(1980s)

A Little Bit of Curry: The Greatest Adventure (1985)

So how did Tim Curry, camp icon and transgressive titan of pop culture get his start in animated voicework? Where did he begin? Voicing a drag queen serial killer in some seedy Ralph Bakshi picture?

No, he got his break in straight-to-video Christian media.

Don’t try to put him in your little boxes.

The Greatest Adventure: Stories from the Bible was a series animated by Hanna Barbera which had three children from the modern day travelling back in time and meeting various figures from the Bible. And holy shit, this thing had a STACKED cast! Rob Paulsen, Alan Oppenheimer, Ed Asner, Jeffrey Tambor, Helen Hunt, Helen Slater…TONY JAY AS CAIPHAS?!

EDWARD FUCKING JAMES FUCKING OLMOS AS PHAROAH!?

YES! AND IT IS AS PERFECT AS IT SOUNDS!

But, anyway, you knew as soon as I said it who Curry ended up playing. Come on. You knew.

“Plaaaaay me the best soooooong in the world. Or I’ll eat your souls.”

It’s often been said that Morgan Freeman is the Voice of God. As in, he’s just how people naturally assume God sounds like. I would like to propose Tim Curry as the Voice of Satan. There’s not really that much I can say about his performance as the serpent, suttlest beast in all the field.

I don’t know if I was expecting some sign of inexperience or roughness given this was his first voice role. But, no, he gives exactly the performance you’d expect and it’s pretty much perfect. No notes. I also do like that they gave him limbs. In Genesis, the serpent only became legless as punishment for tempting Adam and Eve which almost every depiction forgets, so kudos.

Apparently, Curry had such a nice time working with Hanna-Barbera that he decided that voicework was definitely his bag. Hallelujah.

Now, all that’s left is to categorise this in one of the four categories of Tim Curry performance.

Evil, Sexy, Evilly Sexy or Funny Accent?: Very much Evilly Sexy.

“Well I hope you don’t expect me to save you, ’cause I don’t do that anymore.”

Superman 3 is probably the most reputationally fluid of all the Reeves-era Superman flicks. One and (to a lesser extent admittedly) Two are uncontested classics of the genre, Supergirl and Quest for Peace were seen as dogs when they were released and are seen as dogs now. But the third outing is where I think consensus breaks down. Some people hate it even more than Superman 4. Mad people, I suspect, gibbering loons who should not be allowed out of the house unsupervised but they are an important and influential constituency in modern affairs and we overlook their views at our peril.

Superman 3’s standing at any given moment really depends on the general public’s taste in superhero media and how tolerant they are feeling towards silliness. For this is, let us be very clear, a deeply silly film. Richard Lester, now fully in control and having banished the last vestigaes of Richard Donner’s weighty, epic solemnity is ready to give us his thesis statement on what Superman is. And his answer boils down to; “Superman is very silly”.

So, Lester decides that Superman should be funny. And, if you’re the Salkinds that doesn’t just mean getting a comic actor to join the cast. That means getting THE BIGGEST STAND UP COMIC IN AMERICA *PUFF CIGARS*.

Now, the Salkinds’ “bigger equals better” approach served them quite well in the past but here I think it came a serious cropper. Richard Pryor is, and always will be, on the Rushmore of American comedy legends but (heresy incoming) I don’t think he was a great comedic actor. He certainly isn’t in this movie, most of his schtick (and oh my Christ is there a lot of it) comes across really laboured and kinda leaden. There’s a couple of problems here. Firstly, Pryor isn’t performing his own material. He’s an actor performing someone else’s script. Second, I think the Salkinds expected Pryor to do what Bill Murray did in Ghostbusters and just do his own thing while treating the script with a kindly disregard. But here’s the thing: Richard Pryor loved Superman and treated the material with a respect that is admirable but not particularly funny. To be sure, there are parts here that I find humorous but that’s more a result of waging a war of attrition. Pryor gets a whopping half an hour of screentime, compared to around forty minutes for Superman. He is very much the deuteragonist. In fact, the very first shot of the movie is his face.

In my review of Superman I mentioned how I consider it to be the ultimate “eighties” movie but I think this might have it beat. Superman 3 opens with a black man applying for unemployment benefit and being denied because he kept getting fired for stealing and being incompetent, only for him to see an ad looking for computer programmers and immediately getting a stable and well paid job because gosh darn it the economy is just that good. That may be the most eighties thing I have ever seen.

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“I see you are practiced in worshipping things that fly. Good.”

Well, it was nice while it lasted.

As mind bogglingly ambitious as Richard Donner’s Superman is, it’s incredible to think that the original vision was even more epic in scope. The idea was that Superman 1 and 2 would be released in quick succession and would constitute one single, massive saga, much like what Quentin Tarantino did with Kill Bill years later. Instead, mid-way through production Donner was fired by the Salkinds and replaced by another Dick, Richard Lester, who famously declared after seeing Donner’s vision for the film that he wasn’t interested in doing that “David Lean thing” (Lean being an English director famous for big, lavish epics).

It’s easy to cast Donner as an artistic savant whose vision was crushed by soulless Hollywood suits and it’s not even like that’s an entirely invalid read. Many people have made fun of the Salkinds, including me, Unshaved Mouse, in literally my last review.

But the truth, of course, is a bit more complicated than that. Donner was a notorious, almost Kubrickian perfectionist and his shoot ran way over time and, oh yeah, was the most expensive film in history at that point. It’s very easy to say that the Salkinds should just have backed off and let Donner cook when it’s not your money he’s cooking. And, to be fair to the Salkinds, they actually had a reputation for being very director friendly as producers go. Not takings sides, probably faults all around. Anyway, the result is we have two versions of Superman 2. The first is the entirely reshot version directed by Richard Lester. The second is the Richard Donner cut, a version assembled by Donner in 2006 using a combination of his own surviving footage, out-takes, screen-tests and some footage cribbed from Lester’s version. Both versions are worth your while, neither is the equal of the first film and both are fascinatingly flawed in different ways.

The plot, at least, is the same in both, at least in the broad-strokes.

The three Phantom Zone Criminals are freed by a nuclear device launched into space by Superman and begin to make their way to Earth. Lex Luthor escapes from prison with the help of Miss Teschmacher and they schlep all the way to the North Pole where they discover the Fortress of Solitude and learn about Zod. Meanwhile, Lois Lane deduces or is just basically shown that Clark is Superman and confesses her love to him. He consults with a holographic version of his father or (depending on the version) his much cheaper mother and is told that he can be Superman or have fine Earthling booty but not both. He gives up his powers and returns to civilization only to learn that Zod has basically conquered the Earth and is calling him out on national TV like Ultimate Warrior calling out the Hulkster. Superman returns to the Fortress of Solitude, bullshits his way into getting his powers back, flies to Metropolis, gets his ass beat and flies away. Lex Luthor, who has basically ingratiated his way into Zod’s inner circle, tells him where the Fortress of Solitude is and they take Lois hostage and fly over there. Superman fights them and then tricks them into losing their powers like he did whereupon he and Lois either possibly kill them (Lester cut) or DEFINITELY KILL THEM (Donner cut), thus saving the Earth.

But make no mistake, they are VERY different movies.

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Son of the White Mare (1981)

I will probably never watch this movie again.

Not because it is bad.

Because the experience of watching Son of the White Mare again could never top the experience of watching it for the first time.

And you know what’s crazy? This is…drumroll please…my final reader’s request. And the reason I left this one to last was because the requester simply asked me to review “something Eastern European” and I just chose this because it looked interesting. I picked this one almost at random.

And it ended up being…well, we’ll get to that.

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The Fantastic Adventures of Unico (1983)

Back around the time the first eukaryotic organisms were developing on the Earth’s sea floor, I coined the term “Tar and Sugar Movies” to describe the earliest films of the Walt Disney Animated Feature canon. I chose the name in reference to the often jarring tonal shifts between cloying cutsiness and shocking darkness of those films. In retrospect though, I think I got it wrong. The true Golden Age of the Tar and Sugar aesthetic was not the late thirties and forties, but the nineteen eighties.

Here is the typical eighties cartoon experience:

“Golly Gee! This sure is a fun picnic! I just hope that mean ol’ Lord Hexxodrexx doesn’t show up to spoil everything.”

“I HAVE COME TO DEVOUR YOUR FUCKING SOULS!!! GRAAAAAAAA!!!”

And I think, with today’s movie, I may have found the ultimate Tar and Sugar movie. And, as in most things in this life, they do it better in Japan.

I don’t have to introduce Osamu Tezuka by this point, do I? Born in 1920s Osaka, created manga and animé as we know it, the Japanese Walt Disney, one of the most influential animators of all time you know all this. He was also quite possibly one of the most prolific creators in history, writing and drawing well over 700 manga series in his lifetime encompassing virtually any genre you could think of and targeted at every possible age demographic. The basis for today’s movie was the children’s manga Unico, about a cute little unicorn who has magical powers that he uses to bring happiness and joy to everyone he meets.

Well, I’m sure there’s no way that could possibly take a dark turn.

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The Land Before Time (1988)

You know the thing about the dinosaurs? It’s really, really sad when you think about it.

These beautiful animals lived for millions of years and then one day, literally one day, their world turned into a flaming hell and they died horribly. And they never understood why.

I was thinking about that a lot as I sat down to re-watch Don Bluth’s third film, The Land Before Time, and the last one he made before parting company with Stephen Spielberg. On one level, this is the least personal of Bluth’s early, pre-sellout films and the one that he had the least real affection for. Whereas Secret of Nimh and An American Tail were true collaborations, The Land Before Time seems to have been the point where Spielberg (and new producer George Lucas) really took the reigns and Bluth was more just the guy who animated what the execs wanted. Story-wise at least. Whatever you think about him as a film-maker, Bluth had a tendency to stamp his work very strongly and it does still very much feel like one of his films in terms of atmosphere, if not necessarily subject matter.

This feels like it came from Spielberg. Is that just me?

Bluth’s films are famously dark and melancholy and I think that’s why this one works.

More than any other movie, this one captures the essential truth that any story about dinosaurs is a tragedy.

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The Dark Crystal (1982)

The Lord of the Rings really shouldn’t work, should it?

Nine hours of wandering around in a made up fantasy world with tons of different factions, fake languages, dozens upon dozens of characters and a story drawing on thousands of years of fictional history, it should be a series that only the most hardcore nerds would have any interest in. So why is it so popular?

I think it comes down to two things:

Complexity resting on simplicity.
The Ring is not just a Ring.

The story of Lord of the Rings is fiendishly complicated but it all relies on one very small thing.

Frodo must destroy the One Ring. That’s the key to understanding everything that happens in the movie. Every other character’s story and motivations somehow branch off from that one central spine: Frodo must destroy the One Ring, everyone else is either trying to help him or stop him. Huge complexity resting on something very simple.

So what’s all this got to do with The Dark Crystal?

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Return to Oz (1985)

At some point in the early eighties someone in Hollywood (possibly Stephen Spielberg) decided that the children must be made to suffer.

I don’t know what it was, but the eighties were an absolute Golden Age for media ostensibly aimed at children that seemed “aimed” more like you’d “aim” a psychological terror campaign against an enemy army.

And atop any list of eighties kid’s movies guaranteed to traumatise your little angels you’ll find 1985’s Return to Oz a movie that I never saw growing up, presumably because my parents knew that if they tried to take me to it the cinema would never not smell of piss again.

My wife, however, has seen it and has kindly agreed to watch it with me…

‘Till death do us part my ass.

Alright, what is this thing anyway?

1939’s The Wizard of Oz is regarded by many to be the greatest movie Disney ever made, which tears them up inside because they didn’t actually make it. L. Frank Baum’s been dead a long ass time and if you want to make a movie based on his Oz books you just knock yourself out because they’re all in the public domain. But so much of what people associate with the Oz story comes not from the books but from the movie, which is still owned by MGM. Which means you gotta be real careful when making your own movie that you don’t impinge on any of the unique elements of that film like the ruby red slippers or the famous dialogue or Margaret Hamilton’s Wicked Witch of the West or else MGM will send the big lion around to eat your feet.

Of course, Disney would love to make their own direct sequel or remake to the Wizard of Oz but they can’t because a certain company lobbied hard and dirty to ensure that movie copyright in America lasts until roughly the heat death of the universe.

Ah karma. Sweet as mother’s milk.

Anyway, that’s more or less how we got Return to Oz. It’s a sequel based on an amalgamation of two of Baum’s later Oz books that the filthy Oz casuals among you probably didn’t know even existed. And rest assured, if it is shamelessly aping an older film, it’s definitely not Wizard of Oz.

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Heavy Metal (1981)

Heavy Metal began in 1977 as an American translation of Metal Hurlant, a French science fiction fantasy magazine that featured seminal work by such legendary creators as Moebius, Enki Bilal and Jean Claude Forest and had a massive influence on the entire comic book medium because TITS.

Tits tits tits. Melons. Gazongas. Knockers. Hooters. Tatas. Jugs. Boobies. Yayas. Bosoms. Chesticles. Mazumas. Badonkadonks. Big ol’ greasy Baps.

Was there some genuinely thought provoking and visually spectacular sci-fi in its pages? Absolutely! Playboy also published plenty of great articles, what’s your point?

Heavy Metal, the 1981 anthology animated film that adapts many of the magazine’s most iconic stories, has tits. It has many tits. It has big tits and small…actually no, it only has big tits. In the ancient swamp of the pre-internet age, that really was enough. The marketing campaign could literally have been the words “CARTOON BOOBS, YA DIG?” plastered on every available surface and this movie would have been a success.

But for a jaded, modern reviewer who sees boobs once (maybe even twice) a month, it’ll take more than that. So, is there more to Heavy Metal than awesome bewbage? Let’s take a look.

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Rock and Rule (1983)

Imagine you go to a Burger King and the guy at the counter serves you with a smile, promptly brings the food to your table, thanks you kindly for your custom and wishes you a good day. Someone, in short, who doesn’t have to put nearly this much effort into their job but does it anyway because, gosh darn it, if you’re going to do a job you might as well do it well.

That’s Nelvana. Nelvana is an extremely prolific Canadian animation studio who produced basically any cartoon you saw in the eighties or nineties that wasn’t made by Disney, Hanna-Barbera, Filmation or Warner Bros. They’re probably most famous (if you’re my age, at least) for their many, many licensed animations for properties like Care Bears, Strawberry Shortcake and My Pet Monster. Nelvana were front and centre in the saccharine, corporatised swamp that was the American TV animation scene in the Reagan era. Like many of their peers, Nelvana had to make ends meet in the burger joint by cranking out barely concealed animated toy commercials. Unlike many of their peers, Nelvana actually seemed to give a damn. Their shows were, broadly speaking, better than they needed to be and demonstrated real skill and craftsmanship in their animation. There were always hints that, if given time and a budget and a premise slightly less anodyne than “Will Grumpy Bear ever get that stick out of his ass?”, Nelvana had the talent to make something truly special. And, if ever there was a time to do it, it was the early eighties.

The late seventies/early eighties were the “Warring States” period of American Feature Animation. The senile old king, Disney, had fallen from his throne and seemingly every animator who could hold a pencil was scrambling for the crown. This was the heady time when Rankin Bass, Ralph Bakshi and Don Bluth battled for control of the artform, right up until 1989 when the old king came back and was like “I’m feeling a lot better now everyone, thank you for your concern“.

But all that was in the future. Nelvana was formed in 1971 by Patrick Loubert, Clive Smith and Michael Hirsh with the stated intent of creating a Canadian Disney.

After several well received Christmas specials and animating literally the only part of the Star Wars Holiday Special that deserved to be spared the flame (the cartoon that introduced Boba Fett), the studio began work on their first feature length animation; Rock and Rule. It’s an obvious passion project, clearly made by a young team just bursting with talent and ambition and love for what they were doing. It’s also something that was very obviously begun without a complete script or even a set plot. It’s weird. It’s uneven. It’s a wild, uncontrolled shambling mess of eighties animation that failed when it was dumped into theatres with no marketing by a distributor that neither loved nor understood it. Which obviously means that it was made for me, Mouse, personally.