The Rocketeer was created in 1982 by the late Dave Stevens as a tribute to Depression-era movie serials and comic strips and such. Stevens had an affinity for the pop culture of the first half of the 20th century, having made a career of creating art in the style of that bygone era. Besides The Rocketeer, his best-known works were his illustrations of pinup model Bettie Page (who was also a supporting character in The Rocketeer).
The Phantom was created in 1936 by the late Lee Falk (who continued to write The Phantom comic strip until his death in 1999 at the age of 87), and was the very type of adventure story that Stevens was nostalgic for and trying to re-create with his Rocketeer character.
Both characters were adapted into live-action movies in the 1990s that took place in 1938 and would prove to be disappointments at the box office.
The Rocketeer film rights were sold by Stevens within a year of the character’s creation to Disney, but it took the better part of a decade for the movie to actually be made. Part of this was due to creative differences, including Disney wanting to change the design of the character’s outfit, and director Joe Johnston wanting to cast a relative unknown in the title role.
Eventually, the movie was released in 1991 with Billy Campbell in what he had hoped to be his breakout in the title role. Co-stars included former James Bond Timothy Dalton as the Errol Flynn-esque Neville Sinclair, Jennifer Connelly as Jenny Blake (a reworking of Page), and Alan Arkin as Peevy. Hopes of sequels (Stevens and screenwriters Danny Bilson and Paul De Meo envisioned this as a trilogy) were dashed by the movie’s poor box office and lukewarm reviews. This remains the only screen version of the Rocketeer, so far, at least—Disney’s been talking about a new Rocketeer movie for more than five years now.
The 1996 film version of The Phantom was one of many screen adaptations of the character, though the only live-action feature film. There was a movie serial in 1943 starring Tom Tyler, two animated series that featured the character (Defenders of the Earth in the 1980s and Phantom 2040 in the 1990s), a TV miniseries starring Ryan Carnes in 2010, and an unsuccessful pilot for a TV show in 1961 starring Roger Creed, Lon Chaney Jr., Paulette Goddard, and Richard Kiel.
Neither of these two films really did well with movie audiences, though both have something of a cult following now. (Johnston credits his directing of The Rocketeer with getting the gig to direct Captain America: The First Avenger.) It is safe to say that The Phantom‘s tag line of “SLAM EVIL!” remains the worst tag line in the entire history of Hollywood…
“I don’t work for no two-bit Nazi!”
The Rocketeer
Written by Danny Bilson & Paul De Meo & William Dear
Directed by Joe Johnston
Produced by Charles Gordon & Lawrence Gordon and Lloyd Levin
Original release date: June 21, 1991
In 1938, stunt pilot Clifford Secord tests his Gee Bee, which has been put together by his crew, led by “Peavy” Peabody. He flies right over a car chase—two feds are chasing a couple of gangsters who stole a personal rocket-pack from inventor Howard Hughes. One of the gangsters shoots at Secord’s plane, thinking that it belongs to the feds, and the Gee Bee is badly damaged and crashes. One gangster is killed, but the driver swaps out the rocket pack for a vacuum cleaner, hiding the rocket in an abandoned plane in a hangar. The car winds up crashing into a fuel tank and exploding, though the driver bailed out before that. Before he’s taken the hospital, the gangster tells the feds that Hughes’s property blew up with the car. The feds recover the wreckage and return it to Hughes. The inventor makes it clear that he will not try to make another rocket pack.
Secord and Peavy are devastated, as the airfield owner, Otis Bigelow, is charging them for the damage, and they’re out a plane. Bigelow talks them into reviving their clown act to pay down the debt, which Secord reluctantly agrees to. As he and Peavy are digging the clown plane out of mothballs, they find Hughes’s rocket pack, which the gangster hid in their plane.
They test it on a statue and discover that it works beautifully, though it needs a helmet for protection and to steer, as there’s no rudder. Peavy writes up specs for the rocket and designs a helmet. Secord wants to use this jet pack as a new flying act that will pay much better than the clown act. Peavy wants to test it further before they try it.
The gangsters who stole the rocket in the first place work for Eddie Valentine. Valentine, in turn, works for Neville Sinclair, an actor who has hired Valentine to retrieve the rocket. Valentine isn’t thrilled that one of his people is dead and that the feds are after him.
Secord takes his girlfriend, Jenny Blake, out on a date to see a movie. The newsreel before the picture talks about a German zeppelin that is flying across country and will arrive in Los Angeles soon. This might be important later.
The movie is a Sinclair picture about aviation, which Secord and his buddies pick apart at the Bull Dog Diner after the movie, to Blake’s annoyance. Blake is in Sinclair’s latest flick, though she didn’t get the part of the princess with one line of dialogue (that went to the producer’s niece, who is terrible), and is instead an extra.
Blake also finds out about Secord almost dying and losing the Gee Bee by accident, as Malcolm, one of the pit crew, mentions it, assuming she already knew. But Secord didn’t want to worry her, and then—because he hasn’t pissed her off enough—he also belittles her acting career. She then storms off in a huff.
Sinclair sends a massive thug named Lothar to question the driver in the hospital, who reveals where he hid it right before Lothar breaks him in two. (The nurse and cop guarding him are too busy listening to the radio to hear him until it’s too late.)
However, Valentine’s goons don’t find the rocket pack where the driver said it would be. They keep an eye on the air show, figuring that one of the pilots who rent space there and perform in the show might have it.
Secord is late to do the clown show, and Malcolm overhears Bigelow threatening his job if he doesn’t make it. Already guilty about spilling the beans to Blake, Malcolm puts on the clown suit and flies the plane. Unfortunately, he hasn’t flown a plane in 25 years, and he loses control of the bird. Secord puts on the rocket pack to enact a rescue, which he does, albeit with a certain amount of property damage. While Bigelow isn’t thrilled with the latter, he loves the attendant publicity, naming this new attraction “the Rocketeer.”
Peavy tracks down Secord where he crash landed, and they get away from what they think is the press, but is actually Valentine and his goons.
Secord goes to the set of Sinclair’s movie to tell Blake about the rocket, but he accidentally knocks over a fake wall before saying he’s there to see Blake. Sinclair angrily has Blake fired for this (it’s supposed to be a closed set), but then he overhears Secord telling Blake about his new find. Blake doesn’t want to hear it, and storms off. Sinclair tracks her down and rescinds his firing of her, and also asks her out to dinner at the South Seas Club (which is owned by Valentine).
Lothar goes to Bigelow to find out who the Rocketeer is, killing him when he’s done. Hughes, meanwhile, has learned that the wreckage the feds recovered isn’t his rocket. (“Congratulations, gentlemen—thanks to the diligence of the FBI, this particular vacuum cleaner will not fall into the wrong hands.”) The feds go to question Bigelow, but it’s too late. However, they see the impression of the address he wrote down for Lothar—which is Secord and Peavy’s house. Lothar is already there, beating the crap out of Secord and Peavy. When the feds show up, there’s a massive shootout. But the feds don’t cover the rear of the house for some odd reason, so all three manage to escape, Lothar with Peavy’s specs, Secord and Peavy with the actual rocket.
Valentine sends his goons to the Bull Dog, as it’s a popular pilot hangout, to try to find Secord and the rocket. Meanwhile, Sinclair takes Blake to dinner at the South Seas. Valentine is peeved that he’s too busy romancing some dame, but Sinclair explains that it’s Secord’s girlfriend, and he will get Secord’s location out of her with his charm and wit and good looks. Back at the Bull Dog, the goons get Blake’s rooming house number from where Secord (rather stupidly) wrote it on the wall next to the diner pay phone. But the girl who answers the phone reveals that Blake is at dinner with Sinclair. The goons are not happy about this, as they think Sinclair is pulling a fast one on Valentine. Two of them stay behind while two others go to the South Seas.
The pilots are able to overpower the two remaining thugs, and Secord uses the rocket pack to get to the South Seas ahead of the other two. He manages to get Blake away from Sinclair to warn her to get to safety, but then all hell breaks loose when Lothar recognizes Secord. The club is shot to ribbons, Secord flies all around the club in the rocket pack, doing even more damage, and then Sinclair is able to kidnap Blake (who only doesn’t run away because she sees Secord in the rocket pack).
Blake gets away from Sinclair by being a better actor than him and fooling him with a seductive act long enough to hit him on the head with a vase. (His own attempts to seduce her fail because he keeps using lines from his movies, and Blake has seen all of them.) She finds a secret room and discovers that Sinclair is actually working for the Nazis. Sinclair and Lothar find her in the secret room and she’s back to being a hostage.
Valentine calls Secord on Sinclair’s orders and tells him that, if he wants to see Blake alive again, he’ll bring the rocket to the Griffith Observatory.
Secord is then taken by the feds to Hughes, who already got Peavy. (Hughes is impressed with Peavy’s creation of a helmet to gain control of the rocket.) Secord is more than happy to turn the rocket over—after he rescues Blake. Hughes and the feds refuse. The Nazis are also trying to develop a personal rocket pack, and they think someone in Hollywood is a Nazi agent employing Valentine. Secord realizes that it’s Sinclair, and he escapes (using a model of Hughes’s Spruce Goose to get away, prompting the inventor to mutter, “That son of a bitch will fly!”).
Using the rocket pack, Secord flies to Griffith. He tells Valentine that Sinclair is a Nazi, which doesn’t make the gangster happy—he’s a criminal, but he’s an American criminal, dagnabbit!—and he turns on Sinclair. However, Sinclair has a platoon of German soldiers and a zeppelin (the one from the newsreel) up his sleeve.
However, the feds followed Secord, and a big-ass gunfight breaks out, with the mobsters and feds on one side (the smile Valentine gives one of the feds when the latter realizes that they’re on the same side is priceless) and the Nazis on the other. Sinclair gets away with Blake on the zeppelin, and Secord flies up to try to effect a rescue. He manages to defeat Lothar, but Sinclair has a gun to Blake’s head, and so Secord hands over the rocket pack—but not before removing the chewed gum that’s blocking a fuel leak. Sinclair flies away only to immolate himself on burning fuel. Secord and Blake are rescued from the zeppelin by Hughes and Peavy in one of the former’s tiny planes.
The next day, Sinclair is mourned as a victim of an attempt at Nazi sabotage. Hughes thanks Secord by giving him a brand-new Gee Bee to fly in the nationals. Blake also has a present for Peavy: the specs for the rocket pack, which she nabbed from Sinclair’s secret room before she was re-captured.
“I could kill you and feed your pink ass to the sharks!”
The Phantom
Written by Jeffrey Boam
Directed by Simon Wincer
Produced by Alan Ladd Jr. and Robert Evans
Original release date: June 7, 1996
A group of treasure hunters arrive at the jungle island of Bengalla in 1938. They’ve kidnapped a local boy to serve as guide as they drive down a dirt road and across a rickety bridge. Their theft of a silver skull is interrupted by the Phantom, whose presence is a surprise to Quill, the thieves’ leader, as he killed the Phantom years earlier.
The Phantom manages to capture most of the thieves, and rescue the boy, but Quill gets away with the skull. As they fight, the Phantom sees that Quill has the spider-web tattoo of the Sengh Brotherhood, the ancient order of pirates whose actions led to the creation of the Phantom twenty generations ago. Believed to be immortal, the mantle of the Phantom is actually passed down from father to son. (Quill killed the current Phantom’s father, who was the 20th.)
Diana Palmer returns home to New York from an adventure in the Yukon only to see that her uncle and aunt are throwing a dinner party for charity. Her uncle, Dave Palmer, runs a newspaper, and he’s investigating a businessman named Xander Drax, who has suspicious ties.
The most recent clue is a spider-web symbol that relates to searches into occult matters that Drax is making at the local library. Drax denies these charges, though the elder Palmer shares them with the mayor and police commissioner. (He doesn’t know that the latter is in cahoots with Drax.) His niece offers to travel to Bengalla to investigate further, as he can’t stay away from the paper that long.
Palmer boards a sea plane, which is hijacked near Bengalla by Sala, a woman in Drax’s employ. She kidnaps Palmer and takes her to one of Drax’s boats, where Quill and Sala both question her.
The Phantom learns of Palmer’s kidnapping from British Captain Horton, an ally of his who publicly denies the Phantom’s existence. But the Phantom seems to know Palmer personally.
With the help of the boy Quill suborned as a guide, the Phantom finds the boat and rescues Palmer, though she carries her own weight, too. They escape on a plane, but are forced to crash it when gunfire punctures a fuel line. They go the rest of the way to the Phantom’s secret headquarters on horseback, where they meet Horton. Palmer shows them the spider-web image, and they realize that it’s the Sengh Brotherhood they’re after.
The skull Quill stole at the beginning is one of three—the others are a gold skull and a jade one. When put together, they have immense power. The Phantom can’t let Drax or the Sengh Brotherhood get their hands on them. But the skulls have been lost for centuries.
Horton sees that Palmer makes it back to New York safely, and the Phantom removes his mask and hood and travels to New York on his own as Kit Walker. Palmer and Walker went to college together, but he left suddenly when his father died, and he had to take over the “family business.” (That cover story is both the truth and nowhere near the whole truth.) Palmer seems to have gotten over Walker.
Another of Palmer’s suitors, a bored rich kid named Jimmy Wells, recalls seeing a jade skull at a local museum when he was a kid, and sure enough, the skull is there. Walker is about to take it when Drax shows up and takes it for himself. Two of the skulls together will point to the third, and when Drax puts the silver and jade ones together, they fire a laser on a map that hits the Devil’s Vortex.
Keeping Palmer as a hostage, Drax sends Quill off with Walker to question him as to his interest in the skulls, but Walker is able to get away and change into his Phantom outfit. He stays one step ahead of Drax’s people, but Drax himself makes it to the docks (it helps that he has a police escort thanks to the corrupt commissioner) and flies away on a sea plane. The Phantom hitches a ride on a pontoon until they arrive at an island in the Devil’s Vortex.
That island is the secret headquarters of the Sengh Bortherhood. They have the gold skull, and the leader, Kabai Sengh, has no interest in a partnership with Drax when he can just take what he wants. He only listens to Drax for as long as he does because Quill is part of the brotherhood. (The brotherhood’s ill treatment of Palmer leads Sala to switch sides.) Kabai Sengh also claims that they need a fourth skull to control it, which is news to Drax.
The Phantom has been tracking them, and ambushes the group. A battle ensues, with both sides being badly hurt, and Kabai Sengh tossed into shark-infested waters. But Drax manages to put all three skulls together. However, he can barely control the power, because he doesn’t have the fourth skull—the Phantom, however, does, as it’s the skull on his trademark ring. He uses it to zap the three skulls, and they explode, killing Drax and destroying the Sengh Brotherhood’s stronghold.
He tells Palmer his origin story, but she herself figures out that the Phantom is Walker. (It’s not like it isn’t obvious, since he has the same voice and cheekbones and jawline.) Walker claims he can only reveal his secret to the woman he wishes to marry, and Palmer wonders what he will do if the woman says no.
Saying neither yes nor no, she buggers off with Sala in a plane, leaving the 21st Phantom to gallop off on his horse.
“How do I look?” “Like a hood ornament.”
Both these movies have a great deal in common, besides being live-action adaptations of comic characters. They both take place in 1938, they both have charismatic stars with movie-star good looks, as it were, whose careers weren’t quite what they had hoped after they took these roles. And they both do a superb job of finding actors who don’t look at all out of place in the era, as you could easily see the likes of Treat Williams or Alan Arkin or Timothy Dalton or Bill Smitrovich or Paul Sorvino (who was pretty much born to wear a pinstripe suit and hat and wield a Tommy gun) or Kristy Swanson in a pre-World War II flick.
But The Rocketeer is an eminently enjoyable movie, whereas The Phantom is as forgettable as its slogan (“slam evil”? seriously, guys?) is doofy.
Screenwriters Bilson and De Meo (who also worked on the underappreciated 1990 Flash TV series) and director Johnston do a fine job of channeling the era while still keeping a modern sensibility about it. The characters use some period slang, and Terry O’Quinn and Tiny Ron both do superb jobs of channeling Howard Hughes and Rondo Hatton (who made a career out of playing big thugs like Lothar—Ron was also made up to look like Hatton), and Dalton is the perfect person to play a swashbuckling actor with a dark side. (Sinclair was based on Errol Flynn, specifically the version of Flynn portrayed in Charles Higham‘s 1980 unauthorized biography, which wasn’t debunked until after this film was written.)
Best of all, though, is that The Rocketeer is fun. The easy camaraderie among the pilots, the tense confrontations between Sinclair and Valentine, the struggles of Blake to make it in the world she loves, and just the straight-up adventure of it all—it’s a delight from start to finish. In fact, the only real flaw is the way Secord treats Blake. I totally get what he sees in her, but it’s not really clear why she continues to see him, especially the way he constantly puts her career down. I mean, yeah, 1938, but still, she can probably do better.
Jeffrey Boam and Simon Wincer have much less luck with their interpretation of the Phantom. The dialogue is lifeless—I struggled mightily to find a worthwhile quote to headline that movie’s summary—and the performances are a colossal waste of a bunch of fine actors. Williams in particular spends the entire movie half-shouting in an even tone, making it sound like he’s performing the film by reading off cue cards for people whose hearing aids have broken. Patrick McGoohan is an extra-special waste, as every time he showed up, I had forgotten he was in the film—it takes a particular talent to make you forget all about a Patrick McGoohan performance, but Wincer managed it, and that’s not a compliment. Smitrovich is excellent as always, but he really only gets two good scenes before he’s shoved aside for his niece.
The good news is that Swanson is the star of the show, as Palmer holds her own, not settling to be just the hostage. (The one way in which Phantom is superior to Rocketeer, as Blake spends the entire movie being the victim of other characters’ whims, only taking charge once, and that victory is short-lived when Sinclair and Lothar re-capture her.) In addition, Catherine Zeta Jones is having a grand old time as Sala, but the character’s heel-turn is a bit too fast and unconvincing. Having said that, while I still have absolutely no desire to see a sequel with the Phantom, I’d love to watch the spinoff movie about Palmer and Sala flying off and having adventures and making men look dumb.
And the main reason why I’m in no rush to see the sequel that never was going to happen anyhow is because holy crap, Billy Zane is dull. He has the look of the Phantom down, and he moves with an effortless grace that works perfectly for the role. But his line readings are deadly dull—not helped by the lines themselves being just as deadly dull—and he radiates absolutely no presence as the Phantom or as Walker.
Bill Campbell, for all that Secord is kind of an ass, is at least well-meaning and earnest. He wants to fly more than anything, and he obviously enjoys the heck out of being the Rocketeer. He actually takes charge of the movie, even though Arkin pretty much steals the show as the delightfully eccentric Peevy. (His babbling about engineering with O’Quinn’s Hughes is one of the high points.)
To this day, I don’t understand why The Rocketeer wasn’t more popular. It has done better as a cult hit than it did as a theatrical release, but we’re still waiting for a new Rocketeer film two and a half decades later. However, I have no trouble understanding why there hasn’t been a new Phantom film. The character’s white-savior origins are dodgy enough (the movie mostly avoid this by doing as little with the natives as possible, limited to one bit of assistance), and this version does nothing to mitigate that or give you something else to distract you from it. It just sits there, lifelessly.
We’re taking next week off for Thanksgiving, but we’ll be back on the 1st of December with two more 1990s adaptations, Barb Wire and Judge Dredd.
Keith R.A. DeCandido is the Author Guest of Honor at Atomacon 2017 this weekend in North Charleston, South Carolina. He’ll be selling and signing books as well as doing lots of programming—his schedule can be found here.
I much prefer The Phantom to The Rocketeer. Roger Ebert expresses my views precisely in his review of the former.
I remember (if vaguely), the big promotion to-dos for both, and yet I wasn’t surprised at their relative lack of performance. But it isn’t like there weren’t a lot of movie flops at the time. I’m wondering if anybody is planning on remaking any of those too.
My mind canon has Kristy Swanson and Catherine Zeta Jones becoming lovers. They had a lot more chemistry than Swanson did with ol’ Billy Zane.
How could you not mention Patrick McGoohan as the Phantom’s ghost dad? He is literally the only reason to watch this movie!
Dare I admit I like THE PHANTOM better? THE ROCKETEER is one of those movies that, on paper, sounds like grand pulp fun, but which left me underwhelmed. For one thing, it suffers from a bad case of origin-itis. It takes forever for him to finally put the damn costume and jet-pack and become The Rocketeer, at which point the movie is practically over!
And I liked Zane as the Phantom. He does a good job of conveying a sorta Christopher Reeve-style earnestness and decency that make me think that, in another universe, Zane would have made a good Superman. Plus, Catherine Zeta-Jones as a sky pirate!
I like The Rocketeer a lot. It’s a fun story, it captures the period quite well, and it’s a pretty darn faithful adaptation of the comics, or so I gather (I haven’t read them). The cast is very good, and I don’t think Jennifer Connelly has ever been more luminous and captivating, except maybe in Hulk, where she was the best thing about the movie by a huge margin. It has one of James Horner’s better scores, although it’s from the era when most of his scores sounded so much alike that I got sick of hearing them.
The main thing I had a problem with was the body count. The Rocketeer came out at a time when I’d gotten pretty sick of the American feature film industry’s addiction to having the heroes kill the villains en masse. I guess it’s consistent with the ’30s and ’40s movies it’s homaging, but still, I wished the Rocketeer had been a less violent hero, in keeping with the light tone of the story overall, and in line with the protagonists of Bilson & DeMeo’s TV shows at the time. (In addition to The Flash, they also did a short-lived adaptation of DC’s Human Target with Rick Springfield, and the initial network version of the Knight Rider-ish Viper on NBC, both of which had considerably more non-lethal protagonists than their later incarnations.)
As for The Phantom, I don’t remember it as well, but I recall finding it flawed but moderately entertaining. I recently saw George Pal’s 1970s adaptation of Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze, starring Ron Ely as the pulp hero who inspired Superman, and I think they’re kind of similar — period pieces that are pretty faithful to the source, earnest but clumsy, somewhat campy in a way that almost but doesn’t quite work.
Keith, don’t you mean that Zeta-Jones’s character makes a face turn, i.e. bad turned good? As I understand the usages from TV Tropes, a heel-face turn or face turn is when a “heel” (bad-guy wrestler) becomes a “face” (good-guy wrestler), and a face-heel turn or heel turn is when a good guy turns out to be bad.
The Rocketeer is one of my favorite movies of all time. It might have been edited to be a little more snappy (sometimes the scenes tend to linger), but other than that it is great. And it has air racers, mad science, plucky underdogs, thrilling rescues, a dirigible, a beautiful and plucky heroine, a wise mentor, scenery-chewing villains given to evil monologues, the best Howard Hughes cameo ever, and even one of those good old-fashioned cartoon newsreel expository lumps in the middle. The Rocketeer looked great in flight; the only glitch in the CGI was a somewhat fake looking flaming death scene. The movie did a great job of bringing one of my favorite comics to life. If you look at the shelves of my den, you can get a feel for what characters I have enjoyed over the years, and the fact that there are three different Rocketeer figures is no accident.
The Phantom had some good elements, but was a bit too cheesy at key moments to work. I still watch it when I come across it on cable, but while it is fun, it certainly does not rank among great films. Catherine Zeta Jones must have had fun filming it, and her role was one of the best points in the film.
princessroxana: Um, I did mention McGoohan. Read the review segment of the post again…
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I always loved The Rocketeer, in large part because it was the moment where Tim Dalton – after years of trying so hard to be the frowny serious one – seemed visibly to relax and have fun, and be all the better for it.
“It wasn’t lies! It was acting!”
Another highlight of The Rocketeer is the beautiful score by James Horner.
And for me the gag at the end where Sinclair about to make his rocket powered escape saying “I’ll miss Hollywood” before falling to his fiery death on the Land part of the infamous Hollywoodland sign, missing the Hollywood part.
https://youtu.be/6jhpJzHPiNc
@7/AlanBrown: As a 1991, pre-Jurassic Park film, The Rocketeer relied on old-school optical effects (e.g. miniatures, bluescreens, stop-motion model animation, and matte paintings) rather than CGI.
Here’s a contemporary Entertainment Weekly article about the shooting of the zeppelin crash: http://ew.com/article/1991/07/12/behind-scenes-rocketeer/
And here’s a retrospective piece from the film’s stop-motion animator talking about how he created the Rocketeer flying sequences: https://vfxblog.com/2016/06/21/animator-tom-st-amand-reflects-on-25-years-of-the-rocketeer/
Old-school effects techniques may not look as lifelike as CGI at its best, but the process of how they were created was enormously more interesting and fun.
Also a word for that brief simulated animated Nazi propaganda film in THE ROCKETEER that uncannily captures the aesthetics and animation of that era.
@6 ” I recently saw George Pal’s 1970s adaptation of Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze, starring Ron Ely as the pulp hero who inspired Superman,”
Superman’s main inspiration was Philip Wylie’s novel GLADIATOR (1930), which features a character who is invulnerable to bullets (only the largest artillery shells are capable of hurting him), can leap enormous heights and distances, lift objects weighting many tons, etc.
Krad, yes, I found it. I missed it before, sorry. Pretty much all I remember about the movie is Patrick McGoohan.
I’m a straight woman but I can totally see picking Catherine Zeta-Jones’ Sala over Billy Zane’s Phantom as a romantic partner.
@11 Thanks for the info. I hadn’t remembered that the movie was pre-CGI. Knowing that, I have to say the way the effects held up so well is even more impressive.
I do remember, years later, being extremely happy to hear that Joe Johnston had been selected to direct Captain America: The First Avenger. Having seen how well he captured the spirit of the era as the director of The Rocketeer, I knew that Cap would be in good hands!
@13/trajan23: Yes, I know about Gladiator, but we’re talking about a muscular, square-jawed pulp hero whose first name was Clark, whose nickname was the Man of Bronze, and who had a Fortress of Solitude in the Arctic. So obviously Doc was an influence on Superman as well.
I think The Rocketeer would make a fine reboot.
However, The Phantom strikes me as problematic in this day and age. I always associate that comic strip with dark-skinned primitives oh-and-ahing over the “Ghost who Walks”. Even in the best light, it has colonial sympathies. Compared to Black Panther, it looks very out-of-place and inappropriate.
I’m a big fan of The Rocketeer. One of the few movies I’d consider a spiritual sequel to the Indiana Jones movies. It really nails that old-fashioned aw-shucks serial adventure. A shame it didn’t do well at the box office. The blueprints were obviously sequel bait.
FYI, there’s a recent podcast called The Rocketeer Minute that analyzes the movie one minute at a time. Billy Campbell shares his thoughts in several episodes. A good listen for fans.
The Phantom could probably stand a mixed-race casting, it isn’t like he needs to be any particular ethnicity.
Keith, will you be reviewing The Shadow?
@19, it would be VERY surprising if the Phantom wasn’t mixed race after twenty generations in Africa.
@20, The Shadow is one of my guilty pleasures. I know it’s not a good movie but I enjoy it. And Margo’s dresses are gorgeous, I especially like the green velvet number.
@19 & 21: In fact, there’s actually kind of an in-story reason for the Phantoms not to be ethnically mixed. Part of the way the Phantom works is that the son always takes over the role from the father upon his death, so that the Phantom will appear to be immortal and able to return from the dead — hence “The Ghost Who Walks.” So it’s part of the family tradition to make sure that every Phantom gets married and has a son who can eventually take over for him and pretend to be him (and also be given the name Kit Walker, though it’s less clear why that’s necessary for his civilian identity). So since his costume leaves his face and hands visible, it would kind of spoil the illusion if a white Phantom turned over the mask to a biracial son. So even if there were some generation of Kit Walker out there who had a son with an African woman, he’d still have a duty to his lineage to marry a white woman and have another son who could inherit the mantle. Which, now that I put it in those terms, just intensifies the intrinsic white-savior problem with the concept.
Apparently consistency of appearance isn’t that important. There have been female Phantom with impressive chests in the comic strip.
On the marketing side of things, I remember well seeing The Rocketeer movie poster (by John Mattos) in the lobby of our local theater when I was eight years old. I’d never heard of the comic, but the art deco imagery was captivating. ‘Wow! What is that?’ I’m not sure I even saw the trailer. The poster was enough. Kudos to Disney for trying something different from the usual giant actor faces over the title.
Suffice to say, my parents and I were there to see the movie that summer—among the half dozen or so people in the theater. Then the film started and the picture was off, where the bottom half of the frame was on top and the top was on the bottom. An inauspicious start, but we had a good time anyway.
@23/roxana: I think the female Phantom was temporary, filling in for her brother while he was injured.
I’m reminded of when John Byrne later used the same joke for the Golden Age Joker turning on the Red Skull in his Batman-Captain America crossover comic…
A year after The Rocketeer movie there was a work in the NorWesCon art show that had the character in costume with his uniform burned off – an accurate depiction of what would have happened to an actual rocket carried in that position. Real rocket packs have their nozzles much further away from the body. Nice costume, but guaranteed to cause a flame-to-butt interaction
22, that’s really more an excuse not to do it, but given the sheer likelihood of facial divergence(the mask might cover the eyes and hair, but not the nose) and even variances in Caucasian skin-tone, let alone the possibility of scars, acne, and even the effects of aging, it’s a tissue paper-thin reasoning that blows away rather quickly.
Especially over 20 generations of world-trotting heroes that themselves have married quite diversely already.
I can understand wanting to address the concern, but it’s not terribly hard to do so.
23, indeed, not even disguised under a boyishly slim physique, which itself represents a bit of a problem over the years when you think about it.
The Phantom is just escaping from the reality of differing appearances by ignoring it, nothing more.
@29/LordVorless: Just to be clear, I’m not defending The Phantom‘s racial politics — on the contrary, I’m critiquing it by pointing out that its premise is built to create an excuse for Kit Walker to only marry white women — and probably white women of a certain specific type, to maximize the chance of the sons continuing to resemble their fathers. There’s a touch of eugenics to the premise on top of the white-savior colonialism.
Although, of course, at any time in the first several decades of the strip’s existence, it would’ve been taken for granted by most of its audience that a white man would only ever consider marrying a white woman. Or maybe an Asian woman, though she’d then be treated as exoticized and fetishistic.
First of all Lee Falk never drew the Phantom, he did write it up to his death. Ray Moore was the first artist for the strip.
I think the Rocketeer was almost a perfect adaptation of the comic. Falling down on junking the Betty Page look-alike girlfriend and her pin-up girl occupation. (But the only actress I can think of that could pull that off would be Pauly Perrete and she was probably just a kid then! Quick Wiki check, nope born in ’69, she coulda done it.)
The Phantom, in the opinion of a life-long Phantom fan who acknowledges that Hollywood can’t touch any property without mucking it up somehow, is a good but flawed film. You mentioned Patrick McGoohan but I don’t think you mentioned that he plays the ghost of Walker’s Dad who mainly shows up to bust the boy’s chops. That aspect and the power ring duel at the end (which encompasses the whole magic angle imbued into the Skull Ring thing) were the things I would like to change about the film. One of the gimmicks of the strip is the Phantom Chronicles, wherein each Phantom records his adventures as handbooks for succeeding generations. They could have had Zane read the books and filmed interesting flashbacks showing us what he reads.
The Phantom’s reason for existence is to fight piracy and there are still pirates, in many forms, including, to my mind, terrorists. So he could, possibly, be made relevant today.
The white savior angle could be disarmed by showing how they help and often save him. (Expecting lots of flak for that statement.)
There have been different looking Phantoms in the 21 generations, one that springs to mind is described as having the build of a fireplug. People aren’t as superstitious now as in the 30s (if they ever really were) so the whole “Man Who Cannot Die” thing is as questionable as “Criminals are a cowardly and superstitious lot, I will become a BAT!” And Warner Bros. fall all over themselves to keep Batman in the cinemas.
30, I never thought you were, I merely think your reasoning as offered is poor, as physical appearance is highly variable with descent, and relying on the premise of a consistency in spouse choices when it’s established that the Phantoms are known for seeking out a diverse assortment of women to marry (leaving aside the inconsistencies present), is even worse.
That said reasoning is lacking in conjecture is another problem, but since you’re not writing a Lee Falk biography, it’s not much of one. If you were, I’d be deeply troubled though.
And of course, whatever would be the thinking of the time, that time is not now. So we need not consider ourselves beholden to it in terms of what we might support.
31, indeed, many of the conceits of the past do not necessarily last so well today, and if we want to keep the premises, while altering some details, well, it isn’t like that is something new either. Just check out Arthurian mythos!
@31/Paul McCall: I wouldn’t say that terrorists in the purest sense are the equivalent of pirates. Today we tend to use “terrorist” as a scare label for anyone we see as a villain, but strictly speaking it refers to someone who uses tactics that instill terror and dismay in a civilian population in order to pursue a political or strategic objective. A pirate is simply a thief. The two can overlap — certainly the leaders of the so-called Islamic State are more pirates than the actual religious leaders they pretend to be, and some nations in the past would recruit pirates (privateers) to harass and terrorize enemy ships — but they aren’t automatically the same thing.
@32/LordVorless: It’s not my reasoning, it’s the strip’s. Reporting something is not endorsing it. We’re talking about a work of fiction, and lots of fiction ignores genetic realities and postulates the conceit of children bearing a striking resemblance to their parents or ancestors. It doesn’t have to be realistic in order to be true to the storytellers’ intentions; after all, there’s nothing realistic about a strange visitor from another planet who can change the course of mighty rivers and bend steel in his bare hands, or about an Amazon princess who can deflect bullets and fly an invisible plane.
If you’re correct that the strip has shown the Phantoms seeking out a variety of different types of women, then, yes, I am incorrect about that, but that’s an error of fact, not reasoning. There’s no call to be so ad hominem about it.
33, based on your posts and my experience, I see the reasoning as your offering your own ideas. What the strip is doing, is hand-waving the nature of appearance across many generations, for a story conceit(easily lost itself in the art of the original strip anyway), while you’re trying to add more substance (realism as it were) to it than the story itself attempts. Mostly because I’ve never seen this idea from the material (or the creators, diverse lot they themselves are), but if you want to offer citations, go ahead.
Otherwise, I will see it as your conjecture that you are basing on your interpretation of the story. Or if you want to present it as somebody else’s ideas, I suggest you add such a disclaimer more boldly in the future, like by saying “I have heard the idea” or whatever strikes your fancy.
In any case, the wives while even allowing for inconsistencies and reversions, do not follow themselves a uniform pattern, making it even more dubious to believe. Me, I just chalk it down to not thinking too much about it, and walking away.
And FWIW, there are lots of questions (and yes, conjectures) about Superman and Wonder Woman too. Some of them have even been “answered” in the various stories. Or editorials, as Larry Niven famously provided in Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex.
@31, an enemy who keeps coming back However many times you kill him strikes me as being way spookier than a guy in a bat suit.
35, now I’m trying to think of the time I saw something which had Batman training whole squads of Replacement Robins…
One thing I’ve only come to appreciate over time as I’ve seen more older movies is how many references The Rocketeer packed in. The chewing gum for luck is from (IIRC) Test Pilot, lightening the zeppelin’s load by having people exit sans parachute is from Hell’s Angels (complete with “For ze fatherland”), etc.
Man, Catherine Zeta-Jones as Sala in the Phantom ( and her performance in the Antonio Banderas Zorro films as Elena) makes me long for an alternate time-line where she plays Talia Al Ghul in a Batman movie.
All I want to say is I LOVE the Rocketeer – it’s very much a period adventure piece, in that same faux 30s reality as Indiana Jones, and shares much of the same sense of fun.
And Timothy Dalton is just loving taking the opportunity to chew the scenery, its a total change from his previous work as Bond.
Throwing in a modern reference to that whole “man wearing a bat suit” thing. In the Justice League movie (which I saw Friday night), Aquaman made fun of the whole bat suit thing. So even the movies are making fun of the costume that creates fear trope.
@37 One other “reference” to older films is the “patriotic gangsters” (Paul Sorvino saying he may be a crook but he’s still a good American) that was the main plot point in “All Through the Night (1941) where Humphrey Bogart leads a gang of Broadway gamblers and racketeers against a cell of Nazi saboteurs.
I am probably the perfect target audience for The Rocketeer; big fan of the comics, love stuff with a similar sensibility like Betty Page pinups, Xenozoic Tales/Cadillacs & Dinosaurs, Armageddon 2419, Alex Raymond and Al Williamson, and Jennifer Connelly. I saw this movie when it first came out.
And yet, the only thing I can remember from it is that Timothy Dalton was an awesome dashing-but-mustache-twirling villain and the we-may-be-gangsters-but-we’re-America-gangsters flip.
I think one of the issues with the film was that it came out at a time when people had lost their awe of manned flight. But at the same time there wasn’t yet enough time for people to be really nostalgic about that kind of pulp SF/adventure tale.
I absolutely love these two films, particularly The Phantom, as I am a fan of the character. Both films achieved what they set out to do, they were effective adaptations of the comics… it’s only too bad that they didn’t have the success they deserved.
Looking at the summer of 1991, it’s maybe a bit surprising that The Rocketeer was beaten at the box office by Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, City Slickers, Dying Young, and The Naked Gun 2 1/2 during its first two weeks, but a week later a little movie called Terminator 2 was released. Cliff Secord didn’t have a chance.
44, yeah, I’ve always wondered how many decent movies were killed by a blockbuster sucking all the energy away.
I’m sure Disney hoped they had a blockbuster on their hands with The Rocketeer, too. It had many of the elements that made the Indiana Jones series a hit. But—and we laugh at it now—Robin Hood and that Bryan Adams song were everywhere that summer. Then Arnold came along and, well, terminated any hope Disney had left.
And that was 1991, folks. Look at the movie schedule now. The calendar is packed with blockbusters. Superhero movies in November? No wonder overall ticket sales are down. Audiences are exhausted.
We recorded The Rocketeer onto VHS at one point when I was a kid (I’m guessing it was the Disney Sunday Movie or something) and man we watched the heck out of that thing. So much fun. I must have been 13 or 14 at the time and, uh, wow Jennifer Connelly.
Adding my vote to the others for The Phantom as the better movie. My own order of enjoyment is The Phantom – The Shadow – The Rocketeer. I quite enjoyed The Rocketeer; I just don’t think the leads had as much fun making it as it seems obvious was happening in the other two.
The Rocketeer absolutely, fundamentally and emphatically, needed another action set piece. It’s just not exciting enough, it under delivers on the thrills that are so essential to the cliffhanger genre it tackles.
@49/Cobalt Blue: Action is fine, but I’m more thrilled every time Jennifer Connelly is onscreen…
The idea of ‘more action set pieces’ is, in my opinion, one of the biggest problems with superhero and action movies today; they’re overstuffed, overwrought, and overlong. Rocketeer comes in at a lean 108 minutes. Exactly the length these kind of movies should be.
To be honest, I tend to think of the Ghost Who Walks as less “White Saviour” and more “Deniable Asset” – what could be more convenient for some remote tribe facing regular (albeit small-scale) incursions from foreign threats than having a one man army crusading for Justice on his own dime while their own sons & daughters get on with daily business in greater safety as a result? (Especially since they can point to that self-same one man army and say “He can’t be one of ours, he’s white!” should anyone ask).
Also, I can’t help but think that it makes more sense for The Phantom to get his start somewhere far east of Africa (perhaps in the Malay Archipelago – what they used to call the ‘Pirate Islands’ back in the day) and then move to ‘The Dark Continent’ only after the modern world starts making things much, much quieter in his traditional stamping grounds (The name ‘Bengalla’ more naturally suggests a location in the Bay of Bengal than on the coast of Africa, after all).
Also, THE ROCKETEER is peachy keen. That is all.