Universal, the Dark Universe, and undead movie monsters

AS THE JUGGERNAUT Marvel Cinematic Universe wraps up its “Phase Three”, bids farewell to some of its most beloved characters, and moves on to new, weird films with titles no-one could possibly like, other attempts at recreating Marvel’s obvious yet surprisingly difficult formula/business model continue to fall behind.

The DCEU movies continue to be allowed to stumble on whenever something like David F. Sandberg’s Shazam! generates good reviews*; Sony are working on their second doomed attempt to build a cinematic universe solely based on characters from the pages of Spider-Man; perpetual losers Sony also tried to build a universe around Ghostbusters – you know, that charming standalone comedy from 1984, the one that was pretty much played out by the time of its first sequel.

And Universal, having built the first cinematic universe back in 1943 when they created Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man – and in later films added Dracula and The Invisible Man to the mix – tried to channel new life into some dead properties by announcing the Dark Universe. Predictably, everyone hated the name and, after much wasted money on marketing, the whole universe was cancelled after one bad movie, The Mummy.

Universal’s had a long and interesting history with these characters. Every time they come up, the assumption seems to be that they’ve been dormant since the 1940s. This is not entirely accurate. Universal made their very first horror film in 1913, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but the earliest film they retroactively branded as a “Universal Horror” was 1923’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame. A number of silent, German Expressionist-influenced silent pictures followed before the huge sound successes of Dracula and Frankenstein in 1931. The Mummy, The Invisible Man, Bride of Frankenstein and Dracula’s Daughter, among many others, followed in the next few years and, in 1939, Son of Frankenstein re-invigorated the series once again. At that point, Universal’s business model shifted to cranking out cheap sequels of varying quality and, in time, crossovers became inevitable. In 1948 the original incarnations of Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster and the Wolf Man had their last hurrah in the comedy vehicle Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Abott and Costello went on to encounter The Invisible Man, Jekyll & Hyde and The Mummy, all while standalone horrors continued to be produced at a rate of 2 or 3 a year until 1960.

In 1957 – while the original Universal Horror franchise was still running – Hammer released The Curse of Frankenstein, starring Peter Cushing as the creator and Christopher Lee as the monster. There had, of course, already been other takes on Frankenstein, Dracula and the other Gothic classics, but Hammer’s had a semiofficial Universal seal of approval, often distributed by them and sometimes using Universal-owned elements. Horror of Frankenstein and The Mummy rounded out Hammer’s Universal stable, and Frankenstein and Dracula sequels kept appearing until 1974.

In 1979, John Badham directed Frank Langella in a classy, moody Dracula, but unlike previous revivals, it led to no further monster activity until 1987’s The Monster Squad, a charming comedy in the style of Gremlins or Ghostbusters** featuring Dracula resurrecting Frankenstein’s Monster, the Wolf Man, the Mummy and the Gill Man (The Creature from the Black Lagoon) to cause family-friendly mischief. Universal licenced the character rights but not their familiar appearances, meaning the film features handsomely realised and almost-familiar versions of the classic monsters. For TV, Universal coproduced House of Frankenstein with NBC. Billed as a remake of the 1944 film, in practice it was nothing of the sort, but it did feature Frankenstein’s Monster alongside a generic vampire and werewolf.

Then in 1999, Stephen Sommers’ remake of The Mummy, trading Gothic mood for action-adventure spectacle, kicked off a flurry of monster activity. It had two sequels, the first of which, The Mummy Returns, generated its own spinoff, The Scorpion King. The Scorpion King was a prequel to the prologue scene of The Mummy Returns, and itself generated one prequel and three sequels. Van Helsing, also by Sommers, featured Jekyll & Hyde, Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, the Brides of Dracula and a number of werewolves in an overstuffed, feature-length trailer that made Sommers’ Mummy look restrained. It was preceded by an animesque half-hour straight-to-DVD prologue, Van Helsing: The London Assignment. The best of the third-millennium Universal monster movies thus far has been 2010’s The Wolf Man which, despite another overstuffed narrative, at least aims for Gothic chills and not action-movie thrills. 2014’s Dracula Untold, conceived as a standalone blending Bram Stoker’s fictional Count Dracula with history’s 15th-Century tyrant/liberator, Vlad Dracula, was retooled by executives into the first Dark Universe movie, then retconned out of continuity after its (deserved) box-office flop. Which brings us to the 2017 Mummy, which also brings in Jekyll/Hyde as a main character and features brief nods to Dracula and Gill Man. A tedious, too-dark-to-see special-effects rollercoaster that’s too dark and strange for the Summer blockbuster crowd but far too much a blockbuster for the horror crowd, it was another well-deserved flop that actually had little to do with classic Universal mythology***. Amusingly, it was even lapped by the previous set of Mummy pictures, when The Scorpion King: Book of Souls, the fourth sequel to the prequel to the prologue of the sequel to the second remake of the original, appeared in 2018. And there may well be more straight-to-DVD Scorpion Kings coming. Someone’s clearly watching them.

As for the Dark Universe, a Bride of Frankenstein remake, that would have come out without a Frankenstein to sequelise, has been cancelled, while a Johnny Depp-starring Invisible Man has been completely retooled into a far more exciting Leigh Whannel-directed Blumhouse co-production. Dependent on its success, Universal may revert to their 1940s model and churn out low-budget but basically satisfying revisions of their old material. Ultimately, the saddest part of the whole thing is how many interesting takes on these characters Universal has rejected in favour of pursuing bid-budget action movies. Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water was the best Creature from the Black Lagoon ever made, and it grew out of del Toro’s desire to do an official Creature movie. why Universal didn’t sue is beyond me, but one can’t help but be glad they didn’t. Over the years, George Romero, Clive Barker, Joe Dante and others have been denied the opportunity to develop takes on Universal’s properties.

Without even touching on the hundreds of non-Universal-approved takes on these characters, the longest Universal themselves have ever let them lie silent in their graves is 10 years, from The Monster Squad to House of Frankenstein. And the odds are that these undead monsters will simply continue to live, well beyond their natural lifespans. Remember, Frankenstein was well over a hundred years old when Universal made their first adaptation.

*Interesting note: Sandberg’s clever, low-budget horror Lights Out is a DCEU movie by virtue of one of its characters reappearing in Shazam!

**I call these “charmedies”, where the humour doesn’t necessarily come from being laugh-out-loud funny, just very charming. They were particularly popular in the 80s and often feature pastichey takes on comic-book and matinée-movie fantasy; other examples include The Blues Brothers, Back to the Future, The Goonies and Bill & Ted.

***Its rather fetching Sofia Boutella Mummy was not the Imhotep featured in the 1932 and 1999 Mummy films, nor Kharis who featured in the 1940s Mummy sequels, the Abbot and Costello vehicle and the Hammer version, but an original Mummy, while Jekyll/Hyde has never been counted among the classic monsters line-up, despite being granted occasional appearances such as in Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde and Van Helsing.

Nada the Lily, Black Panther, & the colonial adventure

EVER SINCE READING, as a teenager, H. Rider Haggard’s classic adventure novels She and King Solomon’s Mines and its sequel Allan Quatermain, I’d been hungry to find more from Haggard. It wasn’t until, as an adult, I was gifted a Kindle and found an ebook of his complete works that I was able to: aside from the well-known titles already mentioned, hardly anything remains in print from an author who was once one of the English-speaking world’s most popular.

This likely has to do with much of Haggard’s work’s status as colonial fiction, which has had a hard time attracting any readers since around the advent of post-colonial literature. Kipling, one of the most prominent writers of his own time, is nowadays hardly read, save for the odd academic defence or condemnation. Heart of Darkness remains on syllabi, likely aided by being so deconstructionary and generally difficult, but the rest of Conrad’s colonial fiction is obscure.

Haggard himself inaugurated the genre with King Solomon’s Mines, but his full oeuvre of more than fifty novels spans almost half a century and an array of genres including early examples of science fiction and the historical novel, and settings ranging across Africa, Europe, Asia and North and South America as well as throughout human history. Popular sales and enthusiastic reviews sustained his career well into the twentieth century, and dozens of film adaptations appeared, from Georges Méliès’ 1899 “The Pillar of Fire”, based on She, to Hammer’s 1965 treatment of the same material, while the last thirty years has seen Haggard’s only screen representation come from the 2008 Asylum mockbuster Allan Quatermain and the Temple of Skulls, taking more cues from the successful (and Haggard-influenced) Indiana Jones films than the text it purportedly adapts. To this day, echoes of Haggard’s work are evident in all kinds of stories of adventure and fantasy, exploration and colonisation – the recent success of Marvel’s Black Panther film, set in a Haggard-like hidden African kingdom, attests to this – but his novels themselves remain little-read and overdue for re-interpretation.

The books in question, it must be said, range in quality as well as content – though the very roughest still make for stirring yarns – but the most remarkable among them is Nada the Lily, an early example of the spin-off prequel for a successful series, exploring the younger days of Umslopogaas who, in Allan Quatermain, had played a formidable variation on the Man Friday noble savage part.

Already the ambition of Nada the Lily is evident, for it is hard to imagine the original Man Friday, nor any of his literary descendants, meriting their own derivative work – particularly not one in which the narrative is at no point driven by their relationship to white European characters. In fact, the entire cast of Nada the Lily are black Africans, and many of them are real historical figures, or closely based on them: while the “Lost World” literary genre began with the imaginary Kukuanaland of King Solomon’s Mines, and was more fully explored in the hidden Zu-Vendis kingdom of white Africans in Allan Quatermain, Nada the Lily’s action takes place in the very real Zululand, and in what was then the fairly recent past. We would not, either, expect the prequel to a fantastical adventure story to fall more into historical fiction, then still a relatively young genre having been codified by Sir Walter Scott in the first half of the century. No prior attempts appear to have been made at a novel of African history, and Nada holds the distinction of being the first ever novel with an entirely black cast. In fact, given the paucity of African written records, such a novel could probably only have come from a colonial adventurer such as Haggard, who relied heavily on the oral histories he picked up from natives as well as the partial reconstructions attempted by some of his contemporaries, such as the missionary Henry Callaway.

In a favourite technique of Haggard’s, the narrative is presented as a genuine artefact, with occasional interjections by its “editor”. In the frame narrative, a white explorer becomes stranded in a sudden and mysterious snowdrift, whereupon he gets caught up hearing the main story, which is recounted to him by the elderly Mopo, who was once witch-doctor to the great king Chaka (better known to modern readers as Shaka Zulu), and father of the beautiful Nada who is the object of the young Umslopogaas’ love. Umslopogaas has been raised as Nada’s brother but is in actuality the son of Chaka, kept secret by Mopo due to Chaka’s policy of having all his sons killed lest one should rise against him.

Following Chaka’s assassination by his half-brother Dingaan, Nada is forced to flee, taking refuge on the great Ghost Mountain, with “a grey peak rudely shaped like the head of an aged woman” in a manner recalling the twin peaks nicknamed Sheba’s Breasts, in King Solomon’s Mines. Unlike Sheba’s Breasts, however, the Ghost Mountain really exists, though Haggard never visited and took some dramatic licence in its depiction. Here his carefully-researched historical epic takes a turn into the phantasmagorical territory which made his name, with Umslopogaas’ introduction to the mountain’s unique resident, Galazi the Wolf, who has been raised by the mountain’s resident wolf-pack (Kipling acknowledged in a letter to Haggard that the concept for The Jungle Book grew from reading Nada the Lily), though presumably the “wolves” are hyenas. Galazi acts as the pack’s leader and the wolves do his bidding, making for an unforgettable Haggard set-piece as he makes his last stand on the Ghost Mountain.

Haggard’s blending of fantastical elements with historical narrative makes Nada the Lily one of his most appealing works; his books have always been sold on his great imaginative power, while the lofty tone of his prose, informed by Homer and the King James Bible, is often undercut by a lack of polish and an occasional clumsiness. He himself seems to have been aware of this, but preferred to leave his manuscripts unrevised, asserting in his autobiography The Days of My Life that “wine of this character loses its bouquet when it is poured from glass to glass”. The energy and roughshod nature of his earlier adventure novels is less evident in the latter half of his body of work, which is dominated by melodramas and further historical tales. Indeed, the narrative of Nada the Lily itself is revisited and continued in a trilogy of novels – Marie, Child of Storm and Finished – which fully integrate Allan Quatermain and his wife Marie into the action, covering a number of key historical events such as the Great Trek, the Weenen Massacre and finally the Anglo-Zulu War with the detail of an amateur historian and, in some cases, an eyewitness. All are captivating, but Nada the Lily stands as the ultimate Haggard work. The tone is set in the very opening lines of the “Introduction”, as detailed documentary narrative begins to give way to the spellbinding voice of folk-tale or oral history:

 

Some years since–it was during the winter before the Zulu War–a White Man was travelling through Natal. His name does not matter, for he plays no part in this story. With him were two wagons laden with goods, which he was transporting to Pretoria. The weather was cold and there was little or no grass for the oxen, which made the journey difficult; but he had been tempted to it by the high rates of transport that prevailed at that season of the year, which would remunerate him for any probable loss he might suffer in cattle. So he pushed along on his journey, and all went well until he had passed the little town of Stanger, once the site of Duguza, the kraal of Chaka, the first Zulu king and the uncle of Cetywayo. The night after he left Stanger the air turned bitterly cold, heavy grey clouds filled the sky, and hid the light of the stars.

 

The synthesis of styles is sufficiently convincing to allow for a premonition much later in the book, and spelling out its underlying theme, not to spoil the narrative immersion:

 

Thou canst not kill this white men, for they are not of one race, but of many races, and the sea is their home; they rise out of the black water. Destroy those that are here, and others shall come to avenge them, more and more and more! Now thou hast smitten in thy hour; in theirs they shall smite in turn. Now they lie low in blood at thy hand; in a day to come, O King, thou shalt lie low in blood at theirs.

 

So prophesies Mopo to Dingaan, elaborating on a prophesy made earlier by Chaka with his dying breath. The Shakespearean wrangling for the Zulu throne which has driven the novel’s tragic events is given a deeply ironic weight by the reader’s sure knowledge that all of this contending for power is in vain, and the alienating effect on the European reader shown himself as Other, as relentless monster, is increased by the richly immersive detail with which the novel portrays the Zulu way of life. The cultural destruction wrought by colonialism has never been more vividly made plain, though Chinua Achebe’s novel of immediately pre-colonial Nigerian life, Things Fall Apart, does make use of a similar effect.

Both are novels which make no attempt at “whitewashing” pre-Christian African values; Nada the Lily’s heroes and villains alike are recognisably Zulu in culture, with their multiple wives, pragmatic attitudes toward death, and glorification of war and conquest. Haggard’s treatment of Chaka, in particular, is spectacular. His cruelty and paranoia, and the sheer arbitrariness with which so many of his acts are conceived and carried out, is chillingly similar to the tyrants that came before and after him: Genghis Khan, Caligula, Idi Amin. Yet Chaka is also a visionary, terrible but great, and fits in with popular conceptions of tragic conquerors like Caesar or Napoleon.

Like every one of Nada the Lily’s characters, in short, his actions play out on a grand, larger-than-life scale, something Haggard was unique among Victorian authors – and even early-to-mid 20^th-Century writers – in acknowledging could be afforded to native African affairs. The aforementioned superhero film Black Panther has broken a number of box-office records, and won much critical acclaim for its images of a bold, vibrant, and epic black African adventure directed at mainstream audiences. Yet it has an antecedent, more than a century old, in Nada the Lily and the rest of the series.

Tomorrow Never Dies, Police Story 3, & a hopeless spinoff

I’VE ALWAYS THOUGHT that, as exciting and underrated as it is, Tomorrow Never Dies probably features a bit too much action for a Bond picture, which have always leant towards the “adventure” side of action/adventure – it’s a noticeable difference if you compare the series to such Bond competitors/derivatives as the Indiana Jones, Batman or Mission: Impossible series, or Marvel’s brand-new stab at the long-dormant “black 007” genre in Black Panther.

For a long time, though, I’d been mistakenly thinking of it as a film that’s overly keen to ape violent American films, in the manner of Licence to Kill or Quantum of Solace. After defining its own subgenre in the 60s, the series has occasionally, and rather sadly, borrowed from other genres, many of them partially derived from the Bond formula itself: blaxploitation in Live and Let Die; Kung Fu in The Man with the Golden Gun; Star Wars in Moonraker; Lethal Weapon, Die Hard and their ilk in Licence to Kill; Batman Begins in Casino Royale; Bourne in Quantum of Solace. What hadn’t struck me previously is that Tomorrow Never Dies represents the Bond series’ attempt to piggyback on Hong Kong action cinema of the sort codified by John Woo. That’s the real meaning of Bond dual-wielding a P99 and an MP5 as he mows down Carver’s henchmen, not to mention the use of pre-Matrix bullet-time showing off Wai Lin’s cartwheels and high kicks.

Wai Lin, of course, is played by the Hong Kong star Michelle Yeoh, who had already submitted an audition tape for this precise rôle with her appearance in Police Story 3: Super Cop. In that film, Yeoh plays a no-nonsense Chinese policewoman, an orthodox communist who bickers with the partner she’s assigned: Jackie Chan as a policeman from (then still-British) Hong Kong. In Tomorrow Never Dies, Yeoh plays a no-nonsense Chinese spy, an orthodox communist who bickers with the partner she’s assigned: James Bond, a spy from Britian. (An earlier draft of Tomorrow Never Dies would actually have revolved around the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China, which was scrapped when a) production took too long for the issue still to be relevant, and b) the handover went very smoothly and afforded little opportunity for action set-pieces or communist-vs.-capitalist quipping.)

It isn’t only the character dynamic between Bond and Wai Lin that feels borrowed from Police Story. After about eighty minutes of standard Bond stuff, the film sends us to Asia, after which the action is nonstop for about a solid half-hour. Among the setpieces are Bond and Wai Lin rappeling down a skyscraper by clinging to an enormous and slowly-tearing poster adorning its side, and a rooftop motorcycle chase for which the pair are handcuffed to one another for the duration. The combination of eye-popping action and physical comedy comes straight from Jackie Chan, and it’s a shame that Pierce Brosnan is an actor and not a stuntman, for scenes like these work best when they’re done fully in-camera, without swapping between actors and stuntmen.

Wai Lin was apparently one of the series’ more popular Bond Girls, though I always found Yeoh a little stiff and awkward here compared to some of the wonderful performances she’s given in Chinese and HK films. Still, a spinoff was originally intended for her character who, of several Bond Girls set up as female counterparts to Bond (The Spy Who Loved Me‘s XXX, Die Another Day‘s Jinx) is the most convincing. Yeoh was already used to such spinoffs, having starred in one of her own featuring her character from Police Story 3: Super Cop. That spin-off was confusingly marketed in various territories as Supercop, Supercop 2, Police Story 3 Part 2, Supercop, Police Story IV, Project S or Once a Cop. I wonder whether the producers would even have started thinking about spinoffs if the Police Story series hadn’t gone there first.

And I wonder if the Police Story series first came to their attention with the wide release of Police Story 4: First Strike, aka Jackie Chan’s First Strike. It takes the series away from Hong Kong cop action in favour of a globetrotting plot obviously intended to launch Chan’s character as a Hong Kong alternative to Bond, and was seen by plenty of international audiences previously ignorant of the series. Once again, Bond was borrowing from its own imitators.

As for the Wai Lin spinoff, it never materialised, and the producers turned their hopes to Jinx in Die Another Day, envisioning a “Winter Olympics” scenario in which her films and Bond’s would alternate. After the rough reception given Halle Berry not only in Die Another Day but also X-Men, Swordfish and (especially) Catwoman, the spinoff idea was once again abandoned, and I have to wonder: does anyone really want or need to see Bond without Bond? If they do, they already have a rich array of alternatives from which to choose.

Marvel, DC, & 1.5-horse races

DID ANYONE SEE Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice? I’m just asking. Personally I didn’t bother; it wasn’t that I didn’t care, it just sort of passed me by. The figures suggest that’s probably the case for a lot of people out there, since the film did a passable, but disappointing, $850m & received damning reviews across the board. Given it was meant to launch a mega-expanded-universe-cinematic-juggernaut-crossover franchise (as was 2013’s uninspiring, but successful, Man of Steel), this is bad news for DC. Once upon a time, they could open massive comic-book movies like 1978’s Superman (plus four sequels), 1989’s Batman (plus three sequels), & 2005’s Batman Begins (plus two sequels & a pretty good animated spinoff), while in roughly the same timeframe, Marvel was producing unwatchable shit almost exclusively, which is funny since in terms of sales Marvel’s always had a competitive edge against the older, more conservative DC. In terms of popular iconography, DC’s always had the upper hand with their Superman/Batman/Wonder Woman trinity, though the depth & variety of Marvel characters is more impressive, & outside of that trinity DC’s never really managed to manage another household name, where Marvel has several (Spider-Man, The Incredible Hulk, Captain America, The Fantastic Four, Silver Surfer, The Mighty Thor, the X-Men & especially Wolverine plus, of late, Iron Man). Plus, in recent years Marvel have launched hugely successful films even when based on their obscurer characters. Similar attempts by DC have resulted in nothing but flops. Given all of this cinematic kerfuffle, plus DC’s flagging readership since the New 52 reboot, they’d be wise to watch out, lest they surrender the greater market share to Marvel after sixty-odd competitive years, making things less of a two-horse race & more of a 1.5-horse race.

1.5-horse races are surprisingly common; if anything, they may actually be more common than true two-horse races. It’s where one company has a clear lead, perhaps more than 50% of the market share, & their next competitor is almost as visible, almost as famous, almost as acclaimed, sells almost as well.

In fast food, there’s McDonald’s vs. Burger King. In traditional animation, there’s Disney vs. Warner Bros. (appropriate, given Disney owns Marvel & WB, DC); in CG animation there’s Disney Pixar vs. DreamWorks Animation. In cola, there’s Coca-Cola vs. Pepsi; in orange soda, there’s Fanta vs. Tango (Tango is sold in the UK by Britvic, who distribute fellow 2nd-bester Pepsi); in lemonade, there’s Sprite vs. 7Up (again, Sprite is Coca-Cola’s horse; 7Up, PepsiCo’s). In computers, there’s Microsoft vs. Apple. In trainers, there’s Nike vs. Reebok, & there’s Adidas vs. Puma. In girls’ dolls, there’s Barbie vs. Cindy. In American cars, there’s Ford vs. General Motors. In Italian sports cars, there’s Ferrari vs. Lamborghini. In music, there’s The Beatles vs. The Rolling Stones, The Sex Pistols vs. The Clash, Oasis vs. Blur, Madonna vs. Cyndi Lauper, Michael Jackson vs. Prince, & 2Pac vs. The Notorious B.I.G.. In American inventing, there used to be Thomas Edison vs. Nikola Tesla. Many football rivalries also work the same way: Manchester United vs. Manchester City, Arsenal vs. Tottenham Hotspur, Liverpool vs. Everton, West Ham vs. Millwall,  Norwich vs. Ipswich, Cardiff vs. Swansea, & Crystal Palace vs. Brighton and Hove Albion. Celtic vs. Rangers has become this of late, after Rangers’ bankruptcy/buying-out saga. No doubt other sports have their own examples too. This can even extend to rivalries between cities, for which many of the football rivalries spill out into a larger rivalry. It can even happen with countries: look at Australia vs. New Zealand, Japan vs. South Korea, or for a less friendly example, South Korea vs. North Korea.

Even the Cold War, when you really think about it, resolves itself as another of these 1.5-horse races, with the Soviet Union stretching itself too thin in trying to remain competitive with the United States. But, as you can see from perusing the list above, it’s rare for one side to ever get enough of an upper hand to really drive its rivals into the ground, so both sides keep hanging on while an indifferent public tends just to go for the brand they prefer.

Asimov, Lovecraft, & promiscuous continuities

HERE’S A piece of news for you: Ridley Scott’s Prometheus 2, formerly known as Paradise Lost, Prometheus: Paradise Lost, & Alien: Paradise Lost, is now called Alien: Covenant, until a new title for it rolls around. Pfft, who cares? Prometheus was rubbish, & the whole world is much more excited for the same-franchise, rival-movie, Neill Blomkamp’s maybe-one-day-to-see-release Alien 5. And if we have to see Ridley Scott revisiting a gritty early sci-fi classic, aren’t we all way more excited for the Blade Runner sidequel? Yeah? Kind of? Yeah.

You know, in another world, both movies would be the same thing. Scott stopped just short of including explicit reference to Blade Runner‘s Tyrell Corporation in Prometheus. Given the visual & thematic similarities of Alien & Blade Runner, it only makes sense to bind them together as sisters in continuity. But, it could be argued, it doesn’t even require a Prometheus to do that. The recent videogame Aliens: Colonial Marines had absolutely no qualms about including a cheeky nod to Blade Runner. OK, given it also includes nods to Prometheus & Spaceballs, it may not be that significant, especially since Colonial Marines has trouble even fitting itself into the franchise. But the more authentic Alien: Isolation also enjoys a good Blade Runner nod.

& then, of course, there’s the matter of Soldier. Released in 1998 & forgotten shortly thereafter, the film was directed by Paul W.S. Anderson & written by David Webb Peoples, also credited for Blade Runner. Sharing many elements of continuity with Blade Runner, & incorporating several references to other Philip K. Dick works (Blade Runner was based on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), Peoples admitted to seeing it as something of a sidequel to Blade Runner. But freeze-frame enthusiasts would also have determined that it shares a continuity with Aliens, thanks to a reference to Kurt Russell’s character Sgt. Todd 3465 having received training with the M41A Pulse Rifle & the USCM Smartgun. Those even fonder of freeze-framing may also have discerned the wreckage of Event Horizon‘s Lewis & Clark alongside a wrecked Blade Runner spinner. It seems appropriate, given that Event Horizon, also directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, so effectively aped the look & the mood of the Alien series that it was more satisfying than the same year’s Alien: Resurrection. About the only property it seemed to resemble even more closely than Alien was the videogame franchise Doom: in Doom, an experimental teleporter on Mars accidentally opens a portal to Hell; in Event Horizon, an experimental FTL engine in space accidentally opens a portal to Hell. Doom, the most influential first-person shooter game in history, had begun life as an Aliens licensee, before legal issues required a quick reskin & change in backstory. & what other weapon should Todd have been trained in the use of? The DOOM MKIV BFG! Perhaps we shouldn’t take all of this too seriously: the really really freeze-frame-savvy would also have spotted references in Soldier to Executive Decision (in which Kurt Russell starred as Dr. David Grant), Escape From New York & Escape From L.A. (in which Kurt Russell starred as Snake Plissken), Stargate (in which Kurt Russell starred as Colonel Jonathan O’Neil, & which also deals with aliens contacted via experimental portal technology), Tango & Cash (in which Kurt Russell starred as Lieutenant Gabriel Cash), The Thing (in which Kurt Russell starred as R. J. MacReady, & which owes its structure, mood, & nightmarishly-designed alien villain to Alien), Captain Ron (in which Kurt Russell starred as Captain Ron), Backdraft (in which Kurt Russell starred as both Captain Dennis McCaffrey & his son, Lieutenant Stephen “Bull” McCaffrey), Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (& thus indirectly every other iteration of Star Trek, too), & the Dexter Riley trilogy: The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, Now You See Him, Now You Don’t, & The Strongest Man in the World (which starred Kurt Russell as Dexter Riley, & whose use of Medfield College, a fictional university setting shared with The Absent-Minded Professor, Son of Flubber, & Flubber, recalled the use of fictional Miskatonic University in the works of Lovecraft). Soldier was clearly having its fun, & “Tannhauser Gate” has become almost an obligatory reference for science-fiction works.

But, at the same time, there might be something to this. Science-fiction giants of the late-twentieth century, Alien & Blade Runner both established handy ready-made references that later films could easily piggyback on, aiming perhaps to gain a bit of easy credibility or, less cynically, just to make audiences smile. Both were accepted into a wider canon of what we might call “promiscuous continuities”: fictional shared continuities which were a) open to new entries, b) proved to be attractive continuities for other writers, & c) could have continuity easily established with a throwaway line or references. Most of these pre-established promiscuous continuities came from pulp literature, in which originality is uncommon, but so is litigation. Prominent promiscuous continuities include: the Cthulhu Mythos, a cosmic horror continuity established by H.P. Lovecraft & others; the robot stories of Isaac Asimov, whose Three Laws of Robotics are sufficiently simple & sensible to be adopted whole by numerous other writers; & the world of Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, in which mech armour is deployed against alien “bugs” (probably shares DNA with the aforementioned Doom: just as Aliens FPS games look like Doom ripoffs; just as the Doom movie, when it finally appeared, looked like a ripoff of Aliens, Event Horizon, or even Resident Evil, itself a videogame-to-film adaptation by Paul W. S. Anderson; just so, the eventual Starship Troopers movie owed a fair debt to the superior Aliens).

Academics would call this wealth of pre-established suggestive connections intertextuality, though the key difference is that, where intertextuality requires only that another work is being referenced, these are cases of it being invoked, i.e. the use of elements from that work are to establish that both take place within the same wider narrative universe. Connections to these promiscuous continuities are often so casually established that it’s easy to miss &, like invoking magic with spells, there are usually certain preferred phrases with which to do it. For Blade Runner, you just have to say “Tannhauser Gate”. For Asimov, it’s “Three Laws”, while for Lovecraft it might be Miskatonic University, the Necromonicon, or Cthulhu. Alien is often referenced via the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, while the Terminator films, sharing much cast & crew with the Alien series, are invoked in Aliens with Cyberdyne Systems.

Aliens just couldn’t stop namedropping, so it only made sense when a Freeze-Frame Bonus gag in Predator 2 led to a full-fledged crossover film directed by Paul W. “him again!” S. Anderson. In the comics world, things were taken even further with an Aliens versus Predator versus The Terminator comic. Aliens came out in a more innocent time, & writer-director James Cameron was probably only aiming for window-dressing in hitting the big promiscuous continuities: the android Bishop, we are told, is Three Laws Compliant, while Starship Troopers, required reading for the actors, was invoked in one throwaway “bug hunt” line. Meanwhile the first Alien film, without ever directly referencing Lovecraft, has also been suggested to do a better job recreating the mood & themes of his works than most official adaptations, & between it & Prometheus, Lovecraft’s celebrated At the Mountains of Madness has pretty much been covered.

If one has to go to Alien for their Lovecraft fix rather than to other, more official sources, this is likely because most official Lovecraft film adaptations were by either Stuart Gordon or Brian Yuzna or both, whose successful Re-Animator set a comedic tone influenced by The Evil Dead & Ghostbusters, both of which suggested themselves as unofficial Lovecraft films. Lovecraft’s sphere of influence, however, extended beyond the cinema; it was a sufficiently promiscuous continuity for Doctor Who, who found himself battling Lovecraftian Old Ones several times in the novels; more officially, Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos & Robert E. Howard’s Hyperboria (home of Conan the Barbarian & other, less successful, creations) were mutually dependent. Conan the Barbarian even became a part of Marvel Comics continuity, which also included G.I. Joe, Transformers, Star Trek, & another promiscuous continuity of the cinema: Godzilla.

Spectre, Thunderball, & the convoluted history of Kevin McClory

IT SEEMS INCREDIBLE but aside from a comparison made in a Sherlock review, this blog has yet to treat the subject of James Bond, whether the character, the series of novels, or the series of films; all this despite the incredibly exciting announcement made in December about the upcoming film, Spectre, which sees the return of Skyfall director Sam Mendes, boasts an impressive cast list, a ridiculously cool poster, & a title which blatantly announces the return of SPECTRE*, the original evil organisation which served as the villains in six films from 1962 to 1971, & provided the inspiration for Marvel’s HYDRA, G.I. Joe‘s Cobra, DC’s H.I.V.E., The Man from U.N.C.L.E.‘s THRUSH, Get Smart‘s KAOS, & any other acronymic NGO whose political alignment of “evil” handily allows them to play the villains in fantasy espionage plots without real-world political controversy. But SPECTRE, led first by the metal-handed Dr. No, then later the utterly iconic Blofeld, are still the best, with their volcano lairs & spaceship-swallowing spaceships, & to have them back as the baddies is thrilling – even as it causes one to wonder what will become of Quantum, the obvious SPECTRE stand-in created for Quantum of Solace. The need for Eon to use a stand-in for their own favourite villains came about as a result of perhaps the longest legal battle in film history.

In the late 1950s Ian Fleming, with screenwriter Kevin McClory, began work on a screenplay intended to kick off a James Bond film franchise, several years before Eon Productions’ Dr. No. Fleming & McClory together went through a variety of ideas for the story then provisionally known as Longitude 78 West, with McClory also bringing in a third-party collaborator of his own, Jack Whittingham. Fleming, apparently satisfied for the most part with McClory & Whittingham’s script, gave the nascent project the new, more dynamic title Thunderball &, after some light rewriting, began shopping it to studios, without any success. This process of submission seems to have wearied Fleming, as, apparently cynical about Thunderball‘s chances of ever being put into production, he decided instead to rework the script’s plot into a novel, the ninth entry in his series. That novel, published in 1961, stuck closely to the unproduced screenplay, but nowhere credited McClory or Whittingham.

McClory vs Fleming was the first lawsuit of many, with McClory & Whittingham fighting for recognition for their uncredited work. The screenwriters sought not a co-authorship credit, but for the novel’s copyright page to contain an acknowledgement to their screenplay. In 1963, with Eon’s Dr. No & From Russia with Love having already been released to critical & commercial success, McClory & Whittingham won their acknowledgement. As part of the settlement, Fleming was allowed to retain full rights to his Thunderball novel, but McClory – & not, for some reason, Whittingham – retained the rights to any film production of Thunderball, whether that production was based directly on his screenplay, or indirectly on it via Fleming’s novel.

With Eon’s third James Bond film, Goldfinger, already in production, producers Harry Saltzman & Albert R. Broccoli contacted McClory to consider co-producing Thunderball as the fourth film in the series. There was no need, from an artistic perspective, for Thunderball to come next; but from a business perspective, Saltzman & Broccoli feared that McClory might produce his own Thunderball film & release it in competition with the official series, which they would have had no legal means to prevent, & so sought instead to subsume his Thunderball rights into their overall James Bond rights. From McClory’s perspective, moreover, developing a Thunderball film that was an entry in the already popular, big-budget series, starring the popular Sean Connery rather than having to cast a new Bond, must have looked like a safe investment. Eon, therefore, negotiated to lease the Thunderball rights from McClory for ten years. One speculates that Eon must have tried to secure McClory’s film rights in perpetuity; but equally, McClory would have been aware that the rights were by far his greatest asset, & so haggled them down to just a decade’s ownership.

Opening in 1965, Saltzman/Broccoli/McClory’s Thunderball became the most successful Bond film to date, building on the success of the blockbuster formula which had coalesced in 1964’s Goldfinger. Following the film’s success &, more generally, the franchise’s dominance in the 60s & 70s, McClory made various attempts to capitalise on his little piece of Bond, arguing that various elements of the franchise originated in Thunderball & thus could not be used by Eon – or anyone else save the estate of the now-deceased Fleming – without his permission, including SPECTRE & its iconic leader Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Although the film series had, by this point, already included SPECTRE six times – with Bond killing their original leader, Dr. No, in Dr. No, in 1962, then facing underlings of No’s replacement, Blofeld, in 1963’s From Russia with Love & 1965’s Thunderball, & facing off against Blofeld himself in 1967’s You Only Live Twice, 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service & 1971’s Diamonds Are Forever – McClory won his suit, blocking Eon from any further use of SPECTRE or Blofeld in their films.

Eon clearly intended to return Blofeld after Diamonds Are Forever, with him escaping by personal submarine at that film’s conclusion, and indeed, Eon intended at one point to use Blofeld as the villain in The Spy Who Loved Me, a film which, despite using the title of one of Fleming’s novels, featured an original plot. And Blofeld would have been appropriate as the villain, since the plot about a supertanker eating tankers recalls the spaceship-eating-spaceship from You Only Live Twice. But after discovering that McClory intended to sue if Blofeld was used, Eon instead created a new villain in Karl Stromberg, one of the more forgettable foes in the series.

At this point, if we’re taking the notion of continuity in the Bond canon at all seriously, we must allow an element of fan speculation to creep in: Blofeld’s villainous plans seem to decay in ambition through his three consecutive appearances as antagonist: in You Only Live Twice he brings the United States & USSR to the brink of nuclear destruction; in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service he wishes to ransom the UN into pardoning him, in order to then go legitimate; by Diamonds Are Forever he is hiding in Las Vegas, having stolen the identity of reclusive millionaire Willard White. Presumably the unimaginably immense resources required for a crime syndicate to maintain a space programme not just competitive with, but vastly superior to, those of both the USA & USSR, all the while remaining secret, were more than SPECTRE could afford to lose when Bond foiled their plan, & the organisation seems to have shrunk to the size of a mere personal entourage for Blofeld. By his final appearance in 1981’s For Your Eyes Only, the worst Blofeld can do is to annoy Bond then get unceremoniously killed before the opening credits. With Blofeld underground in Bond’s world from 1971 to 1981, SPECTRE must have collapsed without leadership, leaving revenge on Bond Blofeld’s last recourse.

Of course, the unnamed, uncredited bald, cat-stroking supervillain who appears in For Your Eyes Only is, for legal reasons, “not” Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Unofficially, it’s clear to fans that Eon sought to finally kill Blofeld, partly to provide closure after Diamonds Are Forever‘s frustratingly open ending, partly to allow Bond some emotional catharsis after SPECTRE’s murder of his wife in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, partly to provide a reassuring continuity link between Connery’s Bond, Lazenby’s Bond, Connery’s Bond again, & Moore’s Bond – the sequence had originally been intended to open Moore’s début, Live and Let Die, but was held off presumably for legal reasons – but mostly to delegitimise the Thunderball remake that producers were aware, by this point, that McClory had managed to get into production, with the Thunderball rights having reverted to him in 1975, per his agreement with Eon in ’65.

Again, McClory must have known that Thunderball was his greatest asset but, having already filmed it once, & not having the legal right to create any Bond films that weren’t Thunderball, his only option was a remake outside of Eon’s continuity: clearly Saltzman & Broccoli would not want to make Thunderball again, but at the same time, the producers probably expected that neither would there be any public or investor interest in an unofficial Bond film that would have to compete with their twelve-films-&-counting juggernaut of a franchise. In all probability, there genuinely wasn’t any public interest in that prospect: Never Say Never Again doesn’t advertise itself as a remake, instead using the return of Connery to the rôle as its big selling point.

Released in 1983 in competition with the official entry Octopussy, Never Say Never Again doggedly copies the successful formula, but without the gun-barrel opening or theme tune it feels a lot like an economy version. Still, Never Say Never Again was competitive at the box office, only narrowly losing to Octopussy, no doubt helped by the asset of definitive 007 Sean Connery, against a tired Roger Moore in Octopussy. In truth, Connery seems equally bored in Never Say Never Again, lured in by filthy lucre & wearing the most expensive wig in film history to hide his age.

At this point, prior to the advent of home video – the current release, incidentally, looks just like the DVDs/Blu-Rays for the official films – McClory lacked the ability to further cash in on the relative success of Never Say Never Again: he legally couldn’t make a sequel, unless it had exactly the same story – & Broccoli, by this point unpartnered from Saltzman, now regarded McClory with hostility, & certainly wouldn’t have let him anywhere near the Eon Productions franchise. Undaunted, McClory put a second remake into production with Sony in 1989. This version was entitled Warhead 2000 A.D., with the intention being to modernise Bond with a dark, realistic tone: unfortunately for McClory, the producers of the official series had already had the same idea that year with Licence to Kill. McClory persisted, and sought as Bond first Pierce Brosnan, who had missed out on replacing Moore in 1987 due to Remington Steele commitments, then in the 1990s, still trying to get the project off the ground, Timothy Dalton, who was still keen on playing the rôle despite Eon’s reluctance to continue with him in the official series. Nothing ever came of the Warhead 2000 A.D. project, though McClory seemed not entirely to have abandoned the idea prior to his death in 2006.

The fifty years of legal conflict finally came to an end in the 2010s after the bankruptcy of Eon’s parent company, MGM. One of the parties in MGM’s subsequent buyout was Sony, & after a brief new round of legal wrangles, Eon Productions was able to acquire all Bond-related elements in 2013, by which point Ian Fleming, Kevin McClory, Jack Whittingham, Harry Saltzman & Albert R. Broccoli were all too dead to care. Still, the happy conclusion to all of this is the appearance, this coming November, of Spectre, returning Bond‘s best baddies to their proper place in the official series. Skyfall may have been the series’ big 50th birthday celebration but, with a legal history going all the way back to 1965’s Thunderball, you could well say that it’s Spectre that’s been 50 years in the making.

*For the record: the SPecial Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion. The acronym is forced; the films avoid bringing it up.