You can get angry with George Lucas ruining Star Wars all you want, but I’m still furious he screwed up Howard the Duck.
Howard the Duck was one of my favorite comic books growing up, I still love it, and the movie just got it all wrong.
This was long before people took comic book movies seriously, and it’s clear that for everyone involved making a movie with a talking duck was beneath them.
There are movies that have become synonymous with disaster, and Howard the Duck is right up there with Heaven’s Gate and Gigli, and I wish it would be rebooted one day, because it could indeed be a good movie I think, but the stench from the first one is too strong for anyone to go near it again. In fact, several years ago at Universal there was a big fire on the lot, and if the negative for Howard the Duck went up in flames, I’m sure Universal wouldn’t have been crying in their beer over it.
Still, the movie has its fans, and there’s certainly got to be Marvel completists out there who are willing to check it out, good, bad or indifferent (mostly bad in this case).
So now Giantfreakinrobot tells us, an executive at Marvel made a little short plea asking Lucas to let Howard the Duck come out on Blu-ray. It’s a funny little animated piece where Howard himself points out that he was the first Marvel character to be adapted into a film.
Released in the summer of 1986, Howard the Duck has indeed had an anniversary, even if it’s just through sheer inertia, and perhaps out of curiosity people will check it out just to see how bad it is, or who just want to complete their Marvel collections, or who knows what.
Yeah, it won’t blow away the piles of money Star Wars and The Avengers made, but maybe it could make a couple of bucks here and there, you never know. Maybe if they put it out as a double bill with the Star Wars Holiday Special it could be the laugh riot of the year, except the Holiday Special was infinitely funnier of course…
