The surprising movie record set by ‘Howard the Duck’
For the last decade and a half, Marvel has reigned as the single biggest and most lucrative brand in all of cinema, but the comic book company’s feature-length live-action adaptations got off to a disastrous start when Howard the Duck tanked hard in the summer of 1986.
Despite boasting George Lucas as a producer and effects from Industrial Light & Magic, the bizarre comedy following the misadventures of an anthropomorphised waterfowl was a critical and commercial disaster that barely recouped its budget at the box office, before going on to win four Golden Raspberry Awards from seven nominations, including ‘Worst Picture’.
It has ended up becoming something of a cult favourite, though, with James Gunn even bringing the title character back into the fold as a recurring cameo presence in the Guardians of the Galaxy series. But what often gets overlooked among the more infamous aspects of its existence is that Howard the Duck ended up having a massive influence on the medium.
Robin Williams may have bailed from voicing Howard when it stifled his improvisational abilities, and the film boasts one of the most inexplicable sex scenes ever committed to celluloid, but it nonetheless broke entirely new ground for featuring the first digital wire removal in the history of the movie business.
For the opening sequence – which features Howard’s chair being launched through the walls and out of an apartment building – the wizards at ILM tried to use standard techniques to make it look convincing, but the wire was always perceptible on-screen.
Deciding that pioneering was the way forward, it just so happened that ILM had developed a new program called LayerPaint, which allowed artists to draw graphics on layers that were then placed over film footage. They also had one of the only digital scanners on the planet that could handle film, which led animator Jonathan Luskin to modify the program so it was capable of loading sequential frames.
Colleague Bruce Wallace would then comb through the footage to add in colours and textures over the frames where the wires were visible, ultimately removing them completely. Audiences would have had no idea watching Howard the Duck that it was blazing a brand new trail for the visual effects industry, but digital wire removal soon became a widely adopted practice.
Robert Zemeckis’ Back to the Future Part II, James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgement Day, and the Wachowski siblings’ The Matrix are just three of the notable blockbusters to have utilised the technique, with digital wire removal soon becoming a staple part of any effects-driven release.
The reputation of Howard the Duck remains less than stellar, but in terms of the impact it made, the unmitigated flop turned out to be a pivotal moment for pushing visual effects forward in the years leading up to the full-blown CGI revolution of the 1990s.
