Howard the DuckGeorge Lucas has cre­ated some won­der­ful movies and is unde­ni­ably a vision­ary film­maker, story-teller and influ­ence in the film indus­try. Recently, evi­dence of this has sur­faced in the form of a PDF out­lin­ing the “Raiders” story con­fer­ence.

He’s also respon­si­ble for some real stinkers. Movie stink that could quickly foul a room full of under­de­vel­oped daisies and sel­dom come up in con­ver­sa­tion for fear of one being exiled or worse, thrown to a bunch of rav­en­ous movie crit­ics. Now I’m begin­ning to feel nos­tal­gic for the car­toon, The Critic, but anyways…

Howard the Duck is per­haps the worst movie on George’s resume (yes, fouler than even Clone Wars), failed mis­er­ably at the box office and yet it retains a charm all its own. There are even days when the movie strangely hov­ers around in my thoughts from time to time.

If this were VH1’s Behind the Music, this is the part when the guy would say.. “And now, the story behind the story.”

It all started with some comics

From Wikipedia:

[Howard the Duck] first appeared in Adven­ture into Fear #19 (Dec. 1973) and sev­eral sub­se­quent series have chron­i­cled the mis­ad­ven­tures of the ill-tempered, anthro­po­mor­phic, “funny ani­mal” trapped on human-dominated Earth. Howard’s adven­tures are gen­er­ally social satires, and also often par­o­dies of genre fic­tion with a meta-fictional aware­ness of the medium. [Wikipedia]

If you were to pick up a Howard comic dur­ing this time you’d notice very lit­tle dif­fer­ence between him and Don­ald Duck. This was inten­tional on the part of its cre­ators but for obvi­ous rea­sons wasn’t car­ried over in the movie.

Quack, Quack!

The movie adap­ta­tion, released in 1986, retained some of the traits from the comic in the form of its star, Howard, who was still ill-tempered and anthro­po­mor­phic. Instead of doing an ani­mated fea­ture, which would’ve been an ideal pre­sen­ta­tion, the film was instead live-action and the duck would be part ani­ma­tronic pup­pet, part diminu­tive actor.

It starred a very young Lea Thomp­son and Tim Rob­bins. Tim Rob­bins, up until this point (with Top Gun’s release loom­ing) had been known for bit roles in TV and film. Lea Thomp­son was (and will prob­a­bly always be) known as the Marty McFly’s mother Lor­raine in Back to the Future.

Together, they were sup­port­ing play­ers to their feath­ered star and despite the sub par script and kooky spe­cial effects, man­aged to give some­what con­vinc­ing per­for­mances. How­ever, there is some­thing to be said about the human/duck rela­tion­ship that is, to this day, uncom­fort­able to watch. I don’t think I was ever fully up to speed on the “birds, ducks and bees.”, but I digress.

Above all us, Howard the Duck, like The Dark Crys­tal, was a child­hood favorite of mine because it was some­thing I enjoyed watch­ing with my family.

It was a fan­tas­tic, awful, bewil­der­ing and grossly under­rated cult classic.

The Trailer

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