‘Heavy Metal’: the R-rated animation featuring John Candy
Like countless comedic performers before and after him, John Candy was known to dabble in voiceover work and lend his distinctively energetic tones to a number of characters that didn’t require him to step outside of the recording booth.
The most obvious was the animated series Camp Candy, which saw the star playing a version of himself who oversees a summer camp. He is found teaching various outdoor skills to a group of children before he launches off into a tangent and regal the viewer with a story told through the medium of flashback and narration across its three seasons and 39 episodes, with some live-action segments folded in as well.
He also voiced a horse in the Bobcat Goldthwait vehicle Hot to Trot, which finds the actor as an investment broker who inherits a talking equine companion from his late father, who happens to have a keen mind for making shrewd investment tips. It’s best not to dwell too long on that one, considering it tanked at the box office and landed five Golden Raspberry Award nominations, including ‘Worst Picture’. However, Candy did at least acquit himself well enough to be kept out of the ‘Worst Supporting Actor’ race.
He got into bed with Disney, too, voicing the albatross Wilbur in The Rescuers Down Under, which was intended to lead to a reunion with co-director Mike Gabriel on the Mouse House’s Pocahontas as an anthropomorphised turkey called Redfeather, before the character was scrapped altogether and the script rewritten following Candy’s passing in March 1994.
However, the first major voice-only role of his career was undoubtedly the most bizarre, and not only because it came in an R-rated cult classic. Adapted from the magazine of the same name, 1981’s Heavy Metal was a rock-and-roll fantasy in every sense of the word, even if it boasted an array of names that were much more closely associated with comedy.
Ivan Reitman was among the film’s producers. At the same time, Candy was joined in the ensemble by Harold Ramis, Eugene Levy, and Rodger Bumpass, the latter of whom would gain widespread recognition decades later for playing Squidward in SpongeBob SquarePants. Hence, it goes without saying Heavy Metal was pretty weird.
A 90-minute anthology split into nine segments and an epilogue, the movie weaved through time and space. It tells a loosely connected story with the presence of the evil Loch’nar knitting things together and Candy playing three different characters throughout the story.
One of them was Den, a nerd in his daily existence who rules over a fantastical world full of mythological beasts and scantily-clad women in another dimension as a supremely jacked warrior. He also voiced a desk sergeant in the segment ‘Harry Canyon’ and a robot in ‘So Beautiful and So Dangerous’, enshrining him as part of a bonkers, erotically-charged, violent, and eye-popping staple of the midnight movie circuit.
Heavy Metal proved so popular that David Fincher was spearheading a remake at one stage. Owner and publisher of the titular magazine, Kevin Eastman, revealed that he was going to direct a segment of the new version. It would feature Deadpool‘s Tim Miller, Guillermo del Toro, Gore Verbinski, Zack Snyder, and James Cameron, with Jack Black and Tenacious D planning to contribute a comedy chapter.
Disappointingly, it never came to fruition, even after the rights ended up in the hands of Robert Rodriguez. However, Fincher did realise his ambitions to a certain extent after channelling the spirit of Heavy Metal for his Netflix anthology series Love, Death & Robots, which was essentially a reinvention of the remake he was planning.
The calibre of the filmmakers who wanted in on the redux underlines just how much of an impact Heavy Metal made on the generation who grew up loving it, with Candy’s unlikely contributions as the jacked ruler of an outlandish kingdom playing a significant part in its lasting appeal.
