The Marvel movie Tim Robbins wants to delete from history: “I was worried at the start”
When Tim Robbins was a young actor first making his way in Hollywood, he appeared in some genuine hits, such as The Sure Thing and the mammoth hit Top Gun. However, in these early years, he was also part of a film so thoroughly raked over the coals by critics that it ended up with a reputation as the worst movie ever made. To add insult to injury, it won four Razzie awards and somehow made the idea of a talking duck feel particularly uncool.
In 1986, the landscape of comic book movies was a world away from what it is today, where it seems like every obscure Marvel or DC character has already been committed to film many times over. Back then, though, the only superhero movies that had hit cinema screens were the Christopher Reeve Superman pictures, and that series had already begun to run out of steam by the third instalment. No Marvel character had appeared on the big screen since a low-budget Captain America serial in 1944 – until George Lucas came along.
After the release of American Graffiti in 1973, Star Wars creator George Lucas became interested in adapting a Marvel comic for the big screen. Rather than focusing on well-known characters like Spider-Man, Iron Man, the Fantastic Four, or Thor, Lucas set his sights on a less expected figure from the Marvel universe.
Instead, Lucas believed the best Marvel candidate for a movie adventure was Howard the Duck, an anthropomorphic waterfowl created by Steve Gerber whose stories were absurdist, existentialist satires of classic genres like film noir and horror. In his quirky tales, Howard was a grouchy, wannabe Casanova trapped against his will on Earth with human beings, whom he generally disdained. This made Howard’s tales extremely funny, but their existentialist elements also helped the series become the thinking man’s comic book. As Gerber put it, “Life’s most serious moments and most incredibly dumb moments are often distinguishable only by a momentary point of view.”
Unfortunately, during his journey from comic book page to the silver screen, Howard the Duck lost everything that made the character edgy and unique. Producer Gloria Katz missed the point of the character entirely when she said, “It’s a film about a duck from outer space. It’s not supposed to be an existential experience.” Howard’s personality was given a makeover in the movie, turning him from a sarcastic, obnoxious jerk into a much nicer, palatable hero. At the same time, his look was altered to make him considerably cuter than he was in the comics, and this made Robbins nervous.
“I think one of the things that we realised at the time was – at least I did from the very first day – was that the duck was kind of miscast,” Robbins told Mandatory in 2016. “We got the wrong duck to be in the movie. And I don’t mean the people that were inside the suit; I mean kind of the design and concept of who the character was.”
The star, who played a scientist tasked with returning Howard to his home world, was aware of the duck’s risqué characterisation in the source material, and this didn’t jive at all with the adorable animatronics and puppets he saw on-set. “In the comic book, it was this cigar-chomping, rude, skirt-chasing duck, and it got kind of cute-ified in the movie, and when I saw that on the set – it was very early on, one of the first days we were shooting – I was worried,” he confirmed. “I was worried at the start.”
Ultimately, Robbins was right to be worried, concluding, “You know, it could have been a better movie for sure.” Having his name attached to such a debacle can’t have been good for his career in those early years, and he’d likely have preferred the film not to have been made at all, if not for one thing: his paycheque. “I wound up getting paid twice for that movie because of all the overtime,” he chuckled. “So, I think more about that than about the quality of the movie.”
