Updated: Seven Lesser Known Comic Book Adaptations

Not every comic-to-screen leap was a blockbuster success.

The comic book movie gold rush is in full swing. This summer no less than four of the studios’ tentpole releases draw inspiration from comics, and speculation and surveillance of upcoming projects including Christopher Nolan’s third Batman film and Joss Whedon’s The Avengers routinely fuel top-of-the update online news. Meanwhile Nolan and Zack Snyder’s Superman reboot, The Man of Steel, continues to announce unexpected and enviable casting decisions.

This image has nothing to do with the article. Its just too strange not to share.

Hollywood has gone to the comics well time and time again since the genre first gained notoriety in the early 1940s, most often for low- or mid-budget fare aimed at children and teens. And for every attempt that hit its box office or audience reception target, there are probably three adaptations that tanked, fell victim to restrictive budgets, or just couldn’t garner enough public interest to build a devoted cult fan base.

We’re sure a few of the following are sentimental favorites to forgiving fans of their respective inspirations. (We like The Flash TV series.) Some aren’t bad, considering their limited resources, and some had unrealized potential. And one or two are terrible. But they’re all from comic books, for better or worse.

Sable (TV series) Premiered November 1987; lasted seven episodes. Based on the First Comics series by longtime Green Arrow writer-artist Mike Grell, Sable followed the exploits of freelance mercenary Jon Sable (Lewis Van Bergen) who worked days as an author of children’s books. Rene Russo, very early in her career, played his girlfriend Eden Kendall.

The clip below shows its noirish promise, even if the show’s “alpha dog adventurer helps client of the week” conceit seems kinda passe now.

Steel (Movie) Released August 15, 1997; total U.S. box office: $1.7 million. In his own DC Comics series and in the Justice League comics and cartoon, Steel is a brilliant engineer and inventor who dedicates himself to defending good after Superman saves his life. So what better “actor” to convey such intellectual and moral strength than human marketing platform Shaquille O’Neal? Judd Nelson played the bad guy, while Richard Roundtree (Shaft) appeared as Uncle Joe.

Though admittedly the film carried a modest $16 million budget, “Shaq Steel” still looks as if he swallowed an electromagnet and walked through a junkyard:

Dr. Strange (TV movie) Premiered September 6, 1978. Clad in a snaredrum-tight Disco perm and piles of gold jewelry, New York psychiatrist Stephen Strange (Peter Hooten) trains to be Earth’s new “Sorcerer Supreme” and rescue a young woman from the evil sorceress Morgan LeFay (Arrested Development’s Jessica Walter).

Intended as the pilot to a television series that never happened, the telefilm featured Marvel Comics’ honcho Stan Lee as a consultant.

Supergirl (Movie) Released November 21, 1984; total U.S. Box Office: $15 million. For years the poster child for misbegotten comic adaptations, Supergirl was rushed into production after the success of the first two Superman films but struggled for distribution after Superman III flopped. Nevertheless, expanded versions released on DVD have clarified its choppily-edited story and somewhat repaired its reputation.

Peter O’Toole, Mia Farrow, and Faye Dunaway make the supporting cast pretty top-heavy, while underused 80s actress Helen Slater (Ruthless People) makes her debut as super-cousin Kara Zor-El.

Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV Movie) Premiered May 26, 1998. A decade before Samuel L. Jackson’s turns in Iron Man and Iron Man 2, David Haselhoff starred in this low-budget TV movie about Marvel Comics’ Man from U.N.C.L.E. riff Nick Fury. The superspy and his former love Valentine Fontaine (Lisa Rinna) take on rival organization HYDRA for possession of a deadly virus. Batman Begins and The Dark Knight scribe David Goyer wrote the script.

The Hoff plays the hyper-macho Fury as… The Hoff with an eyepatch. Watch how S.H.I.E.L.D.’s flying headquarters looks like a basement steam room somewhere. (actual video begins about 23 seconds into clip.)

The Flash (TV Series) Premiered September 20, 1990; lasted 21 episodes. CBS brought the Scarlet Speedster to the small screen apparently motivated by the runaway success of Batman the year before. A TV movie pilot got the family friendly series off and running, but constant schedule shifts and pre-emptions for Gulf War news coverage kept it from building an audience.

Still, The Flash’s (John Wesley Shipp) costume has aged well, as have the special effects. The script quality suffered as the season wore on, however, though fan favorite guests stars like Mark Hamill, Tim Thomerson and Jeffrey Combs frequently livened things up. The series is even collected in a no-frills DVD package.

Captain America (TV movie) Premiered January 19, 1979. An attempt to update the character for the Evil Kenievel/motorcycle years of the 70s, this adaptation featured the original Captain America’s son trying to stop terrorists from detonating a hydrogen bomb on Phoenix, Arizona.

There’s almost nothing about the clip below that doesn’t feel dated, especially the ersatz Cap’s costume and the long, loving takes of motorcycle stunts. A sequel TV movie, released just eleven months later, offered a comparatively more comics-accurate uniform and included Christopher Lee as its villain.

Marvel Studios’ Thor opens nationwide this Friday.

- Michael Kabel

Sour Christmas, Part One

Not feeling the holiday spirit? Here’s the first of a dozen movies and TV shows to help you avoid the season.

Spend the holidays with friends.

Bah, humbug. With Christmas finally arriving this weekend, some of us aren’t feeling the holiday spirit, despite all the efforts of the media and our economy to get us in line. Still, the cold weather and ready supply of DVD’s and Blu-Rays, combined with some long, bleak days off from work, make the next week or so a perfect time to catch up on some movie watching.

This week we’ll profile ten great movies and two superb television series, none of which have a damn thing to do with Christmas, New Year’s, or any of the other reasons to “celebrate.” As always, they’re ranked in no order or importance or quality. Where possible we’ve included trailers or other video clips that were available on YouTube when we looked for them.

Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) – Say what you will about his later films, Guy Ritchie’s debut feature about bratty gangster wannabes hustling the London underworld remains an irresistible whirlwind of style, violence, and swaggering retro cool. The shaggy plot, about a crooked poker game, two vintage musket rifles and a strain of greenhouse grown super-pot, is almost incidental to the brazen energy and gritty atmosphere. The film’s ugly, smart, witty, and honest – all the things Christmas ain’t.

The great cast of (then-) up and coming actors includes Jason Statham, Jason Flemyng, Nick Moran and Vinnie Jones, but it’s Lenny McLean who frequently steals the show as mob enforcer Barry the Baptist.

The New World (2005) – Terrence Malick’s fourth feature follows the romance between 17th Century lovers John Smith (Colin Farrell) and Pocahontas (Q’orianka Kilcher) as the Virginia colony of Jamestown gets off to a shaky start. Sent on a reconnaissance mission by colony chief Christopher Newport (Christopher Plummer) to look for trade partners among the area’s “naturals,” Smith is capture by a local tribe and sentenced to death until the chief’s daughter saves him. The two fall in deep – if star-crossed – love.  

Malick uses the setting and time to explore some of his favorite themes – the moral capacities of the human spirit, mankind’s relation and place within nature, individual will against tightening social norms – and creates a tighter story than 1998′s more expansive (and less cohesive) The Thin Red Line. Farrell is somewhat miscast as the fundamentally restless Smith, but Kilcher, Plummer, and Christian Bale are all just about flawless.

Magnolia (1999) – Paul Thomas Anderson’s sprawling, overreaching saga about interconnected Los Angeles lives at the end of the millennium remains amazing a decade later if only for its sheer audacity and scope. Long, complicated, and at times self-indulgent (the film concludes with a biblical “plague”), Anderson nevertheless keeps things moving by keeping small-scale but taut suspense brewing for all his many characters; some storylines resolve tidily and some don’t, but you have to think a while to determine which ones do which.

The ace cast – the names of which read like a Who’s Who of late-90s talent – keep the events from getting too cumbersome or letting Anderson’s reach exceed his grasp (as it has in both of his films since.) All of that and a career-best performance by Tom Cruise, too.

Ruthless People (1986) – For those who want a snarky holiday, this pitch-dark comedy from the creators of Airplane! showcases both Danny DeVito and Bette Midler’s scene-chewing gusto while still remaining a clever comic thriller.

Fashion marketer Sam Stone (DeVito) plans to murder his wife Barbara (Midler) until she’s kidnapped by a hapless couple (Judge Rheinhold and Helen Slater) that Stone cheated out of millions. But Barbara’s an impossible hostage, and Stone’s attempts to negotiate the ransom demands – the better to provoke the kidnappers into killing her – cause a storm of comic mishaps. Ugly, misanthropic, and shrill but quotably funny, it’s the right movie for the day after Christmas.

Night and the City (1950) American grifter Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark) moves through the post-war London underworld scheming to get out from beneath his employer’s (Francis L. Sullivan) iron grip. Pulled into his tragic plans are his kind girlfriend (Gene Tierney), an ageing champion wrestler (Stanislaus Zbyszko) and his employer’s wife (Googie Withers).

Noir auteur Jules Dassin (Brute Force) adapts Gerald Kersh’s novel by making London’s underbelly both the film’s antagonist and its explanation for the desperation of its inhabitants. Widmark is criminally underrated as a leading man, and he’s at his best here. The downbeat ending remains as haunting as any story put to film.

Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip (2006) – dismissed as an epic white elephant by critics and media virtually upon its debut, Aaron Sorkin’s follow-up to The West Wing easily holds its own against contemporary Emmy-bait fare like Mad Men and Breaking Bad.

When the veteran showrunner (Judd Hirsch) of a Saturday Night Live-like variety show has an on-air meltdown, a newly hired network executive (Amanda Peet) replaces him with the writer-director team (Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford) fired from the show’s staff several years before. Complicating the teams’ return are the writer’s pious, gorgeous ex-lover (Sarah Paulson) and the wrath of the network chief (Steven Weber) who canned them.

NBC cancelled the big-budget affair after 22 episodes, though lately the DVD box set has reached clearance sale prices. The first half-dozen episodes especially are simply unmissable, as this clip from the pilot illustrates.

We’ll be back later this week with five more films and another late, lamented television series that was long before its time. Thanks for reading.

- Michael Kabel

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Seven Lesser Known Comic Book Adaptations

Not every comic-to-screen leap was a blockbuster success. 

Following the colossal successes of The Dark Knight Returns and Iron Man this past summer, there’s a bit of a gold rush to get comic book adaptations finished and into theatres. This week a lot of the buzz was about casting: Don Cheadle will replace Terrence Howard in the Iron Man sequel, while rumors circulated that Warner Brothers wants Ryan Gosling (Lars and The Real Girl) to lead the upcoming Green Lantern movie and Brandon Routh to play Superman again when and if that film takes flight. Beyond casting announcements, the venerable Internet Movie Database shows film adaptations of Thor, The Flash, The Metal Men, Captain America and others in various stages of development. The Hugh Jackman-led X-Men Origins: Wolverine opens next May, and the Punisher: War Zone sequel arrives this December.

This image has nothing to do with the article. Its just too strange not to share.

Yet, for every attempt that hit its box office or audience reception target, there are probably three adaptations that tanked, fell victim to small budgets, or just couldn’t garner public interest. The following list is only a sampling of the projects that took their place in the “also ran” category. We’re sure a few are sentimental favorites to forigiving fans of their respective inspirations. (We like The Flash TV series.) Some aren’t bad, considering their limited resources, and some had unrealized potential. And one or two are terrible. But they’re all from comic books, for better or worse.

Sable (TV series) Premiered November 1987; lasted seven episodes. Based on the First Comics series by longtime Green Arrow writer-artist Mike Grell, Sable followed the exploits of freelance mercenary Jon Sable (Lewis Van Bergen) who worked days as an author of children’s books. Rene Russo, very early in her career, played his girlfriend Eden Kendall. The clip below shows its noirish promise, even if the show’s “alpha dog adventurer helps client of the week” conceit seems kinda passe now.

Steel (Movie) Released August 15, 1997; total U.S. box office: $1.7 million. In his own DC Comics series and in the Justice League comics and cartoon, Steel is a brilliant engineer and inventor who dedicates himself to defending good after Superman saves his life. So what better “actor” to convey such intellectual and moral strength than human marketing technique Shaquille O’Neal? Judd Nelson played the bad guy, while Richard Roundtree (Shaft) appeared as Uncle Joe. Though admittedly the film carried a modest $16 million budget, “Shaq Steel” still looks as if he swallowed an electromagnet and walked through a junkyard.

Dr. Strange (TV movie) Premiered September 6, 1978. Clad in a snaredrum-tight Disco perm and piles of gold jewelry, New York psychiatrist Stephen Strange (Peter Hooten) trains to be Earth’s new “Sorcerer Supreme” and rescue a young woman from the evil sorceress Morgan LeFay (Arrested Development’s Jessica Walter). Intended as the pilot to a television series that never happened, it featured Marvel Comics’ honcho Stan Lee as a consultant.

Supergirl (Movie) Released November 21, 1984; total U.S. Box Office: $15 million. For years the poster child for misbegotten comic adaptations, Supergirl was rushed into production after the success of the first two Superman films but struggled for distribution after Superman III flopped. Nevertheless, expanded versions released on DVD have clarified its choppily-edited story and somewhat repaired its reputation. Peter O’Toole, Mia Farrow, and Faye Dunaway overweigh the supporting cast, while underused 80s actress Helen Slater (Ruthless People) makes her debut as super-cousin Kara Zor-El.

Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV Movie) Premiered May 26, 1998. A decade before Samuel L. Jackson’s cameo in Iron Man, David Hasellhoff starred in this low budget TV movie about Marvel Comics’ Man from U.N.C.L.E. riff Nick Fury. The superspy and his former love Valentine Fontaine (Lisa Rinna) take on rival organization HYDRA for possession of a deadly virus. Batman Begins and The Dark Knight scribe David Goyer wrote the scrpt. The Hoff plays the hyper-macho Fury as… The Hoff with an eyepatch. Watch how S.H.I.E.L.D.’s flying headquarters looks like a basement steam room somewhere. (actual video begins about 23 seconds into clip.)

The Flash (TV Series) Premiered September 20, 1990; lasted 21 episodes. CBS brought the Scarlet Speedster to the small screen apparently motivated by the runaway success of Batman the year before. A TV movie pilot got the family-friendly series off and running, but constant schedule shifts and pre-emptions for Gulf War news coverage kept it from building an audience. Still, The Flash’s (John Wesley Shipp) costume has aged well, as have the special effects. The script quality suffered as the season wore on, however, though fan favorite guests stars like Mark Hamill, Tim Thomerson and Jeffrey Combs frequently livened things up. The series is even collected in a no-frills DVD package.

Captain America (TV movie) Premiered January 19, 1979. An attempt to update the character for the Evil Kenievel/motorcycle years of the 70s, this adaptation featured the original Captain America’s son trying to stop terrorists from detonating a hydrogen bomb on Phoenix, Arizona. There’s almost nothing about the clip below that doesn’t feel dated, especially the ersatz Cap’s costume and the long, loving takes of motorcycle stunts. A sequel TV movie, released just eleven months later, offered a comparatively more comics-accurate uniform and included Christopher Lee as its villain.

Monday we’ll have our review of Oliver Stone’s W. Have a super weekend.

- Michael Kabel

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