Yeah that could work and we can have 18 end up with adult gohan
When you Wish Upon a Frog (Book II of the Jim Henson at Disney saga)
- Thread starter Geekhis Khan
- Start date
- Status
I find videl to be mediocre and Yamcha is Yamcha nobody cares about him
Plus with the whole android 18 and gohan thing I have seen some stuff regarding that and dare I say those are some good sauces
Welp, Guess there's a lot of work ahead piecing together a version of Dragonball that got Henson'd. And BTW, her name is Ruko (sounds like Wukong)
Now I imagine Out of the Vault ep making a joke about this .
Random alien : do not tell me you don't know your Universal alphabet.
Oswald the rabbit : ooooh! of course I know those guys .
I remember that Ruko Goku sister .
Make it sound like Oswald has an unsubtle sneer when mentioning Universal in this context, and it would improve the joke IMHO.
*He scoffs annoyedly instead* I know those guys - and I hate 'em.
Werewolves and Wonder Women
Chapter 8: Something Approaching the Big Time (Cont’d)
Excerpt from All You Need is a Chin: Confessions of a B-Movie Actor by Bruce Campbell
So my role as Alex Evell on Superman 2 got me some positive attention, but mixed reviews. Siskel thought that I was hamming it up too much. Well, guess what, Gene? I was hamming it up! Joel specifically asked me to ham it up! It was a hammy role in a campy movie!
Whatever. Criticism goes with the job. You let it roll off of your back.
Still, though, I had a major supporting credit on a blockbuster film, and my own growing fandom (you lovely nerds!), so Paramount was happy to hire me to play US soldier and semi-reformed thief Jimmy “Fingers” Lucrezia in the Indiana Jones Odyssey miniseries in ’95 and, more critically, Universal didn’t push back when Sam cast me as the antagonist of Wolfman, Tucker Hightower, the greedy Chicago corporate guy who buys out Jack Nicholson’s leather goods factory in New Orleans and sets the plot in motion.
Not really this, but has shades of it
And yea, I got to work closely with Jack Nicholson, who played the protagonist Louis “Lou” Garreaux. I just wish I’d gotten a fraction of what they paid him, which amounted to the gross domestic product of several small nations.
And when I say that I “worked with Jack” I mean that we crossed paths three times when we shot scenes together and he spent the rest of his time in his trailer. He was a consummate professional on the set and, like a lot of those old Method guys, fully committed to the role the second the cameras rolled, but he was separate. He was the Big Star that the rest of us would orbit. Glen Close and John Goodman (who essentially cameoed as his prodigal siblings) could stand toe to toe with him, but I was eclipsed, which worked well on film when my cocky egoism smacks straight into a solid wall of Jack.
Still, he took the time to give me some simple advice: “Bruce, I hate giving advice because people never take it.” [1]
Um, great, thanks. I’ll take that one to heart.
Well, I did at least get to watch the maestro at work and witness that whole “Method” thing in action. Jack dragged Ted and Sam into his trailer to flesh out his character in detail. He’d be the oldest of three kids born to the founder of the family leather goods company, but he was also a rebellious and idealistic hippie in his youth who headed off to Haight/Ashbury and Woodstock and anti-war protests and all that. He took over as CEO from his dad mostly because neither of his lazy, entitled siblings showed much interest in it and because, in his idealism, he wanted to turn the factory into some great and equitable place for all of the employees. But reality struck back and now he’s jaded by his inability to completely balance the needs of the company in the era of outsourcing with his dreams of some sort of equitable worker collective, particularly since his brother and sister each own a third of the company and can outvote him. This frustration leads to anger and resentment as he feels impotent and struggles with feeling like a sell-out.
And with the combination of the hippie past and New Orleans setting, naturally Sam slipped in a couple of Easy Rider references, like having a recreation of the iconic football helmet on a shelf in the background and having Jack riding an old Harley to work[2].
And working on Wolfman was a blast. Barry Sonnenfeld produced and gave Sam all the space he needed. Sam and Ivan wrote the screenplay, setting the film in New Orleans because Sam liked the “spooky vibe” of all the Spanish Moss and cobbled streets. It also meant lots of location shoots, giving us the chance to abuse ourselves on Sazaracs, Bananas Foster at Brenan’s, and endless plates of fiery Cajun-Creole food and crawdads. Or bum it on Bourbon Street for Marti Gras, since naturally we had to get some footage of all that for the film.
Yea, acting’s a tough life.
The plot involved Jack’s Lou Garreaux being, as I mentioned, one of three siblings to inherit the family company, which makes purses and jackets and belts and the like out of leather and employs hundreds of local Americans. And while Lou is, despite being a bit of a jaded grump, a fair and honest boss trying to do what’s right by his employees, his brother and sister are entitled little you-know-whats who sell out their one-third shares to me, or, well, Tucker, the slimy head of Tucker Holdings, LLC. Lou is holding out on selling me his share of the company and introduces me to his workers and tries to build a case for keeping him in charge, but I warn him that if he doesn’t sell his share to me that I’ll move the whole shop to Mexico and put all of the employees on the street.
He relents and sells me his share. I move the shop to Mexico anyway. “Ya’ should’ve gotten it in writing, Lou!”
Yea, I was a real jerk, wasn’t I?
Lou is well off, but spends a lot of his fortune trying to pay his old employees’ rent and expenses while they look for new jobs, not that there are many good jobs to have, and he is forced to confront his own sense of entitlement to his inherited wealth and confronted with his own patronizing belief that he’s somehow supposed to be the savior here, particularly after one former employee flat out calls him out on it (“Save yourself, Lou, your money ain’t wanted here!”).
Eventually, naturally, he’s bitten by the Big Bad Wolf of Symbolism and…well, you know what happens! It’s right there in the title.
(Image source Den of Geek)
Lou, falling back on his old rebellious impulses and determined to be the Great Savior whether his help is wanted or not, uses his wolf strength to go on a Robinhood-like revenge quest against Tucker, who has reduced the factory to a simple distribution center for foreign sweatshop-made goods. The quality of the goods is for crap now as Tucker cuts every corner in the empty pursuit of wealth. So, Lou attacks my trucks and at one point kills a driver. Lou then breaks into the old factory, tears open the safe, and steals all the money, anonymously giving it to all of the former workers who lost their jobs.
Now, before you think that this is a happy little Robin Hood story with a happy little ending, rather than help his former workers, he gets them into trouble since, you know, suddenly they’re all flush with cash that was traced, naturally, to the safe and they were forced to give it all back, some now further in debt after buying things that they couldn’t return. Worse yet, his line foreman, “Tiny”, a former Saints lineman played by Michael Clarke Duncan, is the one the police blame for the attacks, specifically because he’s the only one with motive and opportunity that they figure is strong enough and big enough to fit the description of the witnesses. They assume that he was wearing a mask. Sam and Ted decided to tackle police profiling straight on, and soon Tiny is getting ramrodded by a self-serving DA with political aspirations into a false confession for Lou’s killings.
And damn, Mike was just…he stole the whole damn picture with that one scene. Sorry, Jack.
Anyway, Lou, facing up to the fact that he’s the one who caused this mess, driven by his ego rather than any real sense of justice, sets up a final confrontation that ultimately costs him his life and proves Tiny’s innocence, but not before killing me in the most gruesome and painful manner that the MPAA allowed Sam to get away with.
Yea, sorry, Universal. No sequels. At least not with Jack or Tucker.
Sam made it a tragic story, a dark narrative of idealism clashing with the harsh realities of life. It was all a metaphor for justice and righteousness and egoism and rage and perceptions. A tale of a once-idealistic hippie coming to terms with the modern world and his own wealth and privilege. The story of the Boomer Generation entering middle age. The story of a good man driven to evil, the whole lycanthropy thing really just symbolic of the repressed anger and desperation of a man from a specific time and place trying to come to terms with the life he’d lived.
It was also a gruesome creature feature with some wicked-cool animatronics by the Chiodos and some awesome practical effects as Wolfman Jack rips the side off of a truck with his bare claws. They also did a cool mix of practical makeup and CG for the creepy transformation sequences.
Wolfman Animatronic (Image source Pinterest)
So Wolfman, riding on the coattails of Dracula and Frankenstein, made bank, breaking $170 million against an $80 million budget driven largely by cast payroll (just not mine!). The effects were praised, Nicholson’s performance was praised, Duncan's performance was particularly praised, and, hey, I even got some decent reviews for my performance, not that you’d notice with Jack on the screen.
Would this be the big break? In the words of hack TV writers everywhere, stay tuned.
Well, for every gain there’s a loss, and in Sam’s case that loss was Wonder Woman and his ultimate plans for the Justice League, which would be born without him, but that’s another story. Sam was divorced from Warner by this point, had dumped ABC after a bad first date, and was still seeing Universal. While still with Warner, he’d set in motion a Wonder Woman movie, grabbing Joss Whedon to write the screenplay.
Sam losing WW even cost me a job, since I was supposed to play Trevor’s co-pilot [SIC] Lt. Gurney.
When Sam left Warner, they at first handed it to Joss, and he was all set to direct and even took over production partnership from Sam with his Mutant Enemy Productions. So far so good, right?
Yea, not so fast. Gloria Steinem found out that the man behind the cartoon version of Wonder Woman, i.e. Joss, was writing, producing, and directing the live action film and she blew a gasket. She’d lambasted his depictions of Diana and the Amazons in the cartoon as “fetishistic” and initiated a campaign to “Toss Joss”.
Well, it worked. Warner, who’d been trying to improve its record with female audiences after losing several top-notch female execs like Mira [Velimirovic], and who’d been trying to ride the “Girl Power” thing by heavily merchandizing Wonder Woman, and who reportedly didn’t care much for his script anyway, bought out his contract and brought in Kathryn Bigelow. Joss was not happy, but that’s how it goes.
Well, Kathryn took it over and made some key modifications to Joss’s script, moving the point of view from Steve Trevor back to Diana, downplaying Steve having to step in to save her from the cruelty of the modern world, and in general making it the story about how Diana finds love and learns about the darkness of the modern world, and yet becomes the instrument of change to improve it.
She also ditched the subtle (and occasionally not-so-subtle) nods to WW’s BDSM past that Joss had slipped in there. Sorry, ghost of Bill Marston!
A little bird told me that the studio was pushing for Sandra Bullock to play Diana, but Kathryn went for Catherine Zeta-Jones. I’m sure the name thing was a coincidence, right? Do K/Cathrerines stick together? Either way, Catherine Z-J is practically an amazon as it were, so hey, I liked the choice and I bet you did too. They brought in Brad Pitt as the love interest Steve Trevor and a then up-and-coming Angelina Jolie as the main villain Eris, even though Sam had essentially created the role for Lucy Lawless, whom he’d met through Lysia of Amazonia, which Ted was producing. Meanwhile, Joss had tried to reframe the role as Ares in order to highlight what he saw as his feminist themes, her literally fighting the patriarchy. Kathryn wanted female empowerment in a different way, though, without making it a battle of the sexes. Heroic Woman vs. Villainous Woman, both empowered in their own way, no man needed to define them.
Better that way? Worse? Everyone’s got an opinion and they all stink.
Well, you saw the movie[3]. Kathryn gave it all her dark and noir touch, contrasting the bright lights, open skies, and Classical values of Themyscira against the dark colors, claustrophobic streets, and selfish modern[4] values of Gateway City. Critics liked the cinematography and audiences loved the stylized action and the fight scenes. Joss was annoyed that they removed his giant mechanical chimera scene, citing the Kaiju craze, but the studio, who as you can guess underestimated you nerds based on the whining of a handful of angry virgins at Comicon, killed it to constrain the budget since they never expected WW to break $100 million.
(Image source DW.com)
And hey, despite their assumptions (or maybe because of them, since you girl nerds came out in large numbers) Wonder Woman did great at the box office ($227 million against a $45 million budget) even though some were predicting a disaster since, you know, boy nerds supposedly won’t watch female-led superhero films. I mean, young men are practically famous about not wanting to watch beautiful women in revealing costumes kick ass, right?
Anyway, I’d bet it would have done even better if they hadn’t run it against Spiderman 3 that summer, which was ultimately directed by Joss, but that’s another story.
And as for Sam, well, Universal soon announced that it was merging with ABC, and that Sam’s nemesis Jeffrey Katzenberg would be taking over the combined studios. Needless to say, Sam dropped out of the two-picture deal in the works with them, actually walking off the set of The Curse when the announcement was made.
Finally, Sam said to me, “I guess it’s time to call the Ex.”
[1] Adapted from a quote from our timeline.
[2] Captain America Motorcycle Helmet tip to Mrs. Khan for the “former hippie turned reluctant CEO” theme and Easy Rider references. The Easy Rider references will in turn lead, naturally, to fan theories that Lou is actually George Hanson, who somehow survived his beating, but this will be Jossed by Sam and Ted.
[3] Put quickly: Diana lives on the isolated Mediterranean island of Themyscira when USAF Captain Steve Trevor’s F-14 suffers mechanical trouble and he and his RIO have to eject. They wash up on Themyscira where Hippolyta wants to have them executed as “barbarian invaders”, but Diana, smitten with Trevor and overtaken by her repressed sense of compassion, fights for their lives and ends up winning the duel, but is banished for her disobedience and emotional “weakness”. She joins Trevor in Gateway City where she learns of the hard realities of the modern world in a big fish-out-of-water narrative, and must learn to lean on her compassion over her overt Amazonian sense of belligerent superiority. She also learns about a plot by Eris, who like Ares is disappointed that the prospects for peace are growing with the end of the Cold War, to sew discord and crime in a bid to turn the people of the world against each other. WW is at first defeated due to her arrogant assumption of her superiority and inability to trust the word of the “barbarians” of Gateway City, but in time learns to trust and value and sympathize with them. In an antithesis of Eris, she helps organize the people of the city to oppose Eris’ machinations, leading to the final defeat of Eris and the teasing of a future appearance by Ares in a sequel. Diana becomes Wonder Woman and stays to protect the people of her new home. Some, particularly second-wave feminists, will complain that Diana’s arc is to learn traditionally feminine values (compassion and empathy) and assume it’s a regressive view of femininity, but Bigelow maintains that it’s about the triumph and value of the feminine and the right of women to define themselves, a very third-wave feminist approach.
[4] Per the Joss screenplay and with Warner hoping to save money, they kept it set in the modern day rather than make it a period piece.
Excerpt from All You Need is a Chin: Confessions of a B-Movie Actor by Bruce Campbell
So my role as Alex Evell on Superman 2 got me some positive attention, but mixed reviews. Siskel thought that I was hamming it up too much. Well, guess what, Gene? I was hamming it up! Joel specifically asked me to ham it up! It was a hammy role in a campy movie!
Whatever. Criticism goes with the job. You let it roll off of your back.
Still, though, I had a major supporting credit on a blockbuster film, and my own growing fandom (you lovely nerds!), so Paramount was happy to hire me to play US soldier and semi-reformed thief Jimmy “Fingers” Lucrezia in the Indiana Jones Odyssey miniseries in ’95 and, more critically, Universal didn’t push back when Sam cast me as the antagonist of Wolfman, Tucker Hightower, the greedy Chicago corporate guy who buys out Jack Nicholson’s leather goods factory in New Orleans and sets the plot in motion.
Not really this, but has shades of it
And yea, I got to work closely with Jack Nicholson, who played the protagonist Louis “Lou” Garreaux. I just wish I’d gotten a fraction of what they paid him, which amounted to the gross domestic product of several small nations.
And when I say that I “worked with Jack” I mean that we crossed paths three times when we shot scenes together and he spent the rest of his time in his trailer. He was a consummate professional on the set and, like a lot of those old Method guys, fully committed to the role the second the cameras rolled, but he was separate. He was the Big Star that the rest of us would orbit. Glen Close and John Goodman (who essentially cameoed as his prodigal siblings) could stand toe to toe with him, but I was eclipsed, which worked well on film when my cocky egoism smacks straight into a solid wall of Jack.
Still, he took the time to give me some simple advice: “Bruce, I hate giving advice because people never take it.” [1]
Um, great, thanks. I’ll take that one to heart.
Well, I did at least get to watch the maestro at work and witness that whole “Method” thing in action. Jack dragged Ted and Sam into his trailer to flesh out his character in detail. He’d be the oldest of three kids born to the founder of the family leather goods company, but he was also a rebellious and idealistic hippie in his youth who headed off to Haight/Ashbury and Woodstock and anti-war protests and all that. He took over as CEO from his dad mostly because neither of his lazy, entitled siblings showed much interest in it and because, in his idealism, he wanted to turn the factory into some great and equitable place for all of the employees. But reality struck back and now he’s jaded by his inability to completely balance the needs of the company in the era of outsourcing with his dreams of some sort of equitable worker collective, particularly since his brother and sister each own a third of the company and can outvote him. This frustration leads to anger and resentment as he feels impotent and struggles with feeling like a sell-out.
And with the combination of the hippie past and New Orleans setting, naturally Sam slipped in a couple of Easy Rider references, like having a recreation of the iconic football helmet on a shelf in the background and having Jack riding an old Harley to work[2].
And working on Wolfman was a blast. Barry Sonnenfeld produced and gave Sam all the space he needed. Sam and Ivan wrote the screenplay, setting the film in New Orleans because Sam liked the “spooky vibe” of all the Spanish Moss and cobbled streets. It also meant lots of location shoots, giving us the chance to abuse ourselves on Sazaracs, Bananas Foster at Brenan’s, and endless plates of fiery Cajun-Creole food and crawdads. Or bum it on Bourbon Street for Marti Gras, since naturally we had to get some footage of all that for the film.
Yea, acting’s a tough life.
The plot involved Jack’s Lou Garreaux being, as I mentioned, one of three siblings to inherit the family company, which makes purses and jackets and belts and the like out of leather and employs hundreds of local Americans. And while Lou is, despite being a bit of a jaded grump, a fair and honest boss trying to do what’s right by his employees, his brother and sister are entitled little you-know-whats who sell out their one-third shares to me, or, well, Tucker, the slimy head of Tucker Holdings, LLC. Lou is holding out on selling me his share of the company and introduces me to his workers and tries to build a case for keeping him in charge, but I warn him that if he doesn’t sell his share to me that I’ll move the whole shop to Mexico and put all of the employees on the street.
He relents and sells me his share. I move the shop to Mexico anyway. “Ya’ should’ve gotten it in writing, Lou!”
Yea, I was a real jerk, wasn’t I?
Lou is well off, but spends a lot of his fortune trying to pay his old employees’ rent and expenses while they look for new jobs, not that there are many good jobs to have, and he is forced to confront his own sense of entitlement to his inherited wealth and confronted with his own patronizing belief that he’s somehow supposed to be the savior here, particularly after one former employee flat out calls him out on it (“Save yourself, Lou, your money ain’t wanted here!”).
Eventually, naturally, he’s bitten by the Big Bad Wolf of Symbolism and…well, you know what happens! It’s right there in the title.
(Image source Den of Geek)
Lou, falling back on his old rebellious impulses and determined to be the Great Savior whether his help is wanted or not, uses his wolf strength to go on a Robinhood-like revenge quest against Tucker, who has reduced the factory to a simple distribution center for foreign sweatshop-made goods. The quality of the goods is for crap now as Tucker cuts every corner in the empty pursuit of wealth. So, Lou attacks my trucks and at one point kills a driver. Lou then breaks into the old factory, tears open the safe, and steals all the money, anonymously giving it to all of the former workers who lost their jobs.
Now, before you think that this is a happy little Robin Hood story with a happy little ending, rather than help his former workers, he gets them into trouble since, you know, suddenly they’re all flush with cash that was traced, naturally, to the safe and they were forced to give it all back, some now further in debt after buying things that they couldn’t return. Worse yet, his line foreman, “Tiny”, a former Saints lineman played by Michael Clarke Duncan, is the one the police blame for the attacks, specifically because he’s the only one with motive and opportunity that they figure is strong enough and big enough to fit the description of the witnesses. They assume that he was wearing a mask. Sam and Ted decided to tackle police profiling straight on, and soon Tiny is getting ramrodded by a self-serving DA with political aspirations into a false confession for Lou’s killings.
And damn, Mike was just…he stole the whole damn picture with that one scene. Sorry, Jack.
Anyway, Lou, facing up to the fact that he’s the one who caused this mess, driven by his ego rather than any real sense of justice, sets up a final confrontation that ultimately costs him his life and proves Tiny’s innocence, but not before killing me in the most gruesome and painful manner that the MPAA allowed Sam to get away with.
Yea, sorry, Universal. No sequels. At least not with Jack or Tucker.
Sam made it a tragic story, a dark narrative of idealism clashing with the harsh realities of life. It was all a metaphor for justice and righteousness and egoism and rage and perceptions. A tale of a once-idealistic hippie coming to terms with the modern world and his own wealth and privilege. The story of the Boomer Generation entering middle age. The story of a good man driven to evil, the whole lycanthropy thing really just symbolic of the repressed anger and desperation of a man from a specific time and place trying to come to terms with the life he’d lived.
It was also a gruesome creature feature with some wicked-cool animatronics by the Chiodos and some awesome practical effects as Wolfman Jack rips the side off of a truck with his bare claws. They also did a cool mix of practical makeup and CG for the creepy transformation sequences.
Wolfman Animatronic (Image source Pinterest)
So Wolfman, riding on the coattails of Dracula and Frankenstein, made bank, breaking $170 million against an $80 million budget driven largely by cast payroll (just not mine!). The effects were praised, Nicholson’s performance was praised, Duncan's performance was particularly praised, and, hey, I even got some decent reviews for my performance, not that you’d notice with Jack on the screen.
Would this be the big break? In the words of hack TV writers everywhere, stay tuned.
Well, for every gain there’s a loss, and in Sam’s case that loss was Wonder Woman and his ultimate plans for the Justice League, which would be born without him, but that’s another story. Sam was divorced from Warner by this point, had dumped ABC after a bad first date, and was still seeing Universal. While still with Warner, he’d set in motion a Wonder Woman movie, grabbing Joss Whedon to write the screenplay.
Sam losing WW even cost me a job, since I was supposed to play Trevor’s co-pilot [SIC] Lt. Gurney.
When Sam left Warner, they at first handed it to Joss, and he was all set to direct and even took over production partnership from Sam with his Mutant Enemy Productions. So far so good, right?
Yea, not so fast. Gloria Steinem found out that the man behind the cartoon version of Wonder Woman, i.e. Joss, was writing, producing, and directing the live action film and she blew a gasket. She’d lambasted his depictions of Diana and the Amazons in the cartoon as “fetishistic” and initiated a campaign to “Toss Joss”.
Well, it worked. Warner, who’d been trying to improve its record with female audiences after losing several top-notch female execs like Mira [Velimirovic], and who’d been trying to ride the “Girl Power” thing by heavily merchandizing Wonder Woman, and who reportedly didn’t care much for his script anyway, bought out his contract and brought in Kathryn Bigelow. Joss was not happy, but that’s how it goes.
Well, Kathryn took it over and made some key modifications to Joss’s script, moving the point of view from Steve Trevor back to Diana, downplaying Steve having to step in to save her from the cruelty of the modern world, and in general making it the story about how Diana finds love and learns about the darkness of the modern world, and yet becomes the instrument of change to improve it.
She also ditched the subtle (and occasionally not-so-subtle) nods to WW’s BDSM past that Joss had slipped in there. Sorry, ghost of Bill Marston!
A little bird told me that the studio was pushing for Sandra Bullock to play Diana, but Kathryn went for Catherine Zeta-Jones. I’m sure the name thing was a coincidence, right? Do K/Cathrerines stick together? Either way, Catherine Z-J is practically an amazon as it were, so hey, I liked the choice and I bet you did too. They brought in Brad Pitt as the love interest Steve Trevor and a then up-and-coming Angelina Jolie as the main villain Eris, even though Sam had essentially created the role for Lucy Lawless, whom he’d met through Lysia of Amazonia, which Ted was producing. Meanwhile, Joss had tried to reframe the role as Ares in order to highlight what he saw as his feminist themes, her literally fighting the patriarchy. Kathryn wanted female empowerment in a different way, though, without making it a battle of the sexes. Heroic Woman vs. Villainous Woman, both empowered in their own way, no man needed to define them.
Better that way? Worse? Everyone’s got an opinion and they all stink.
Well, you saw the movie[3]. Kathryn gave it all her dark and noir touch, contrasting the bright lights, open skies, and Classical values of Themyscira against the dark colors, claustrophobic streets, and selfish modern[4] values of Gateway City. Critics liked the cinematography and audiences loved the stylized action and the fight scenes. Joss was annoyed that they removed his giant mechanical chimera scene, citing the Kaiju craze, but the studio, who as you can guess underestimated you nerds based on the whining of a handful of angry virgins at Comicon, killed it to constrain the budget since they never expected WW to break $100 million.
(Image source DW.com)
And hey, despite their assumptions (or maybe because of them, since you girl nerds came out in large numbers) Wonder Woman did great at the box office ($227 million against a $45 million budget) even though some were predicting a disaster since, you know, boy nerds supposedly won’t watch female-led superhero films. I mean, young men are practically famous about not wanting to watch beautiful women in revealing costumes kick ass, right?
Anyway, I’d bet it would have done even better if they hadn’t run it against Spiderman 3 that summer, which was ultimately directed by Joss, but that’s another story.
And as for Sam, well, Universal soon announced that it was merging with ABC, and that Sam’s nemesis Jeffrey Katzenberg would be taking over the combined studios. Needless to say, Sam dropped out of the two-picture deal in the works with them, actually walking off the set of The Curse when the announcement was made.
Finally, Sam said to me, “I guess it’s time to call the Ex.”
[1] Adapted from a quote from our timeline.
[2] Captain America Motorcycle Helmet tip to Mrs. Khan for the “former hippie turned reluctant CEO” theme and Easy Rider references. The Easy Rider references will in turn lead, naturally, to fan theories that Lou is actually George Hanson, who somehow survived his beating, but this will be Jossed by Sam and Ted.
[3] Put quickly: Diana lives on the isolated Mediterranean island of Themyscira when USAF Captain Steve Trevor’s F-14 suffers mechanical trouble and he and his RIO have to eject. They wash up on Themyscira where Hippolyta wants to have them executed as “barbarian invaders”, but Diana, smitten with Trevor and overtaken by her repressed sense of compassion, fights for their lives and ends up winning the duel, but is banished for her disobedience and emotional “weakness”. She joins Trevor in Gateway City where she learns of the hard realities of the modern world in a big fish-out-of-water narrative, and must learn to lean on her compassion over her overt Amazonian sense of belligerent superiority. She also learns about a plot by Eris, who like Ares is disappointed that the prospects for peace are growing with the end of the Cold War, to sew discord and crime in a bid to turn the people of the world against each other. WW is at first defeated due to her arrogant assumption of her superiority and inability to trust the word of the “barbarians” of Gateway City, but in time learns to trust and value and sympathize with them. In an antithesis of Eris, she helps organize the people of the city to oppose Eris’ machinations, leading to the final defeat of Eris and the teasing of a future appearance by Ares in a sequel. Diana becomes Wonder Woman and stays to protect the people of her new home. Some, particularly second-wave feminists, will complain that Diana’s arc is to learn traditionally feminine values (compassion and empathy) and assume it’s a regressive view of femininity, but Bigelow maintains that it’s about the triumph and value of the feminine and the right of women to define themselves, a very third-wave feminist approach.
[4] Per the Joss screenplay and with Warner hoping to save money, they kept it set in the modern day rather than make it a period piece.
Always suspected Kathryn Bieglow would direct WW.
I don't mind she learns compassion here. Makes a nice arc, and everyone could learn it.
I don't mind she learns compassion here. Makes a nice arc, and everyone could learn it.
Certainly not what expected from a Sam Raimi Werewolf movie but I'm positively surprised by the deepness and sophistication of it.
Yes you could totally just see it as a bloody creature feature but it's way more than that!
Great they certainly deserved it!
Wonder if Universal will now make their own Monster Mashup movies?
Jess Whedon can't catch a break can he? Makes you feel almost sorry for him.
Nevermind I'm glad they tossed him now, seriously why make a WW about Steve Trevor and why objectify Diana too?
Great casting, wondering if Brad and Angelina are going to hit it off on set like they did in OTL.
Funny how both OTKs and TTLs Wonder Woman films are a stark stylistic departure from the previous films in the Trinity, just that this time the WW film is the darker one.
Hurray, I hope this means that we can get other female led action movies in the future.
Hopefully the Sequel will be better than WW 1984.
Sam teaming up with Fox? I wish him the best of luck.
Screw them Compassion was always one of the most important aspects of Diana, in fact she even reformed most if her villains this way (although back in the day that only applied to the female ones) I'm actually a bit surprised that she didn't reform Eris at the end, but whatever.
Great chapter @Geekhis Khan
Out of curiosity, here is my attempt at seeing what Catherine Zeta-Jones looks like as Wonder Woman:
For the suit, I’m using the 2008 Fan Art Exibit suit design as a base body, since unless I’m mistaken, that is I believe essentially based off of the design concept art or notes left behind for what was going to be Joss Weadon’s OTL canceled Wonder Woman movie, meaning it’s probably most accurate to what the suit design would have been under Joss Weadon in OTL (it’s also what inspired the later OTL Gal Gadot design).
Now, while Weadon still doesn’t end up making WW ITTL, it seems likely that he would have already gotten far along into concept art for WW’s outfit, and I don’t see why Kathryn Bigelow wouldn’t have gone forward with it, so I imagine it wouldn’t change under her.
For the suit, I’m using the 2008 Fan Art Exibit suit design as a base body, since unless I’m mistaken, that is I believe essentially based off of the design concept art or notes left behind for what was going to be Joss Weadon’s OTL canceled Wonder Woman movie, meaning it’s probably most accurate to what the suit design would have been under Joss Weadon in OTL (it’s also what inspired the later OTL Gal Gadot design).
Now, while Weadon still doesn’t end up making WW ITTL, it seems likely that he would have already gotten far along into concept art for WW’s outfit, and I don’t see why Kathryn Bigelow wouldn’t have gone forward with it, so I imagine it wouldn’t change under her.
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Just gonna let everyone know my family will taking a week long vacation until July 2, so won't be posting as much.
Middle Age Bites
An American Werewolf in America (1995), a Retrospective
From Swords and Spaceships Magazine, April 2009
The ‘90s were a weird time in entertainment. You had these huge blockbusters like Spider-Man and Jurassic Park made possible by special effects revolutions, in turn spawning kaiju films and disaster films. This led Universal to attempt to launch a series of reboots to their old Universal Monsters between 1991 and 1999, featuring such films as Barry Sonnenfeld’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, David Cronenberg’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, David Fincher’s The Mummy, Sam Raimi’s The Wolfman starring Jack Nicholson, and the Roland Emmerich adaption of Creature from the Black Lagoon.[1]
In the midst of this, Mel Brooks got the idea to do one of his famous spoofs. He considered vampires and nearly launched a film titled “Mummy Dearest” (an idea he later adapted for Tales from the Crypt), but eventually settled on werewolves[2].
“I was going to call it ‘Tom Dick, and Hairy’ and make it about an accountant named Tom Dick – I hoped to get Jim Carrey or Michael Richards – who gets bitten by a werewolf while vacationing in Romania,” said Brooks. “Bernie Brillstein liked the general idea, but said we needed a ‘big idea.’ ‘You know, Mel, baby,’” he continued, impersonating Brillstein, “‘like how Blazing Saddles was about racism!’ Sure, I thought, no problem. Oy.
“So I assemble some writers and ask, ‘ok, what’s lycanthropy a great metaphor of?’ Someone says ‘Puberty! All the strange body changes and hair growth!’ and I say ‘That’s brilliant! It’s also Teen Wolf, you schmuck!’
“So, what was the opposite of puberty? Menopause? Someone recommended menstruation, ‘that time of the month’ and all, but Joss said ‘Pratchett already did that.’ Of course, the bastard turned around and did “That Time of the Month” for Tales from the Crypt the very next year, but I digress.
“Finally,” Brooks concluded, hitting his forehead with the heel of his hand, “Someone says ‘midlife crisis.’ And there it was! A middle-aged schlemiel having trouble adapting to life as a recent divorcee, goes on a trip to Romania, gets bit, bam, pow, he’s a werewolf. Now what?”
Now what indeed? Well, the result was An American Werewolf in America, starring Christopher Lloyd as the uptight cubicle drone Tom Dick, slaving away for 20-something middle manager Aiden (David Arquette), who’s the owner’s prodigal son and who, when he’s not abusing and emasculating Tom, is driving around Chicago in a Ferrari with a sexy blonde named Staci (Christina Applegate).
AIDEN walks by with a laughing blonde woman in a miniskirt (STACI) while TOM struggles with the misbehaving copier.
Aiden: Remember, two hundred copies on my desk by morning, and not a copy less, got it, Dick?
Tom: (irritated) Yes, Mr. Murphy.
Aiden: You know where the inbox is, right?
Tom: (smiles severely) Don’t worry, Mr. Murphy, I know just where to stick these copies.
And it just goes downhill from there. At the gym he’s mocked by a lunk. His karate lessons are a disaster (a ten-year-old kicks his ass). Some young women appear to be flirting with him at a stoplight, but are quickly revealed to be mocking him. Soon his wife leaves him and his teenage son Devin (Seth Green), who doesn’t respect him, is perfectly fine with the divorce, and happy to move across the country with mom at the end of the next month. A friend convinces Tom to “get out more”, which culminates in his trip to Eastern Europe to find his heritage (original last name Datcu, Anglicized to Dick at Ellis Island), but it’s a terrible vacation, culminating in him getting bit by a wolf when his Trabant breaks down in the middle of Transylvania on a rainy night.
Back in Chicago, he’s suddenly going through changes as it were. He’s having strange impulses and flashes of anger. He’s growing more assertive and confident. He rebels at the office, quits his job after tossing Aiden down the garbage shoot, and heads out on the town. At first, it’s a montage of liberation as he’s suddenly far more confident and sexier than ever before. Women are actually looking at him unironically! Even his receding hairline is growing back!
“Well, so much for my security deposit…” (Image source: Imágenes Españoles)
But after a few days, the full moon appears, causing him to wolf-out and rampage through the city, trashing everything, taking petty revenge on his ex-wife and others who harmed him, including trashing Aiden’s Ferrari while Aiden’s in it with Staci, and Tom wakes up the next morning with foggy memories and the sudden realization of the damage and danger he caused.
Worse yet, the news reports say that a woman was mauled and killed by “a large dog, possibly a wolf” that night, and Tom is certain that it must have been him.
TOM wakes up in a seedy motel room. A young woman is sleeping beside him. The room is trashed.
Tom: What in the hell happened?
The woman rolls over and is revealed to be STACI, his boss Aiden’s latest girlfriend.
Staci: (smiling seductively, running her fingers across his chest) Don’t you remember, tiger? A giant wolf was chasing me through the park and you somehow chased it off and saved me!
Tom: (looks around) Where are my clothes?
Staci: You were naked when you emerged from the bushes, so I assumed the wolf must have torn them off.
Tom: Oh, yea. (beat) That makes perfect sense.
Meanwhile, Aiden’s close call with the werewolf results in his dad Thaddeus Murphy (Mel Brooks) hiring eccentric and thick-accented werewolf hunter Lupu Barbaneagra (Rowan Atkinson, who takes direct and loving inspiration from Peter Sellers’ Clouseau) to track down the “beast” that attacked his “precious” son and kill it. Barbaneagra promises that “no beast haz ever ezcaped me.”
And back at his apartment, Tom is searching GEnie for “werewolf cures” with some help from his son Devin, who has learned his dad’s secret and thinks that werewolf dad is “really cool”. Tom comes across various strange things, including porn (“Gah, what’s with all these goddam obscene pop-ups?”), before finally seeing a sketchy website for a “Real Cherokee Shaman”. So he heads southwest to Oklahoma with Devin (it’s their “week together” before he moves) to meet this “great and renowned shaman”, where he hopes to find a cure for his new affliction. They encounter various minor adventures and misunderstandings along the way where his “wolf side” causes trouble, much to his son’s amusement (“Wow, dad, wolf-you rocks!”). They even share some father-son bonding time, such as when they awkwardly sing “Werewolves of London” together in a seedy Karaoke bar.
Meanwhile, Lupu is right behind, following his “smell”, finding the aftermaths of all of Tom’s hijinks, and increasingly determined to “find and destroy ze vulf.” Lupu, a living avatar for insecure toxic masculinity, is rude and verbally abusive to all he meets, particularly the women.
“Take vunderlekh, mer narish vays mentshn…” (Image source Scroll.in)
The journey eventually leads Tom and his son to “Dr. Timothy Wolfpaw” (Wes Studi) and his diminutive assistant “Jon Deep River” (Deep Roy), two scam artists taking advantage of tourists, new age yuppies, and other “gullible white people”. Their “Cherokee heritage” is rather questionable. In a reference to Blazing Saddles, Jon Deep River speaks primarily in Yiddish (Mel Brooks reportedly personally tutored Deep Roy on pronunciation and inflection and how best to play “a fed-up Jew”).
Tom: What is this crap? This dreamcatcher says “Made in China!” And Cherokee don’t live in teepees! That’s Plains Indians! Are you even a proper Indian?
Timothy Wolfpaw: (insulted) Of course, I am a “proper Indian!” I was born in Mumbai! (puts palms together) Namaste! Jon Deep River is, on the other hand, full blooded Lakota.
Jon Deep River: Oy vey, bruder, vos iz mit dem Goyim? Meshuggeneh, I tell you.
“We had very strict casting standards,” Brooks later told James Lipton, “‘Only an Indian can play an Indian…and vice versa.’”
Despite expressing his reservations (with a sly lean towards the associated other meaning of the word with regards to Native Americans), Tom decides to hire these two frauds, who attempt to develop a cure using their “deep understanding of the herbs of Mother Earth” and secret internet searches behind his back (“Quick, see what you can find on Netscape!”) while they send Tom through a series of ludicrous and often humiliating “ceremonial spirit journeys” like meditations in the prairie to sweat lodges and other stereotypical things “white people seem to expect”. Timothy Wolfpaw will translate for Jon Deep River’s long (Yiddish) speeches, always focusing on some seemingly deep and philosophical (but in reality, nonsensical) spiritual lesson. Yiddish speakers, meanwhile, are awarded with an inside joke as Jon’s speeches are totally unrelated to the supposed translation, and usually obscene and insulting.
Jon: Azoy ikh zogn tsu dem mentsh, ir viln respekt? Bakumen avek deyn tokhes, aun makhn a Mentsh fun zikh! Vos ken er dervartn, mir veln khvalye etlekhe brenen sage aun er iz vider a Mentsh? Feh! What a putz!
Timothy: Jon Deep River says that if you look deep inside of yourself and make peace with the Great Spirit, then you will receive great spiritual blessings and take control over your form.
Tom: (beat) That’s either deeply profound or complete bullshit. Possibly both.
Timothy: (opening a can of diet soda) Mysterious are the ways of the Great Spirit.
They reportedly had to reshoot the “Mysterious are the ways…” scene several times because the cast kept “corpsing”, or cracking up laughing during takes. “I spend hours working to get the Yiddish exactly right,” said Deep Roy to the camera in one outtake, “and these schmucks can’t stop corsping and ruining the verkakte takes!”
While the majority of the treatments are bogus (Devin even hilariously consumes something that gives him the runs thinking that it’s peyote) Tom does find that the meditations and “time alone in the quiet” is helping him to better control his angry emotions. However, he is shaken at a radio report of a wolf killing a young woman in a small town they spent the night in on the way to the ersatz shamans.
Finally, he is directed by the ersatz shamans to see “a wise woman who may be able to help”. Tom and Devin follow a map (clearly printed out from a website) on a spectacular epic trip to New Mexico through the desert past towering rock formations, Pueblos, and ancient rock art and finally to a crappy trailer in the middle of the desert. The door opens to reveal an ancient and wizened Native American woman in traditional clothing. “We’re here to see the great wise woman,” says Tom. The old woman turns her head and calls out “hey, Wise One! Customers!” and steps back. Up walks a teenaged girl, Amanda Redrock (Michelle Thrush), wearing cutoff shorts and a Snoop Dog T-shirt and listening to Hip Hop on a Discman.
Amanda: (takes one look at TOM) Let me guess, werewolf?
Tom: You’re the Wise Woman?
Amanda: (rolls eyes) No, I’m Executive Assistant to the Tooth Fairy. Do you want to stay a wolf or not?
Tom: (beat) Lead on, Wise One.
Devin: (smiling flirtatiously at AMANDA) Well, if nothing else she’s certainly a Wise Ass!
Amanda gives Tom an elixir, telling him to take it on or around the night of the full moon and he’ll be cured. They leave. By this point Lupu has tracked them to the desert and is actively watching their car through binoculars. When they reach a sketchy roadside motel for the night, Lupu takes a room next to theirs. Lupu takes a moment to load a pistol with silver bullets.
That night, sitting in some crappy lawn chairs watching the almost-full moon and with Devin set to head to California with his mother when they get back, Tom and his son share a touching moment. Devin asks him why he can’t just stay a wolf and suggests that if he doesn’t want the power, then perhaps he could make Devin into a wolf (“Come on, dad! Just bite me, ok?” “A teenaged werewolf?! Nobody wants to see that!”), but Tom confesses the dark truth he’d been avoiding the whole time, that as a wolf you “lose control of your humanity and do terrible things,” confessing, “In my savagery I killed two women.”
This shocking moment is interrupted by Lupu, emerging from the shadows, holding the pistol. “To ze contrary, Mr. Dick, it vas I who killed zem, and knowingly! You zee, I vas the one zat bit you in Romania, and zen tracked you here. And vonce I kill you, all vill belief zat ze vulf vill be dead and zere vill be nobody looking for me!”
As Lupu levels the pistol, Devin charges and tackles Lupu, causing the gun to fall to the ground. Lupu wolfs-out and lunges after Devin, but Tom instinctually wolfs out himself and attacks Lupu. Devin grabs the gun, but can’t get a clear shot (“Shit, I thought this only happened in movies! Can one of you step back for a moment?!”).
Starts out like this, but soon devolves into slapstick (Image source Werewolf News)
The two werewolves savagely fight, with the more experienced Lupu clearly having the upper hand, and soon Tom is giving in to the savagery and about to lose his humanity entirely when Devin tells him to “remember the meditations, dad! You control the wolf!” Suddenly, a sense of peace descends over wolf-Tom, and he assumes a meditative yoga-like stance. After a beat (and the obligatory Asian flute music), wolf-Tom then shifts into karate stance starts to beat up Lupu in a series of showy (and silly) martial arts moves, culminating in a Three Stooges like eye gouge and a kick to the balls. Lupu falls over, holding his crotch and literally howling in pain and Devin runs up and pours the elixir down Lupu’s open mouth, causing Lupu to revert to human form.
As police arrive, wolf-Tom disappears into the night and a woman testifies that she saw Lupu go by with a gun in his hand, and Devin claims that Lupu was trying to kill him. “But why is he naked?” asks the cop. “Um,” says Devin, “He’s a pervo?”
Eventually, Devin finds his dad naked in the desert. Tom has come to terms with himself and his own confidence, but most importantly he has found the love and respect of his son. They head back to Amanda’s trailer for another elixir and then return to Chicago, where father and son embrace and say their goodbyes and Tom says he will take the elixir “tonight.”
But Tom actually has other plans…
As DEVIN and his MOTHER drive off, TOM smiles and walks back inside the apartment. He pulls the bottle of elixir from his pocket, looks at it, then puts it on the shelf as he turns to the fourth wall.
Tom: Well, maybe next month!
CUT TO…… AIDEN in a new convertible Stingray, top down, with a different WOMAN, driving through the city. They park at the overlook and AIDEN starts to lean over towards the WOMAN.
Woman: Hey, grabby-hands, like, no?!
Aiden: Come on, babe! Loosen up! I just want a little…
Suddenly the WOMAN screams and runs out the door as a giant WOLF (TOM) jumps up on the hood of the car, denting it. AIDEN screams and WOLF TOM lifts his leg and urinates all over AIDEN and the car interior as Warren Zevon’s “Middle Aged Monsters” plays.
FADE TO CREDITS
An American Werewolf in America slowly took the country by storm, a relentless sleeper hit, becoming Brooks’ most popular film in decades, making a spectacular $92 million against its relatively small $21 million budget and breaking into the top twenty in a year that included several blockbuster effects films, managing to come close to matching the Sam Raimi film it was in part spoofing. Reportedly, Mel Brooks turned down a ton of money for a proposed sequel, leaving it a solo film. “Like with Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles, there was nowhere to go with that story but down!” he told Variety.
Unlike many of his earlier works, and more in keeping with The Producers or the more recent Life Stinks, it for the most part avoided the silly, overtly absurdist, fourth wall breaking parody humor of many of his most famous works, instead relying on physical comedy, funny dialog, parody elements, and the comedic acting chops of its cast, even as much of the humor was indeed over the top and subtly absurd in a “real life is absurd” way.
And the production of An American Werewolf in America is nearly as insane as the film itself. Struggling to find an appropriate name, the film’s working title jumped from “Tom Dick, and Hairy” to “My Dad the Werewolf” to “I Was a Middle-Aged Werewolf” to “Middle Age Bites!” until someone called out “An American Werewolf in America”, which stuck as a working title and wouldn’t let go. “I ended up calling John Landis and just asking him if we could use the name,” said Brooks. “Not only did he say ‘yes,’ but he wanted to co-produce! He’d been struggling to get An American Werewolf in Paris going with Polygram for a few years and was sick to death of it.”
And to make matters stranger, they received a cease-and-desist letter from author Jim Harrison, who claimed that the “middle aged man gains new confidence as a werewolf” plot was lifted from a rejected screenplay that he wrote for Universal[3]! Landis and Brooks, claiming ignorance but just wanting to quietly put it behind them, ended up giving him an “inspired by” credit and a small but undisclosed payment.
Since Landis controlled the IP and distribution rights for the “American Werewolf” series, Hyperion was able to distribute on their own, and since it was a parody/satire neither Universal nor Polygram had any recourse to stop the production, even as the latter openly feared that the film would sabotage the Paris film. Polygram finally just dropped out, leading Landis to take the Paris sequel film to Hyperion! Doubly ironic, this led to the project getting shelved again until the late 1990s.
Landis also brought Elmer Bernstein on board to reimagine his earlier American Werewolf in London score for the film. They also sprinkled in several classic rock needle drops in keeping with the midlife crisis aspect, with Warren Zevon in particular recruited not just to license his hits “Werewolves of London”, “Excitable Boy”, and “Lawyers, Guns, and Money”, but to write the original (and Golden Globe nominated) song “Middle Aged Monsters”.
Being a Fantasia production, naturally the Disney Creatureworks would take the lead on effects. While some CG was used, the majority of the effects were the practical creature effects that the I-Works had mastered, in particular the combination of prosthetics and animatronics that they had pioneered. Former He Man turned “guy behind the effects” Brian Thompson played Tom Dick as a werewolf, with Karen Prell providing the waldo-work (in a side-note, the animatronic suit would make a cameo in Stephen Chiodo’s Hawaiian Vamps in one of the most bizarre non-sequitur scenes we can recall—the infamous “Damn howlies” scene). Though they originally considered making an R-rated film full of gore on par with its influences, they ultimately pursued the T rating, though pushed the level of blood effects as far as possible in a deliberately ludicrous and deconstructive way[4].
Looking back on it, An American Werewolf in America still holds up as one of Brooks’ best, even as some of the humor betrays its 1990s origins. The jokes still land and the humor, though politically incorrect, is, in typical Brooks fashion, having a laugh at the expense of the oppressors rather that the oppressed, so likely to only offend the most thin-skinned and least self-aware. Christopher Lloyd and Seth Green have an outstanding screen chemistry as a father-son duo, Wes Studi and Deep Roy were clearly enjoying slaughtering ethnic stereotypes and audience expectations as the ersatz shamans of dubious ethnic origin, and Rowan Atkinson was clearly having a ball as the werewolf hunter who was, in fact, a werewolf.
All in all, we love it here at Swords and Spaceships. It’s a masterful spoof, a good self-empowerment narrative, a brilliant situation- and character-driven comedy, a heartwarming family togetherness tale, and proof that Mel Brooks still had it as a producer and director.
It’s also a pretty damned kick-ass werewolf flick!
[1] More on this in a future post.
[2] Hat tip to @El Pip, @WillWrambles, @TheFaultsofAlts, and @GrahamB for this wild idea! In our timeline Brooks produced the underperforming spoof Dracula: Dead and Loving It starring Leslie Nielsen.
[3] Became our timeline’s Wolf (1994) starring Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer, an underappreciated but far from spectacular film. In this timeline Raimi went with his own screenplay.
[4] On par with the staking scene from Dracula: Dead and Loving It (“Location, location location!”).
From Swords and Spaceships Magazine, April 2009
The ‘90s were a weird time in entertainment. You had these huge blockbusters like Spider-Man and Jurassic Park made possible by special effects revolutions, in turn spawning kaiju films and disaster films. This led Universal to attempt to launch a series of reboots to their old Universal Monsters between 1991 and 1999, featuring such films as Barry Sonnenfeld’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, David Cronenberg’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, David Fincher’s The Mummy, Sam Raimi’s The Wolfman starring Jack Nicholson, and the Roland Emmerich adaption of Creature from the Black Lagoon.[1]
In the midst of this, Mel Brooks got the idea to do one of his famous spoofs. He considered vampires and nearly launched a film titled “Mummy Dearest” (an idea he later adapted for Tales from the Crypt), but eventually settled on werewolves[2].
“I was going to call it ‘Tom Dick, and Hairy’ and make it about an accountant named Tom Dick – I hoped to get Jim Carrey or Michael Richards – who gets bitten by a werewolf while vacationing in Romania,” said Brooks. “Bernie Brillstein liked the general idea, but said we needed a ‘big idea.’ ‘You know, Mel, baby,’” he continued, impersonating Brillstein, “‘like how Blazing Saddles was about racism!’ Sure, I thought, no problem. Oy.
“So I assemble some writers and ask, ‘ok, what’s lycanthropy a great metaphor of?’ Someone says ‘Puberty! All the strange body changes and hair growth!’ and I say ‘That’s brilliant! It’s also Teen Wolf, you schmuck!’
“So, what was the opposite of puberty? Menopause? Someone recommended menstruation, ‘that time of the month’ and all, but Joss said ‘Pratchett already did that.’ Of course, the bastard turned around and did “That Time of the Month” for Tales from the Crypt the very next year, but I digress.
“Finally,” Brooks concluded, hitting his forehead with the heel of his hand, “Someone says ‘midlife crisis.’ And there it was! A middle-aged schlemiel having trouble adapting to life as a recent divorcee, goes on a trip to Romania, gets bit, bam, pow, he’s a werewolf. Now what?”
Now what indeed? Well, the result was An American Werewolf in America, starring Christopher Lloyd as the uptight cubicle drone Tom Dick, slaving away for 20-something middle manager Aiden (David Arquette), who’s the owner’s prodigal son and who, when he’s not abusing and emasculating Tom, is driving around Chicago in a Ferrari with a sexy blonde named Staci (Christina Applegate).
AIDEN walks by with a laughing blonde woman in a miniskirt (STACI) while TOM struggles with the misbehaving copier.
Aiden: Remember, two hundred copies on my desk by morning, and not a copy less, got it, Dick?
Tom: (irritated) Yes, Mr. Murphy.
Aiden: You know where the inbox is, right?
Tom: (smiles severely) Don’t worry, Mr. Murphy, I know just where to stick these copies.
And it just goes downhill from there. At the gym he’s mocked by a lunk. His karate lessons are a disaster (a ten-year-old kicks his ass). Some young women appear to be flirting with him at a stoplight, but are quickly revealed to be mocking him. Soon his wife leaves him and his teenage son Devin (Seth Green), who doesn’t respect him, is perfectly fine with the divorce, and happy to move across the country with mom at the end of the next month. A friend convinces Tom to “get out more”, which culminates in his trip to Eastern Europe to find his heritage (original last name Datcu, Anglicized to Dick at Ellis Island), but it’s a terrible vacation, culminating in him getting bit by a wolf when his Trabant breaks down in the middle of Transylvania on a rainy night.
Back in Chicago, he’s suddenly going through changes as it were. He’s having strange impulses and flashes of anger. He’s growing more assertive and confident. He rebels at the office, quits his job after tossing Aiden down the garbage shoot, and heads out on the town. At first, it’s a montage of liberation as he’s suddenly far more confident and sexier than ever before. Women are actually looking at him unironically! Even his receding hairline is growing back!
“Well, so much for my security deposit…” (Image source: Imágenes Españoles)
But after a few days, the full moon appears, causing him to wolf-out and rampage through the city, trashing everything, taking petty revenge on his ex-wife and others who harmed him, including trashing Aiden’s Ferrari while Aiden’s in it with Staci, and Tom wakes up the next morning with foggy memories and the sudden realization of the damage and danger he caused.
Worse yet, the news reports say that a woman was mauled and killed by “a large dog, possibly a wolf” that night, and Tom is certain that it must have been him.
TOM wakes up in a seedy motel room. A young woman is sleeping beside him. The room is trashed.
Tom: What in the hell happened?
The woman rolls over and is revealed to be STACI, his boss Aiden’s latest girlfriend.
Staci: (smiling seductively, running her fingers across his chest) Don’t you remember, tiger? A giant wolf was chasing me through the park and you somehow chased it off and saved me!
Tom: (looks around) Where are my clothes?
Staci: You were naked when you emerged from the bushes, so I assumed the wolf must have torn them off.
Tom: Oh, yea. (beat) That makes perfect sense.
Meanwhile, Aiden’s close call with the werewolf results in his dad Thaddeus Murphy (Mel Brooks) hiring eccentric and thick-accented werewolf hunter Lupu Barbaneagra (Rowan Atkinson, who takes direct and loving inspiration from Peter Sellers’ Clouseau) to track down the “beast” that attacked his “precious” son and kill it. Barbaneagra promises that “no beast haz ever ezcaped me.”
And back at his apartment, Tom is searching GEnie for “werewolf cures” with some help from his son Devin, who has learned his dad’s secret and thinks that werewolf dad is “really cool”. Tom comes across various strange things, including porn (“Gah, what’s with all these goddam obscene pop-ups?”), before finally seeing a sketchy website for a “Real Cherokee Shaman”. So he heads southwest to Oklahoma with Devin (it’s their “week together” before he moves) to meet this “great and renowned shaman”, where he hopes to find a cure for his new affliction. They encounter various minor adventures and misunderstandings along the way where his “wolf side” causes trouble, much to his son’s amusement (“Wow, dad, wolf-you rocks!”). They even share some father-son bonding time, such as when they awkwardly sing “Werewolves of London” together in a seedy Karaoke bar.
Meanwhile, Lupu is right behind, following his “smell”, finding the aftermaths of all of Tom’s hijinks, and increasingly determined to “find and destroy ze vulf.” Lupu, a living avatar for insecure toxic masculinity, is rude and verbally abusive to all he meets, particularly the women.
“Take vunderlekh, mer narish vays mentshn…” (Image source Scroll.in)
The journey eventually leads Tom and his son to “Dr. Timothy Wolfpaw” (Wes Studi) and his diminutive assistant “Jon Deep River” (Deep Roy), two scam artists taking advantage of tourists, new age yuppies, and other “gullible white people”. Their “Cherokee heritage” is rather questionable. In a reference to Blazing Saddles, Jon Deep River speaks primarily in Yiddish (Mel Brooks reportedly personally tutored Deep Roy on pronunciation and inflection and how best to play “a fed-up Jew”).
Tom: What is this crap? This dreamcatcher says “Made in China!” And Cherokee don’t live in teepees! That’s Plains Indians! Are you even a proper Indian?
Timothy Wolfpaw: (insulted) Of course, I am a “proper Indian!” I was born in Mumbai! (puts palms together) Namaste! Jon Deep River is, on the other hand, full blooded Lakota.
Jon Deep River: Oy vey, bruder, vos iz mit dem Goyim? Meshuggeneh, I tell you.
“We had very strict casting standards,” Brooks later told James Lipton, “‘Only an Indian can play an Indian…and vice versa.’”
Despite expressing his reservations (with a sly lean towards the associated other meaning of the word with regards to Native Americans), Tom decides to hire these two frauds, who attempt to develop a cure using their “deep understanding of the herbs of Mother Earth” and secret internet searches behind his back (“Quick, see what you can find on Netscape!”) while they send Tom through a series of ludicrous and often humiliating “ceremonial spirit journeys” like meditations in the prairie to sweat lodges and other stereotypical things “white people seem to expect”. Timothy Wolfpaw will translate for Jon Deep River’s long (Yiddish) speeches, always focusing on some seemingly deep and philosophical (but in reality, nonsensical) spiritual lesson. Yiddish speakers, meanwhile, are awarded with an inside joke as Jon’s speeches are totally unrelated to the supposed translation, and usually obscene and insulting.
Jon: Azoy ikh zogn tsu dem mentsh, ir viln respekt? Bakumen avek deyn tokhes, aun makhn a Mentsh fun zikh! Vos ken er dervartn, mir veln khvalye etlekhe brenen sage aun er iz vider a Mentsh? Feh! What a putz!
Timothy: Jon Deep River says that if you look deep inside of yourself and make peace with the Great Spirit, then you will receive great spiritual blessings and take control over your form.
Tom: (beat) That’s either deeply profound or complete bullshit. Possibly both.
Timothy: (opening a can of diet soda) Mysterious are the ways of the Great Spirit.
They reportedly had to reshoot the “Mysterious are the ways…” scene several times because the cast kept “corpsing”, or cracking up laughing during takes. “I spend hours working to get the Yiddish exactly right,” said Deep Roy to the camera in one outtake, “and these schmucks can’t stop corsping and ruining the verkakte takes!”
While the majority of the treatments are bogus (Devin even hilariously consumes something that gives him the runs thinking that it’s peyote) Tom does find that the meditations and “time alone in the quiet” is helping him to better control his angry emotions. However, he is shaken at a radio report of a wolf killing a young woman in a small town they spent the night in on the way to the ersatz shamans.
Finally, he is directed by the ersatz shamans to see “a wise woman who may be able to help”. Tom and Devin follow a map (clearly printed out from a website) on a spectacular epic trip to New Mexico through the desert past towering rock formations, Pueblos, and ancient rock art and finally to a crappy trailer in the middle of the desert. The door opens to reveal an ancient and wizened Native American woman in traditional clothing. “We’re here to see the great wise woman,” says Tom. The old woman turns her head and calls out “hey, Wise One! Customers!” and steps back. Up walks a teenaged girl, Amanda Redrock (Michelle Thrush), wearing cutoff shorts and a Snoop Dog T-shirt and listening to Hip Hop on a Discman.
Amanda: (takes one look at TOM) Let me guess, werewolf?
Tom: You’re the Wise Woman?
Amanda: (rolls eyes) No, I’m Executive Assistant to the Tooth Fairy. Do you want to stay a wolf or not?
Tom: (beat) Lead on, Wise One.
Devin: (smiling flirtatiously at AMANDA) Well, if nothing else she’s certainly a Wise Ass!
Amanda gives Tom an elixir, telling him to take it on or around the night of the full moon and he’ll be cured. They leave. By this point Lupu has tracked them to the desert and is actively watching their car through binoculars. When they reach a sketchy roadside motel for the night, Lupu takes a room next to theirs. Lupu takes a moment to load a pistol with silver bullets.
That night, sitting in some crappy lawn chairs watching the almost-full moon and with Devin set to head to California with his mother when they get back, Tom and his son share a touching moment. Devin asks him why he can’t just stay a wolf and suggests that if he doesn’t want the power, then perhaps he could make Devin into a wolf (“Come on, dad! Just bite me, ok?” “A teenaged werewolf?! Nobody wants to see that!”), but Tom confesses the dark truth he’d been avoiding the whole time, that as a wolf you “lose control of your humanity and do terrible things,” confessing, “In my savagery I killed two women.”
This shocking moment is interrupted by Lupu, emerging from the shadows, holding the pistol. “To ze contrary, Mr. Dick, it vas I who killed zem, and knowingly! You zee, I vas the one zat bit you in Romania, and zen tracked you here. And vonce I kill you, all vill belief zat ze vulf vill be dead and zere vill be nobody looking for me!”
As Lupu levels the pistol, Devin charges and tackles Lupu, causing the gun to fall to the ground. Lupu wolfs-out and lunges after Devin, but Tom instinctually wolfs out himself and attacks Lupu. Devin grabs the gun, but can’t get a clear shot (“Shit, I thought this only happened in movies! Can one of you step back for a moment?!”).
Starts out like this, but soon devolves into slapstick (Image source Werewolf News)
The two werewolves savagely fight, with the more experienced Lupu clearly having the upper hand, and soon Tom is giving in to the savagery and about to lose his humanity entirely when Devin tells him to “remember the meditations, dad! You control the wolf!” Suddenly, a sense of peace descends over wolf-Tom, and he assumes a meditative yoga-like stance. After a beat (and the obligatory Asian flute music), wolf-Tom then shifts into karate stance starts to beat up Lupu in a series of showy (and silly) martial arts moves, culminating in a Three Stooges like eye gouge and a kick to the balls. Lupu falls over, holding his crotch and literally howling in pain and Devin runs up and pours the elixir down Lupu’s open mouth, causing Lupu to revert to human form.
As police arrive, wolf-Tom disappears into the night and a woman testifies that she saw Lupu go by with a gun in his hand, and Devin claims that Lupu was trying to kill him. “But why is he naked?” asks the cop. “Um,” says Devin, “He’s a pervo?”
Eventually, Devin finds his dad naked in the desert. Tom has come to terms with himself and his own confidence, but most importantly he has found the love and respect of his son. They head back to Amanda’s trailer for another elixir and then return to Chicago, where father and son embrace and say their goodbyes and Tom says he will take the elixir “tonight.”
But Tom actually has other plans…
As DEVIN and his MOTHER drive off, TOM smiles and walks back inside the apartment. He pulls the bottle of elixir from his pocket, looks at it, then puts it on the shelf as he turns to the fourth wall.
Tom: Well, maybe next month!
CUT TO…… AIDEN in a new convertible Stingray, top down, with a different WOMAN, driving through the city. They park at the overlook and AIDEN starts to lean over towards the WOMAN.
Woman: Hey, grabby-hands, like, no?!
Aiden: Come on, babe! Loosen up! I just want a little…
Suddenly the WOMAN screams and runs out the door as a giant WOLF (TOM) jumps up on the hood of the car, denting it. AIDEN screams and WOLF TOM lifts his leg and urinates all over AIDEN and the car interior as Warren Zevon’s “Middle Aged Monsters” plays.
FADE TO CREDITS
An American Werewolf in America slowly took the country by storm, a relentless sleeper hit, becoming Brooks’ most popular film in decades, making a spectacular $92 million against its relatively small $21 million budget and breaking into the top twenty in a year that included several blockbuster effects films, managing to come close to matching the Sam Raimi film it was in part spoofing. Reportedly, Mel Brooks turned down a ton of money for a proposed sequel, leaving it a solo film. “Like with Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles, there was nowhere to go with that story but down!” he told Variety.
Unlike many of his earlier works, and more in keeping with The Producers or the more recent Life Stinks, it for the most part avoided the silly, overtly absurdist, fourth wall breaking parody humor of many of his most famous works, instead relying on physical comedy, funny dialog, parody elements, and the comedic acting chops of its cast, even as much of the humor was indeed over the top and subtly absurd in a “real life is absurd” way.
And the production of An American Werewolf in America is nearly as insane as the film itself. Struggling to find an appropriate name, the film’s working title jumped from “Tom Dick, and Hairy” to “My Dad the Werewolf” to “I Was a Middle-Aged Werewolf” to “Middle Age Bites!” until someone called out “An American Werewolf in America”, which stuck as a working title and wouldn’t let go. “I ended up calling John Landis and just asking him if we could use the name,” said Brooks. “Not only did he say ‘yes,’ but he wanted to co-produce! He’d been struggling to get An American Werewolf in Paris going with Polygram for a few years and was sick to death of it.”
And to make matters stranger, they received a cease-and-desist letter from author Jim Harrison, who claimed that the “middle aged man gains new confidence as a werewolf” plot was lifted from a rejected screenplay that he wrote for Universal[3]! Landis and Brooks, claiming ignorance but just wanting to quietly put it behind them, ended up giving him an “inspired by” credit and a small but undisclosed payment.
Since Landis controlled the IP and distribution rights for the “American Werewolf” series, Hyperion was able to distribute on their own, and since it was a parody/satire neither Universal nor Polygram had any recourse to stop the production, even as the latter openly feared that the film would sabotage the Paris film. Polygram finally just dropped out, leading Landis to take the Paris sequel film to Hyperion! Doubly ironic, this led to the project getting shelved again until the late 1990s.
Landis also brought Elmer Bernstein on board to reimagine his earlier American Werewolf in London score for the film. They also sprinkled in several classic rock needle drops in keeping with the midlife crisis aspect, with Warren Zevon in particular recruited not just to license his hits “Werewolves of London”, “Excitable Boy”, and “Lawyers, Guns, and Money”, but to write the original (and Golden Globe nominated) song “Middle Aged Monsters”.
Being a Fantasia production, naturally the Disney Creatureworks would take the lead on effects. While some CG was used, the majority of the effects were the practical creature effects that the I-Works had mastered, in particular the combination of prosthetics and animatronics that they had pioneered. Former He Man turned “guy behind the effects” Brian Thompson played Tom Dick as a werewolf, with Karen Prell providing the waldo-work (in a side-note, the animatronic suit would make a cameo in Stephen Chiodo’s Hawaiian Vamps in one of the most bizarre non-sequitur scenes we can recall—the infamous “Damn howlies” scene). Though they originally considered making an R-rated film full of gore on par with its influences, they ultimately pursued the T rating, though pushed the level of blood effects as far as possible in a deliberately ludicrous and deconstructive way[4].
Looking back on it, An American Werewolf in America still holds up as one of Brooks’ best, even as some of the humor betrays its 1990s origins. The jokes still land and the humor, though politically incorrect, is, in typical Brooks fashion, having a laugh at the expense of the oppressors rather that the oppressed, so likely to only offend the most thin-skinned and least self-aware. Christopher Lloyd and Seth Green have an outstanding screen chemistry as a father-son duo, Wes Studi and Deep Roy were clearly enjoying slaughtering ethnic stereotypes and audience expectations as the ersatz shamans of dubious ethnic origin, and Rowan Atkinson was clearly having a ball as the werewolf hunter who was, in fact, a werewolf.
All in all, we love it here at Swords and Spaceships. It’s a masterful spoof, a good self-empowerment narrative, a brilliant situation- and character-driven comedy, a heartwarming family togetherness tale, and proof that Mel Brooks still had it as a producer and director.
It’s also a pretty damned kick-ass werewolf flick!
[1] More on this in a future post.
[2] Hat tip to @El Pip, @WillWrambles, @TheFaultsofAlts, and @GrahamB for this wild idea! In our timeline Brooks produced the underperforming spoof Dracula: Dead and Loving It starring Leslie Nielsen.
[3] Became our timeline’s Wolf (1994) starring Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer, an underappreciated but far from spectacular film. In this timeline Raimi went with his own screenplay.
[4] On par with the staking scene from Dracula: Dead and Loving It (“Location, location location!”).
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SO MUCH YES!An American Werewolf in America (1995), a Retrospective
From Swords and Spaceships Magazine, April 2009
The ‘90s were a weird time in entertainment. You had these huge blockbusters like Spider-Man and Jurassic Park made possible by special effects revolutions, in turn spawning kaiju films and disaster films. This led Universal to attempt to launch a series of reboots to their old Universal Monsters between 1991 and 1999, featuring such films as Barry Sonnenfeld’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, David Cronenberg’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, David Fincher’s The Mummy, Sam Raimi’s The Wolfman starring Jack Nicholson, and the Roland Emmerich adaption of Creature from the Black Lagoon.[1]
In the midst of this, Mel Brooks got the idea to do one of his famous spoofs. He considered vampires and nearly launched a film titled “Mummy Dearest” (an idea he later adapted for Tales from the Crypt), but eventually settled on werewolves[2].
“I was going to call it ‘Tom Dick, and Hairy’ and make it about an accountant named Tom Dick – I hoped to get Jim Carrey or Michael Richards – who gets bitten by a werewolf while vacationing in Romania,” said Brooks. “Bernie Brillstein liked the general idea, but said we needed a ‘big idea.’ ‘You know, Mel, baby,’” he continued, impersonating Brillstein, “‘like how Blazing Saddles was about racism!’ Sure, I thought, no problem. Oy.
“So I assemble some writers and ask, ‘ok, what’s lycanthropy a great metaphor of?’ Someone says ‘Puberty! All the strange body changes and hair growth!’ and I say ‘That’s brilliant! It’s also Teen Wolf, you schmuck!’
“So, what was the opposite of puberty? Menopause? Someone recommended menstruation, ‘that time of the month’ and all, but Joss said ‘Pratchett already did that.’ Of course, the bastard turned around and did “That Time of the Month” for Tales from the Crypt the very next year, but I digress.
“Finally,” Brooks concluded, hitting his forehead with the heel of his hand, “Someone says ‘midlife crisis.’ And there it was! A middle-aged schlemiel having trouble adapting to life as a recent divorcee, goes on a trip to Romania, gets bit, bam, pow, he’s a werewolf. Now what?”
Now what indeed? Well, the result was An American Werewolf in America, starring Christopher Lloyd as the uptight cubicle drone Tom Dick, slaving away for 20-something middle manager Aiden (David Arquette), who’s the owner’s prodigal son and who, when he’s not abusing and emasculating Tom, is driving around Chicago in a Ferrari with a sexy blonde named Staci (Christina Applegate).
AIDEN walks by with a laughing blonde woman in a miniskirt (STACI) while TOM struggles with the misbehaving copier.
Aiden: Remember, two hundred copies on my desk by morning, and not a copy less, got it, Dick?
Tom: (irritated) Yes, Mr. Murphy.
Aiden: You know where the inbox is, right?
Tom: (smiles severely) Don’t worry, Mr. Murphy, I know just where to stick these copies.
And it just goes downhill from there. At the gym he’s mocked by a lunk. His karate lessons are a disaster (a ten-year-old kicks his ass). Some young women appear to be flirting with him at a stoplight, but are quickly revealed to be mocking him. Soon his wife leaves him and his teenage son Devin (Seth Green), who doesn’t respect him, is perfectly fine with the divorce, and happy to move across the country with mom at the end of the next month. A friend convinces Tom to “get out more”, which culminates in his trip to Eastern Europe to find his heritage (original last name Datcu, Anglicized to Dick at Ellis Island), but it’s a terrible vacation, culminating in him getting bit by a wolf when his Trabant breaks down in the middle of Transylvania on a rainy night.
Back in Chicago, he’s suddenly going through changes as it were. He’s having strange impulses and flashes of anger. He’s growing more assertive and confident. He rebels at the office, quits his job after tossing Aiden down the garbage shoot, and heads out on the town. At first, it’s a montage of liberation as he’s suddenly far more confident and sexier than ever before. Women are actually looking at him unironically! Even his receding hairline is growing back!
“Well, so much for my security deposit…” (Image source: Imágenes Españoles)
But after a few days, the full moon appears, causing him to wolf-out and rampage through the city, trashing everything, taking petty revenge on his ex-wife and others who harmed him, including trashing Aiden’s Ferrari while Aiden’s in it with Staci, and Tom wakes up the next morning with foggy memories and the sudden realization of the damage and danger he caused.
Worse yet, the news reports say that a woman was mauled and killed by “a large dog, possibly a wolf” that night, and Tom is certain that it must have been him.
TOM wakes up in a seedy motel room. A young woman is sleeping beside him. The room is trashed.
Tom: What in the hell happened?
The woman rolls over and is revealed to be STACI, his boss Aiden’s latest girlfriend.
Staci: (smiling seductively, running her fingers across his chest) Don’t you remember, tiger? A giant wolf was chasing me through the park and you somehow chased it off and saved me!
Tom: (looks around) Where are my clothes?
Staci: You were naked when you emerged from the bushes, so I assumed the wolf must have torn them off.
Tom: Oh, yea. (beat) That makes perfect sense.
Meanwhile, Aiden’s close call with the werewolf results in his dad Thaddeus Murphy (Mel Brooks) hiring eccentric and thick-accented werewolf hunter Lupu Barbaneagra (Rowan Atkinson, who takes direct and loving inspiration from Peter Sellers’ Clouseau) to track down the “beast” that attacked his “precious” son and kill it. Barbaneagra promises that “no beast haz ever ezcaped me.”
And back at his apartment, Tom is searching GEnie for “werewolf cures” with some help from his son Devin, who has learned his dad’s secret and thinks that werewolf dad is “really cool”. Tom comes across various strange things, including porn (“Gah, what’s with all these goddam obscene pop-ups?”), before finally seeing a sketchy website for a “Real Cherokee Shaman”. So he heads southwest to Oklahoma with Devin (it’s their “week together” before he moves) to meet this “great and renowned shaman”, where he hopes to find a cure for his new affliction. They encounter various minor adventures and misunderstandings along the way where his “wolf side” causes trouble, much to his son’s amusement (“Wow, dad, wolf-you rocks!”). They even share some father-son bonding time, such as when they awkwardly sing “Werewolves of London” together in a seedy Karaoke bar.
Meanwhile, Lupu is right behind, following his “smell”, finding the aftermaths of all of Tom’s hijinks, and increasingly determined to “find and destroy ze vulf.” Lupu, a living avatar for insecure toxic masculinity, is rude and verbally abusive to all he meets, particularly the women.
“Take vunderlekh, mer narish vays mentshn…” (Image source Scroll.in)
The journey eventually leads Tom and his son to “Dr. Timothy Wolfpaw” (Wes Studi) and his diminutive assistant “Jon Deep River” (Deep Roy), two scam artists taking advantage of tourists, new age yuppies, and other “gullible white people”. Their “Cherokee heritage” is rather questionable. In a reference to Blazing Saddles, Jon Deep River speaks primarily in Yiddish (Mel Brooks reportedly personally tutored Deep Roy on pronunciation and inflection and how best to play “a fed-up Jew”).
Tom: What is this crap? This dreamcatcher says “Made in China!” And Cherokee don’t live in teepees! That’s Plains Indians! Are you even a proper Indian?
Timothy Wolfpaw: (insulted) Of course, I am a “proper Indian!” I was born in Mumbai! (puts palms together) Namaste! Jon Deep River is, on the other hand, full blooded Lakota.
Jon Deep River: Oy vey, bruder, vos iz mit dem Goyim? Meshuggeneh, I tell you.
“We had very strict casting standards,” Brooks later told James Lipton, “‘Only an Indian can play an Indian…and vice versa.’”
Despite expressing his reservations (with a sly lean towards the associated other meaning of the word with regards to Native Americans), Tom decides to hire these two frauds, who attempt to develop a cure using their “deep understanding of the herbs of Mother Earth” and secret internet searches behind his back (“Quick, see what you can find on Netscape!”) while they send Tom through a series of ludicrous and often humiliating “ceremonial spirit journeys” like meditations in the prairie to sweat lodges and other stereotypical things “white people seem to expect”. Timothy Wolfpaw will translate for Jon Deep River’s long (Yiddish) speeches, always focusing on some seemingly deep and philosophical (but in reality, nonsensical) spiritual lesson. Yiddish speakers, meanwhile, are awarded with an inside joke as Jon’s speeches are totally unrelated to the supposed translation, and usually obscene and insulting.
Jon: Azoy ikh zogn tsu dem mentsh, ir viln respekt? Bakumen avek deyn tokhes, aun makhn a Mentsh fun zikh! Vos ken er dervartn, mir veln khvalye etlekhe brenen sage aun er iz vider a Mentsh? Feh! What a putz!
Timothy: Jon Deep River says that if you look deep inside of yourself and make peace with the Great Spirit, then you will receive great spiritual blessings and take control over your form.
Tom: (beat) That’s either deeply profound or complete bullshit. Possibly both.
Timothy: (opening a can of diet soda) Mysterious are the ways of the Great Spirit.
They reportedly had to reshoot the “Mysterious are the ways…” scene several times because the cast kept “corpsing”, or cracking up laughing during takes. “I spend hours working to get the Yiddish exactly right,” said Deep Roy to the camera in one outtake, “and these schmucks can’t stop corsping and ruining the verkakte takes!”
While the majority of the treatments are bogus (Devin even hilariously consumes something that gives him the runs thinking that it’s peyote) Tom does find that the meditations and “time alone in the quiet” is helping him to better control his angry emotions. However, he is shaken at a radio report of a wolf killing a young woman in a small town they spent the night in on the way to the ersatz shamans.
Finally, he is directed by the ersatz shamans to see “a wise woman who may be able to help”. Tom and Devin follow a map (clearly printed out from a website) on a spectacular epic trip to New Mexico through the desert past towering rock formations, Pueblos, and ancient rock art and finally to a crappy trailer in the middle of the desert. The door opens to reveal an ancient and wizened Native American woman in traditional clothing. “We’re here to see the great wise woman,” says Tom. The old woman turns her head and calls out “hey, Wise One! Customers!” and steps back. Up walks a teenaged girl, Amanda Redrock (Michelle Thrush), wearing cutoff shorts and a Snoop Dog T-shirt and listening to Hip Hop on a Discman.
Amanda: (takes one look at TOM) Let me guess, werewolf?
Tom: You’re the Wise Woman?
Amanda: (rolls eyes) No, I’m Executive Assistant to the Tooth Fairy. Do you want to stay a wolf or not?
Tom: (beat) Lead on, Wise One.
Devin: (smiling flirtatiously at AMANDA) Well, if nothing else she’s certainly a Wise Ass!
Amanda gives Tom an elixir, telling him to take it on or around the night of the full moon and he’ll be cured. They leave. By this point Lupu has tracked them to the desert and is actively watching their car through binoculars. When they reach a sketchy roadside motel for the night, Lupu takes a room next to theirs. Lupu takes a moment to load a pistol with silver bullets.
That night, sitting in some crappy lawn chairs watching the almost-full moon and with Devin set to head to California with his mother when they get back, Tom and his son share a touching moment. Devin asks him why he can’t just stay a wolf and suggests that if he doesn’t want the power, then perhaps he could make Devin into a wolf (“Come on, dad! Just bite me, ok?” “A teenaged werewolf?! Nobody wants to see that!”), but Tom confesses the dark truth he’d been avoiding the whole time, that as a wolf you “lose control of your humanity and do terrible things,” confessing, “In my savagery I killed two women.”
This shocking moment is interrupted by Lupu, emerging from the shadows, holding the pistol. “To ze contrary, Mr. Dick, it vas I who killed zem, and knowingly! You zee, I vas the one zat bit you in Romania, and zen tracked you here. And vonce I kill you, all vill belief zat ze vulf vill be dead and zere vill be nobody looking for me!”
As Lupu levels the pistol, Devin charges and tackles Lupu, causing the gun to fall to the ground. Lupu wolfs-out and lunges after Devin, but Tom instinctually wolfs out himself and attacks Lupu. Devin grabs the gun, but can’t get a clear shot (“Shit, I thought this only happened in movies! Can one of you step back for a moment?!”).
Starts out like this, but soon devolves into slapstick (Image source Werewolf News)
The two werewolves savagely fight, with the more experienced Lupu clearly having the upper hand, and soon Tom is giving in to the savagery and about to lose his humanity entirely when Devin tells him to “remember the meditations, dad! You control the wolf!” Suddenly, a sense of peace descends over wolf-Tom, and he assumes a meditative yoga-like stance. After a beat (and the obligatory Asian flute music), wolf-Tom then shifts into karate stance starts to beat up Lupu in a series of showy (and silly) martial arts moves, culminating in a Three Stooges like eye gouge and a kick to the balls. Lupu falls over, holding his crotch and literally howling in pain and Devin runs up and pours the elixir down Lupu’s open mouth, causing Lupu to revert to human form.
As police arrive, wolf-Tom disappears into the night and a woman testifies that she saw Lupu go by with a gun in his hand, and Devin claims that Lupu was trying to kill him. “But why is he naked?” asks the cop. “Um,” says Devin, “He’s a pervo?”
Eventually, Devin finds his dad naked in the desert. Tom has come to terms with himself and his own confidence, but most importantly he has found the love and respect of his son. They head back to Amanda’s trailer for another elixir and then return to Chicago, where father and son embrace and say their goodbyes and Tom says he will take the elixir “tonight.”
But Tom actually has other plans…
As DEVIN and his MOTHER drive off, TOM smiles and walks back inside the apartment. He pulls the bottle of elixir from his pocket, looks at it, then puts it on the shelf as he turns to the fourth wall.
Tom: Well, maybe next month!
CUT TO…… AIDEN in a new convertible Stingray, top down, with a different WOMAN, driving through the city. They park at the overlook and AIDEN starts to lean over towards the WOMAN.
Woman: Hey, grabby-hands, like, no?!
Aiden: Come on, babe! Loosen up! I just want a little…
Suddenly the WOMAN screams and runs out the door as a giant WOLF (TOM) jumps up on the hood of the car, denting it. AIDEN screams and WOLF TOM lifts his leg and urinates all over AIDEN and the car interior as Warren Zevon’s “Middle Aged Monsters” plays.
FADE TO CREDITS
An American Werewolf in America slowly took the country by storm, a relentless sleeper hit, becoming Brooks’ most popular film in decades, making a spectacular $92 million against its relatively small $21 million budget and breaking into the top twenty in a year that included several blockbuster effects films, managing to come close to matching the Sam Raimi film it was in part spoofing. Reportedly, Mel Brooks turned down a ton of money for a proposed sequel, leaving it a solo film. “Like with Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles, there was nowhere to go with that story but down!” he told Variety.
Unlike many of his earlier works, and more in keeping with The Producers or the more recent Life Stinks, it for the most part avoided the silly, overtly absurdist, fourth wall breaking parody humor of many of his most famous works, instead relying on physical comedy, funny dialog, parody elements, and the comedic acting chops of its cast, even as much of the humor was indeed over the top and subtly absurd in a “real life is absurd” way.
And the production of An American Werewolf in America is nearly as insane as the film itself. Struggling to find an appropriate name, the film’s working title jumped from “Tom Dick, and Hairy” to “My Dad the Werewolf” to “I Was a Middle-Aged Werewolf” to “Middle Age Bites!” until someone called out “An American Werewolf in America”, which stuck as a working title and wouldn’t let go. “I ended up calling John Landis and just asking him if we could use the name,” said Brooks. “Not only did he say ‘yes,’ but he wanted to co-produce! He’d been struggling to get An American Werewolf in Paris going with Polygram for a few years and was sick to death of it.”
And to make matters stranger, they received a cease-and-desist letter from author Jim Harrison, who claimed that the “middle aged man gains new confidence as a werewolf” plot was lifted from a rejected screenplay that he wrote for Universal[3]! Landis and Brooks, claiming ignorance but just wanting to quietly put it behind them, ended up giving him an “inspired by” credit and a small but undisclosed payment.
Since Landis controlled the IP and distribution rights for the “American Werewolf” series, Hyperion was able to distribute on their own, and since it was a parody/satire neither Universal nor Polygram had any recourse to stop the production, even as the latter openly feared that the film would sabotage the Paris film. Polygram finally just dropped out, leading Landis to take the Paris sequel film to Hyperion! Doubly ironic, this led to the project getting shelved again until the late 1990s.
Landis also brought Elmer Bernstein on board to reimagine his earlier American Werewolf in London score for the film. They also sprinkled in several classic rock needle drops in keeping with the midlife crisis aspect, with Warren Zevon in particular recruited not just to license his hits “Werewolves of London”, “Excitable Boy”, and “Lawyers, Guns, and Money”, but to write the original (and Golden Globe nominated) song “Middle Aged Monsters”.
Being a Fantasia production, naturally the Disney Creatureworks would take the lead on effects. While some CG was used, the majority of the effects were the practical creature effects that the I-Works had mastered, in particular the combination of prosthetics and animatronics that they had pioneered. Former He Man turned “guy behind the effects” Brian Thompson played Tom Dick as a werewolf, with Karen Prell providing the waldo-work (in a side-note, the animatronic suit would make a cameo in Stephen Chiodo’s Hawaiian Vamps in one of the most bizarre non-sequitur scenes we can recall—the infamous “Damn howlies” scene). Though they originally considered making an R-rated film full of gore on par with its influences, they ultimately pursued the T rating, though pushed the level of blood effects as far as possible in a deliberately ludicrous and deconstructive way[4].
Looking back on it, An American Werewolf in America still holds up as one of Brooks’ best, even as some of the humor betrays its 1990s origins. The jokes still land and the humor, though politically incorrect, is, in typical Brooks fashion, having a laugh at the expense of the oppressors rather that the oppressed, so likely to only offend the most thin-skinned and least self-aware. Christopher Lloyd and Seth Green have an outstanding screen chemistry as a father-son duo, Wes Studi and Deep Roy were clearly enjoying slaughtering ethnic stereotypes and audience expectations as the ersatz shamans of dubious ethnic origin, and Rowan Atkinson was clearly having a ball as the werewolf hunter who was, in fact, a werewolf.
All in all, we love it here at Swords and Spaceships. It’s a masterful spoof, a good self-empowerment narrative, a brilliant situation- and character-driven comedy, a heartwarming family togetherness tale, and proof that Mel Brooks still had it as a producer and director.
It’s also a pretty damned kick-ass werewolf flick!
[1] More on this in a future post.
[2] Hat tip to @El Pip, @WillWrambles, @TheFaultsofAlts, and @GrahamB for this wild idea! In our timeline Brooks produced the underperforming spoof Dracula: Dead and Loving It starring Leslie Nielsen.
[3] Became our timeline’s Wolf (1994) starring Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer, an underappreciated but far from spectacular film. In this timeline Raimi went with his own screenplay.
[4] On par with the staking scene from Dracula: Dead and Loving It (“Location, location location!”).
Hmmm🤔
With Dafoe's Batman, Downey's Superman, and now a Zeta-Jones Wonder Woman, we've got a hell of a trinity on our hands!Chapter 8: Something Approaching the Big Time (Cont’d)
Excerpt from All You Need is a Chin: Confessions of a B-Movie Actor by Bruce Campbell
So my role as Alex Evell on Superman 2 got me some positive attention, but mixed reviews. Siskel thought that I was hamming it up too much. Well, guess what, Gene? I was hamming it up! Joel specifically asked me to ham it up! It was a hammy role in a campy movie!
Whatever. Criticism goes with the job. You let it roll off of your back.
Still, though, I had a major supporting credit on a blockbuster film, and my own growing fandom (you lovely nerds!), so Paramount was happy to hire me to play US soldier and semi-reformed thief Jimmy “Fingers” Lucrezia in the Indiana Jones Odyssey miniseries in ’95 and, more critically, Universal didn’t push back when Sam cast me as the antagonist of Wolfman, Tucker Hightower, the greedy Chicago corporate guy who buys out Jack Nicholson’s leather goods factory in New Orleans and sets the plot in motion.
Not really this, but has shades of it
And yea, I got to work closely with Jack Nicholson, who played the protagonist Louis “Lou” Garreaux. I just wish I’d gotten a fraction of what they paid him, which amounted to the gross domestic product of several small nations.
And when I say that I “worked with Jack” I mean that we crossed paths three times when we shot scenes together and he spent the rest of his time in his trailer. He was a consummate professional on the set and, like a lot of those old Method guys, fully committed to the role the second the cameras rolled, but he was separate. He was the Big Star that the rest of us would orbit. Glen Close and John Goodman (who essentially cameoed as his prodigal siblings) could stand toe to toe with him, but I was eclipsed, which worked well on film when my cocky egoism smacks straight into a solid wall of Jack.
Still, he took the time to give me some simple advice: “Bruce, I hate giving advice because people never take it.” [1]
Um, great, thanks. I’ll take that one to heart.
Well, I did at least get to watch the maestro at work and witness that whole “Method” thing in action. Jack dragged Ted and Sam into his trailer to flesh out his character in detail. He’d be the oldest of three kids born to the founder of the family leather goods company, but he was also a rebellious and idealistic hippie in his youth who headed off to Haight/Ashbury and Woodstock and anti-war protests and all that. He took over as CEO from his dad mostly because neither of his lazy, entitled siblings showed much interest in it and because, in his idealism, he wanted to turn the factory into some great and equitable place for all of the employees. But reality struck back and now he’s jaded by his inability to completely balance the needs of the company in the era of outsourcing with his dreams of some sort of equitable worker collective, particularly since his brother and sister each own a third of the company and can outvote him. This frustration leads to anger and resentment as he feels impotent and struggles with feeling like a sell-out.
And with the combination of the hippie past and New Orleans setting, naturally Sam slipped in a couple of Easy Rider references, like having a recreation of the iconic football helmet on a shelf in the background and having Jack riding an old Harley to work[2].
And working on Wolfman was a blast. Barry Sonnenfeld produced and gave Sam all the space he needed. Sam and Ivan wrote the screenplay, setting the film in New Orleans because Sam liked the “spooky vibe” of all the Spanish Moss and cobbled streets. It also meant lots of location shoots, giving us the chance to abuse ourselves on Sazaracs, Bananas Foster at Brenan’s, and endless plates of fiery Cajun-Creole food and crawdads. Or bum it on Bourbon Street for Marti Gras, since naturally we had to get some footage of all that for the film.
Yea, acting’s a tough life.
The plot involved Jack’s Lou Garreaux being, as I mentioned, one of three siblings to inherit the family company, which makes purses and jackets and belts and the like out of leather and employs hundreds of local Americans. And while Lou is, despite being a bit of a jaded grump, a fair and honest boss trying to do what’s right by his employees, his brother and sister are entitled little you-know-whats who sell out their one-third shares to me, or, well, Tucker, the slimy head of Tucker Holdings, LLC. Lou is holding out on selling me his share of the company and introduces me to his workers and tries to build a case for keeping him in charge, but I warn him that if he doesn’t sell his share to me that I’ll move the whole shop to Mexico and put all of the employees on the street.
He relents and sells me his share. I move the shop to Mexico anyway. “Ya’ should’ve gotten it in writing, Lou!”
Yea, I was a real jerk, wasn’t I?
Lou is well off, but spends a lot of his fortune trying to pay his old employees’ rent and expenses while they look for new jobs, not that there are many good jobs to have, and he is forced to confront his own sense of entitlement to his inherited wealth and confronted with his own patronizing belief that he’s somehow supposed to be the savior here, particularly after one former employee flat out calls him out on it (“Save yourself, Lou, your money ain’t wanted here!”).
Eventually, naturally, he’s bitten by the Big Bad Wolf of Symbolism and…well, you know what happens! It’s right there in the title.
(Image source Den of Geek)
Lou, falling back on his old rebellious impulses and determined to be the Great Savior whether his help is wanted or not, uses his wolf strength to go on a Robinhood-like revenge quest against Tucker, who has reduced the factory to a simple distribution center for foreign sweatshop-made goods. The quality of the goods is for crap now as Tucker cuts every corner in the empty pursuit of wealth. So, Lou attacks my trucks and at one point kills a driver. Lou then breaks into the old factory, tears open the safe, and steals all the money, anonymously giving it to all of the former workers who lost their jobs.
Now, before you think that this is a happy little Robin Hood story with a happy little ending, rather than help his former workers, he gets them into trouble since, you know, suddenly they’re all flush with cash that was traced, naturally, to the safe and they were forced to give it all back, some now further in debt after buying things that they couldn’t return. Worse yet, his line foreman, “Tiny”, a former Saints lineman played by Michael Clarke Duncan, is the one the police blame for the attacks, specifically because he’s the only one with motive and opportunity that they figure is strong enough and big enough to fit the description of the witnesses. They assume that he was wearing a mask. Sam and Ted decided to tackle police profiling straight on, and soon Tiny is getting ramrodded by a self-serving DA with political aspirations into a false confession for Lou’s killings.
And damn, Mike was just…he stole the whole damn picture with that one scene. Sorry, Jack.
Anyway, Lou, facing up to the fact that he’s the one who caused this mess, driven by his ego rather than any real sense of justice, sets up a final confrontation that ultimately costs him his life and proves Tiny’s innocence, but not before killing me in the most gruesome and painful manner that the MPAA allowed Sam to get away with.
Yea, sorry, Universal. No sequels. At least not with Jack or Tucker.
Sam made it a tragic story, a dark narrative of idealism clashing with the harsh realities of life. It was all a metaphor for justice and righteousness and egoism and rage and perceptions. A tale of a once-idealistic hippie coming to terms with the modern world and his own wealth and privilege. The story of the Boomer Generation entering middle age. The story of a good man driven to evil, the whole lycanthropy thing really just symbolic of the repressed anger and desperation of a man from a specific time and place trying to come to terms with the life he’d lived.
It was also a gruesome creature feature with some wicked-cool animatronics by the Chiodos and some awesome practical effects as Wolfman Jack rips the side off of a truck with his bare claws. They also did a cool mix of practical makeup and CG for the creepy transformation sequences.
Wolfman Animatronic (Image source Pinterest)
So Wolfman, riding on the coattails of Dracula and Frankenstein, made bank, breaking $170 million against an $80 million budget driven largely by cast payroll (just not mine!). The effects were praised, Nicholson’s performance was praised, Duncan's performance was particularly praised, and, hey, I even got some decent reviews for my performance, not that you’d notice with Jack on the screen.
Would this be the big break? In the words of hack TV writers everywhere, stay tuned.
Well, for every gain there’s a loss, and in Sam’s case that loss was Wonder Woman and his ultimate plans for the Justice League, which would be born without him, but that’s another story. Sam was divorced from Warner by this point, had dumped ABC after a bad first date, and was still seeing Universal. While still with Warner, he’d set in motion a Wonder Woman movie, grabbing Joss Whedon to write the screenplay.
Sam losing WW even cost me a job, since I was supposed to play Trevor’s co-pilot [SIC] Lt. Gurney.
When Sam left Warner, they at first handed it to Joss, and he was all set to direct and even took over production partnership from Sam with his Mutant Enemy Productions. So far so good, right?
Yea, not so fast. Gloria Steinem found out that the man behind the cartoon version of Wonder Woman, i.e. Joss, was writing, producing, and directing the live action film and she blew a gasket. She’d lambasted his depictions of Diana and the Amazons in the cartoon as “fetishistic” and initiated a campaign to “Toss Joss”.
Well, it worked. Warner, who’d been trying to improve its record with female audiences after losing several top-notch female execs like Mira [Velimirovic], and who’d been trying to ride the “Girl Power” thing by heavily merchandizing Wonder Woman, and who reportedly didn’t care much for his script anyway, bought out his contract and brought in Kathryn Bigelow. Joss was not happy, but that’s how it goes.
Well, Kathryn took it over and made some key modifications to Joss’s script, moving the point of view from Steve Trevor back to Diana, downplaying Steve having to step in to save her from the cruelty of the modern world, and in general making it the story about how Diana finds love and learns about the darkness of the modern world, and yet becomes the instrument of change to improve it.
She also ditched the subtle (and occasionally not-so-subtle) nods to WW’s BDSM past that Joss had slipped in there. Sorry, ghost of Bill Marston!
A little bird told me that the studio was pushing for Sandra Bullock to play Diana, but Kathryn went for Catherine Zeta-Jones. I’m sure the name thing was a coincidence, right? Do K/Cathrerines stick together? Either way, Catherine Z-J is practically an amazon as it were, so hey, I liked the choice and I bet you did too. They brought in Brad Pitt as the love interest Steve Trevor and a then up-and-coming Angelina Jolie as the main villain Eris, even though Sam had essentially created the role for Lucy Lawless, whom he’d met through Lysia of Amazonia, which Ted was producing. Meanwhile, Joss had tried to reframe the role as Ares in order to highlight what he saw as his feminist themes, her literally fighting the patriarchy. Kathryn wanted female empowerment in a different way, though, without making it a battle of the sexes. Heroic Woman vs. Villainous Woman, both empowered in their own way, no man needed to define them.
Better that way? Worse? Everyone’s got an opinion and they all stink.
Well, you saw the movie[3]. Kathryn gave it all her dark and noir touch, contrasting the bright lights, open skies, and Classical values of Themyscira against the dark colors, claustrophobic streets, and selfish modern[4] values of Gateway City. Critics liked the cinematography and audiences loved the stylized action and the fight scenes. Joss was annoyed that they removed his giant mechanical chimera scene, citing the Kaiju craze, but the studio, who as you can guess underestimated you nerds based on the whining of a handful of angry virgins at Comicon, killed it to constrain the budget since they never expected WW to break $100 million.
(Image source DW.com)
And hey, despite their assumptions (or maybe because of them, since you girl nerds came out in large numbers) Wonder Woman did great at the box office ($227 million against a $45 million budget) even though some were predicting a disaster since, you know, boy nerds supposedly won’t watch female-led superhero films. I mean, young men are practically famous about not wanting to watch beautiful women in revealing costumes kick ass, right?
Anyway, I’d bet it would have done even better if they hadn’t run it against Spiderman 3 that summer, which was ultimately directed by Joss, but that’s another story.
And as for Sam, well, Universal soon announced that it was merging with ABC, and that Sam’s nemesis Jeffrey Katzenberg would be taking over the combined studios. Needless to say, Sam dropped out of the two-picture deal in the works with them, actually walking off the set of The Curse when the announcement was made.
Finally, Sam said to me, “I guess it’s time to call the Ex.”
[1] Adapted from a quote from our timeline.
[2] Captain America Motorcycle Helmet tip to Mrs. Khan for the “former hippie turned reluctant CEO” theme and Easy Rider references. The Easy Rider references will in turn lead, naturally, to fan theories that Lou is actually George Hanson, who somehow survived his beating, but this will be Jossed by Sam and Ted.
[3] Put quickly: Diana lives on the isolated Mediterranean island of Themyscira when USAF Captain Steve Trevor’s F-14 suffers mechanical trouble and he and his RIO have to eject. They wash up on Themyscira where Hippolyta wants to have them executed as “barbarian invaders”, but Diana, smitten with Trevor and overtaken by her repressed sense of compassion, fights for their lives and ends up winning the duel, but is banished for her disobedience and emotional “weakness”. She joins Trevor in Gateway City where she learns of the hard realities of the modern world in a big fish-out-of-water narrative, and must learn to lean on her compassion over her overt Amazonian sense of belligerent superiority. She also learns about a plot by Eris, who like Ares is disappointed that the prospects for peace are growing with the end of the Cold War, to sew discord and crime in a bid to turn the people of the world against each other. WW is at first defeated due to her arrogant assumption of her superiority and inability to trust the word of the “barbarians” of Gateway City, but in time learns to trust and value and sympathize with them. In an antithesis of Eris, she helps organize the people of the city to oppose Eris’ machinations, leading to the final defeat of Eris and the teasing of a future appearance by Ares in a sequel. Diana becomes Wonder Woman and stays to protect the people of her new home. Some, particularly second-wave feminists, will complain that Diana’s arc is to learn traditionally feminine values (compassion and empathy) and assume it’s a regressive view of femininity, but Bigelow maintains that it’s about the triumph and value of the feminine and the right of women to define themselves, a very third-wave feminist approach.
[4] Per the Joss screenplay and with Warner hoping to save money, they kept it set in the modern day rather than make it a period piece.
Also, I thought y'all might appreciate this bit of news:
Bruce Campbell Writing DC Horror Comic Book ‘Sgt. Rock Vs. The Army of the Dead’!
Bruce Campbell will make his mark on the DC Universe with the upcoming DC Horror comic book series Sgt. Rock Vs. The Army of the Dead, which brings back a classic DC character. Created by writer Robert Kanigher and artist Joe Kubert, Sgt. Rock first appeared in June, 1959, in DC’s anthology...
bloody-disgusting.com
Ui a David Fincher Mummy movie? Cool
Also can't wait to learn more about Creature.
I see that the Tales tv show is still going strong?!
Sneaky Joss, sneaky.
I wonder if he made it an empowering tale about fighting the patriarchy or whatever or if it's more of a fetishising "big strong women beating up dudes" kinda story.
Love the casting here!
Also Seth Green as the son? Brilliant even if I expect that there are going to be endless Spider-Man jokes. Like Spideys dad got bitten by a non radioactive wolf!
The Trabant alone gives so many joke opportunities, especially for Americans who don't know that this is an actual real car.
Oh what a dark turn.
Great choice to use Atkinson, he is probably the only one, besides Seller if course, who could actually do a good Clouseau (no offense to Steve Martin).
And now it's a roundtrip movie!
Reminds me of the Goofy movie honestly, just that it's for the benefit of the dad and not the son.
Funny and kinda accurate since I've I remember correctly many "shamans" back in the day where actually Jewish or Italian like the infamous cultural adviser on Star Trek Voyager Jacob Lighfoot.
Also the Yiddish is just great, I applaud Deep Roy for putting so much maloche in his performance.
Classic bait and switch!
A suspect that a Diskman is TTLs successor to the Walkman but with CDs?
No Devin that's not a good thing to say!
Joss did you sneak that in?
What a dark and completely out of left field reveal! Wonder if one of the characters calls that out?
I expect at least a passing reference to Karate kid!
Great Mel still got it! Hope we see more spoofs from him.
Great howling chapter @Geekhis Khan
I can see both sides of this. Honestly, what concerns me more is the idea that Amazonian values are Wrong, and Diana has to go to Man's World to learn better, regardless of what those values are. Although I suppose that the more right her Amazon upbringing is, the harder (but not impossible) it is for her to have any kind of character arc.
The wise woman? The wise woman??
Two things must ye know about the wise woman!
(Sorry, but with Atkinson in the cast I couldn't resist.)
Seriously, both these films sound pretty great.
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