Well, this one deserves some in depth commentary, but let me say overall a very interesting and action packed update, CM!
Update #13 -- American superheroes and "gunsploitation", and British science fiction.
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America
Although the trend began in the late 1970s with Superman and Superman II, the superhero movie could be regarded as a defining film genre of the 1980s. The decade saw the release of a multitude of adaptations from comic books: from the biggest-scale franchises such as Superman, Batman, Captain America and Spider-Man, through to cheaper efforts such as The Flash, Daredevil and Green Arrow. (A glaring exception was of course Wonder Woman, whose film adaptation would be continually delayed throughout the decade due to a combination of bureaucratic misfortune and badly-disguised misogyny.)
Oh come on! Why did you delay Wonder Woman? Was it to get rid of Lynda Carter? Curse you, curse you I say!
One can see the influence of the superhero movie bleed into other genre films of the era, even in established series. For example, the Jedi and the Sith in The Star Wars are effectively superheroes and supervillains within a science-fantasy setting. And in Rocky IV, the final movie of the Rocky series, protagonist Rocky Balboa is obviously depicted like a superhero facing off against the blatantly supervillainous Ivan Drago.
Sounds like interpretation change due to different context rather than an actual change to the films in question.
In addition to adaptations, film studios began making their own original superhero stories – notable examples being Shadow Hawk and Agent Zero. Most of these original superheroes were targeted towards an older crowd with R-rated films, while adaptations were more likely to be PG or PG-13. Although the characters were original their origins and powers generally fit the mould of either Captain America or Batman, either being genetic supermen or merely highly equipped with technology. As a rule, their enemies would be either criminals, terrorists or (occasionally) communists.
Funny, somehow I would have thought the opposite would have occured with more 'adultish' versions of classics to both interest an older viewer as well as tapping into their nostaglia, and then a bunch of lower budget, 'kid-friendly' superhero knockoffs.
These films’ popularity was often at the expense of the sub-genre commonly known at the time as the “shoot-’em-up”, although it has come to be known in retrospect as “gunsploitation”. ....
Interesting thought and I like the concept of gunsploitation films as a subgenre - not sure that superhero faire would suck so much of the life out of the action genre, but that is certainly an unknowable question and in your timeline it is as valid a response to superhero movies as any.
The public’s attitude to gunsploitation is best demonstrated by the performance of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s follow-up to The Terminator: the gunsploitation flick Commando (which was at least partly comedic but was primarily intended as an action film). The film was released in summer 1985 – between Spider-Man (starring Matthew Broderick as Peter Parker) being an amazing smash-hit success,
Good that there is a Terminator. Like Broderick as Peter Parker.
and Shadow Hawk drawing the more mature audience who might consider Spider-Man too tame, Commando did not receive an especially large audience share – it grossed $23 million and was considered a step down for Schwarzenegger after Conan the Barbarian and The Terminator.
Meh - OTL Commando certainly was no great film....
Still, Commando had earned back just over twice its budget, which made it respectably successful and was sufficient to earn it a sequel. Die Hard: Commando II (1988) is best known for being the first film appearance of actor Alan Rickman as the Russian terrorist leader Anton Grechko, who was widely considered to be the best part of a film that generally did not distinguish itself.
Certainly plausible from the production history but I shall miss terribly OTL Die Hard - I do not believe that this is an improvement.
BTW, this does raise some interesting questions as to the direction of Bruce Willis' career.
Schwarzenegger himself acted in several other gunsploitation films through the late 1980s, and would also go on to play several more high-profile villain roles, but would not achieve mainstream success playing a hero again until Skynet: The Terminator Part II (1991) – after that, he was able to permanently transition to heroic roles
Ooh, you need to give more details of this alternate Terminator sequel!!
(helped by the fact that by that time he was able to speak with a flawless American accent in films).
Did he do better in some way than OTL? While he certainly has suppressed his accent, I would hardly call his current one OTL 'flawless American'.
Schwarzenegger was one of the few gunsploitation stars who was able to break through to the mainstream – others such as Chuck Norris and Steven Seagal remained thoroughly ghettoized within the sub-genre and are generally unknown to all but enthusiasts.
No, I want the first five Seagal films! Above the Law, Hard to Kill, Marked for Death, Out for Justice, and Under Siege. After that, he got kinda weird and I'm okay. Especially Above the Law - it really set a new mark!
Sylvester Stallone, meanwhile, took an entirely different approach to his career than Schwarzenegger – throughout the 1980s he was associated with films that flirted with gunsploitation but were slightly too intelligent to belong to the genre. A good example was First Blood (1982), in which he starred as killing-machine Vietnam veteran John Rambo: the film delved into Rambo’s tortured psyche, only featured him actually killing one person (and that accidentally, in self-defence) and finally ended with Rambo’s ignoble death at the hands of his former commanding officer.
Darn, I really loved Rambo II!
Another such example was Eagle’s Fury (1986), which Stallone wrote and directed but did not act in himself.
Eagle’s Fury starred Harrison Ford as Colonel Leo Hendricks, commander in charge of a Delta Forces unit, and Jason Robards as the President of the United States – the film was centred around a mission (“Operation Eagle’s Fury”) to rescue American civilians being held hostage by a North African nation which had recently undergone a communist revolution. Despite the changes in details, the story was a thinly-veiled “how-it-should-have-happened” for the Iran hostage crisis of 1979-81, and Robards’ character – though not defined politically beyond a certain hawkishness – a clear analogue of President Ronald Reagan. However, the film itself was superbly well-written and shot, and actually took the time to portray its protagonists as real people without resorting to cheap manipulation; Harrison Ford, a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, stated that he accepted the role of Hendricks out of high regard for the screenplay itself regardless of its political message. Eagle’s Fury would later come to be regarded as the signature right-wing movie of the decade, and would be celebrated by American conservatives (particularly the interventionist warhawk “neoconservative” faction).
The connection of Eagle’s Fury with the Iran hostage crisis was not lost on the viewing public: the film’s release saw a spike in anti-Iranian sentiment nationwide, the likes of which hadn’t been seen since the crisis itself. Stallone himself had to make a public statement decrying all prejudice or violence against the Iranian-American community.
Could do without the controversy bit, but otherwise this sounds like a great movie!
The United Kingdom
While Spider-Man and Shadow Hawk were busy blowing Commando out of the water, across the Atlantic Ocean a film was being released that had been anticipated for some time. After two radio series, four books and one six-episode television show, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was being adapted to film as well.
Rather than simply retelling the story of the Earth being destroyed and of the planet Magrathea yet again, the film was instead based on plans for a second series of the TV show, which would have been adapted from the third book Life, the Universe and Everything. This meant that the film appeared to follow on from the TV show in some ways: it started on prehistoric Earth, where the show had ended; its backstory more or less matched the events of the show; it kept the same designs for the Guide, Marvin and the Heart of Gold; and Peter Jones, Simon Jones, Mark Wing-Davey, Stephen Moore and Richard Vernon all reprised their roles.
Well, no matter how kitchy some of it was, I still loved the television mini-series a lot lot more than the OTL movie, so linking them is good, especially in casting and style (could be cleaned up and more sophisticated, but clear where the antecedents came from).
There were also significant differences, such as the recasting (yet again) of Ford Prefect and Trillian – David Dixon was judged as too placid and Sandra Dickinson too ditzy to be suitable for the film;
I heartily disagree - those two were terrific in their roles!
they were replaced in the roles by Rik Mayall and Miranda Richardson respectively.
On the other hand, these are great replacements and hard to argue with!
The design of Zaphod in the film also changed: the utter failure of the second animatronic head from the TV show resulted in its replacement in the film by a second animatronic face, on the back of Zaphod’s head. (At Wing-Davey’s insistence, Zaphod’s hair was also changed from red to surfer blond.)
I don't know about these changes - I liked the obviously fake second head!
In the UK, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1985) did respectable business. In the all-important American market, its release was delayed to November and then passed by mostly unnoticed. A sequel was not forthcoming.
I think it is a real problem for the American audiences especially to start where the television miniseries ended. I would have remade Hitchhikers for the big screen being true to the miniseries, then made this as a sequel (and with little time in between releases, no more than a year - otherwise you will lose interest I fear).
1985 also saw the television show Doctor Who air its 23rd season, again with Colin Baker as the Doctor. It was clear from the previous year that Nicola Bryant’s character Peri Brown wasn’t working: her relationship with the Doctor as his Companion was too antagonistic, to the point where they didn’t seem to like each other at all, and their conflicts always seemed to end in the Doctor’s favour. Additionally, the strategy to attract more viewers through Peri’s sex appeal didn’t appear to be working. At the end of the second serial, Peri was killed off under tragic circumstances; the next serial introduced the Doctor’s new companion Claudia, played by Angela Bruce. Claudia was a sharp contrast to Peri, and not only due to being about ten years older and the first non-white companion in the history of the show: she seemed to actually enjoy travelling in the Tardis, unlike Peri, and was able to deflate the Doctor’s ego through being dismissive of his bluster, meaning the two were better matched in strength of personality. The character would remain on the show for the rest of Colin Baker’s tenure as the Doctor, finally leaving the show in Sylvester McCoy’s first full serial as the Seventh Doctor (the final serial of the 25th season, in 1987) to be replaced by new character Ace, played by Sophie Aldred.
All the above fine by me. Peri was annoying in so many ways - it's a shame because I think the actress under different direction could have worked. However, Angela Bruce definitely has in OTL the street cred to pull off being a 1980s companion. Good on her and good on you!
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Notes: I wrote this earlier than I thought I would. That's a sign that I've been seriously procrastinating during this exam revision period and I need to study more. (Though in fairness to myself, I've had most of this planned for a long time.)
Then after you have commented on my brilliant comments, get back to studying!
"Shadow Hawk" and "Agent Zero" are actually comic-book character names in OTL, but since they were invented in the 1990s I feel comfortable about stealing them here. Seriously, it's really fucking hard to come up with a completely original superhero name. Just try it. I dare you.
Desolation - some mention of someone by this name on Marvel Earth 616, sorry.
Pyrion - not finding anything come up when searched.
The Maldovian - not in a comic (but don't ask about his backstory).
Inquest - not finding any comic character when searched.
The Nameless - okay this one got a hit but it is a group, not an individual. The Nameless One is a god or demon in the comic realm.
Roadmaster - seems no precedent.
So yeah, you have to go vague because the obvious ones have been used, but it is possible - on the other hand, I think there is nothing wrong with you recycling ones you like, especially if they aren't going to get used due to changes in the timeline otherwise.
What in TTL is called "gunsploitation" would in OTL simply be called "action" -- but the difference is that the tropes of OTL's '80s action films never came to dominate the entire genre, meaning that the "shoot-'em-up" remains a bit of a separate subgenre within the larger whole.
Confession time: I've never seen Commando either.
Not missing much.
Matthew Broderick seemed like the obvious choice for 1980s Peter Parker. A welcome side effect (for me) is that I've just severely altered Ferris Bueller's Day Off, or possibly butterflied it away completely. Man, I hate that movie.
Bad CM! Bad, bad!!! I LOVE Ferris Bueller's Day Off - it is like one of the all time classics from my perspective. I don't know what childhood tragedy made you twisted like this, but get help, man, please!
Die Hard was almost a sequel to Commando in OTL as well, but got retooled into a standalone story. In TTL, Die Hard: Commando II is more like its original conception -- less heist film, more terrorism thriller. Lower budget too.
A definite loss for this timeline.
Rambo still dies at the end of First Blood because there's less potential for a sequel, given that superheroes are on the way up and gunsploitation is on the way down -- thus they keep the original ending. There are no Rambo sequels.
Eagle's Fury basically takes the cultural place of Red Dawn, helped by the fact that it's actually a much better movie than Red Dawn is.
Don't know about that - Red Dawn was a cultural happening onto itself - Eagle's Fury is military genre, whereas Red Dawn is hard core survivalist, dude.
There were plans to make a second series of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy based on Life, the Universe and Everything in OTL as well, but they were discontinued.
Which was a damned shame!
It's not clear from the update itself, but the major difference regarding Doctor Who is that Michael Grade never becomes Controller of BBC1,
Yeah, that's probably a good thing.
and thus doesn't put the show on an 18-month hiatus out of spite.
Yeah!
I've butterflied away the character of Mel (hurrah!),
I'm not a Mel hater - but your alternate companion sounds much preferable, so if I have to choose, I'll go with yours.
but I'm keeping Ace and I regret nothing. I'm also keeping Sylvester McCoy because he's awesome, but he comes into the show a little later (near the end of the penultimate serial in 1987, rather than in the first serial) due to Colin Baker retiring from the role rather than being fired. But as luck would have it, this means that Sylvester McCoy now gets to skip over his silly season and get straight to the good stuff.
You go, ColeMercury! I can forgive you your strange Bueller hatred for this!!
The next update will be regarding Highlander.
Oh, please make things better, please please please!