Sunday, August 2, 2015

In The Beginning There Was...Howard the Duck!


Right now, it seems that Marvel Comics can do no wrong. Take Ant-Man, a superhero movie that quite frankly no one asked for, but has proven to be successful. And a lot of fans credit it's success with one thing that other recent Marvel movies have in common - they don't take themselves seriously.
DC Comics movies have drawn all the excitement and joy out of movies and thus are giving us these grim and gritty movies that look depressing. After seeing Man of Steel, I felt like it was just another grim sci-fi movie in the vein of Riddick. Seeing Jared Leto as The Joker in Suicide Squad makes me squeamish. Oh, he has tattoos all over his body. That's...that's pathetic.
Even The Dark Knight Rises was bad at times.
On the flip side, there was Superman Returns, a poorly directed movie that wants us to believe that Kal Penn could be a viable henchman to Superman. And Brandon Routh just really phoned it in as the titular character.
So, what's a filmmaker to do? Maybe look at Guardians of the Galaxy, another superhero movie that no one really asked for but has become one of the most successful and highly praised comic book movies.
Part of Guardians' charm was that it didn't take itself seriously but knew it had to tell an interesting story. And the ending joke of having Howard the Duck appear in the post-credit scene was a big middle finger to Hollywood.
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Guardians was released on Aug. 1, 2014, 28 years after Howard the Duck was released in theaters.
Howard was the first Marvel feature movie. There were Captain America serials and very campy TV movies in the 1970s.
One had to ask themselves why would George Lucas want to make a big screen adaptation of a cigar-smoking wise-cracking duck. Lucas even stepped down as president of Lucasfilm to focus on producing the movie,
It proved to be one of the many problems. Originally intended as an animated movie, studio interference led to it be a live-action movie. The problem was in the mid-1980s, special effects were still pretty bad. It didn't help that the movie was filmed before the dialogue of Howard was recorded leading to some problems with lip syncing.
Tim Robbins recently said in a Playboy interview the problem was they miscast the lead role. Also, the production went over schedule and over budget at Robbins said was paid twice as much because his schedule was supposed to be for a three-month shoot that doubled.
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There were also reports that Robbins and Lea Thompson as Howard's human love-interest, Beverly, fought with director Willard Huyck because they were shooting all the Howard scenes first and then shooting their close-ups. Well, the title of the movie is Howard the Duck.
And that is the problem, the character of Howard, at least, portrayed here, is not that good. Howard fluctuates between being a cowardly duck and being a quick to violent rage with the line, "On my planet, they don't say die, they say kill."
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A bipolar duck? Maybe. But scenes contradict each other. Howard at first appears to be somewhat sleazy but when faced with the odd scene of having sex with Beverly, he chickens out.

Also, the movie was poorly marketed at children, but within the first few minutes pictures two scenes of nude female ducks and Howard standing in a field of marijuana.
The first sequence set on Duckworld in Howard's apartment in Marshington, D.C. has a lot of play on words that some children may not understand and some adults might find interesting. There are some parodies of TV shows and commercials as duck football players talk about jock itch powder, and another one of a soap opera in which a female doctor nurse pours her heart out to a male doctor nurse as he tries CPR on a patient.
But it leads someone to wonder, basically Duckworld is just like Earth but for ducks. So why does Howard not know what a pizza is?
I know it's not to be taken seriously, but the problem is Howard the Duck portrays human beings who are either confused and freaked out by Howard's appearance or accept it as if he is just a little strange.
The second part of the movie deals with Howard turning into an action hero as he and Robbins character, Philsie, rescue Beverly from the clutches of an Evil Dark Overlord of the Universe that has taken over the body of Dr. Jenning (Jeffrey Jones), who was conducting experiments with a laser that zapped Howard from Duckworld to Earth.
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Howard the Duck got bad reviews and performed badly in the country only making about half of its $37 million budget. Huyck, who already had another dud, Best Defense, on his resume, gave up directing. Him and his wife, writer-producer Gloria Katz, who had helped Lucas write the script for American Graffitti, spent years trying to rebound, later writing the script with Lucas on another dud, Radioland Murders.
The actors were able to rebound. Robbins also was in the box-office success Top Gun that same year. He went on to star in movies like Bull Durham, Jacob's Ladder and The Shawshank Redemption eventually winning an Academy Award for his role in Mystic River. 
Thompson was able to find some success returning to her roles in the Back to the Future movies as well as meeting her future husband, Howard Deutch, who directed her in Some Kind of Wonderful, and the TV show, Caroline in the City.
Jones, who also had a success that year with Ferris Bueller's Day Off, later appeared in Beetlejuice and became a favorite of Tim Burton appearing in Ed Wood and Sleepy Hollow before arrests on child pornography charges limited his roles.
Chip Zien, who voiced Howard, found success on Broadway and Ed Gale, who performed most of Howard's movements, later appeared in SpaceBalls and performed movements for Chucky in Child's Play.
By 1986, comic book adaptations were very rare. You had the Superman movies with Christopher Reeve, which by Superman III had become a joke and with Superman IV: The Quest of Peace put the franchise on hold for nearly 20 years. Anyone remember Supergirl?
Next up was The Punisher in 1989, a low-budget adaptation of the comic-book character that got bad reviews. But the bad reviews nothing compared to Captain America, originally intended to be released in 1990, but then went straight to video and later appeared on cable.
There was also that adaptation of The Fantastic Four, produced by Roger Corman, that has been argued that it was either made to get the filmmaking rights or was totally shelved because of the poor production values.
It wasn't until X-Men appeared in 2000 that it seemed a worthy movie could be produced from a Marvel comic.
Strangely it all began with a talking, cigar-smoking anthropomorphic duck.
Just like a line from the movie, "In the beginning there was...Howard the Duck!"

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