional. My own love of superhero comics involves a certain suspension of disbelief that I actively embrace. I don't need to delve into Batman's psyche and then watch a full-scale epic battle that takes out half of Gotham City in spectacular pyrotechnic fashion - I'd rather see him beat up a bad guy (pow! bam! thud!) and scale a building using the Batarang and some string. I want spangles and spandex and bold primary colors. I want the purest black-and-white distillation of good versus evil. There's a certain joy in that.
If that's your bag, then I recommend the Corman DVD. If it's not, I hear Batman Begins is pretty decent.
But just about everyone in both camps seems to be roundly panning the NEW Fantastic Four movie, so you might want to hold off on that until it comes out on DVD. (Even though I hear that Ioan Gruffudd makes an extremely sexy Reed Richards.)
2 Comments:
Excellent post. I may have to soon write a follow-up on my own blog.
Yes, but have you seen The Terror of Hidden Island Lake? Sadly, I remember both this and the Looney Tunes/DC Heroes crossovers from my childhood. Worse yet, I remember enjoying them.
Post a Comment
<< Home