Knowledge Waits is a feature where I just share some bit of comic book history that interests me.
With the news of Ava DuVernay directing an upcoming New Gods film for Warner Bros, CBR managing editor, Albert Ching, asked me to revisit a classic Comic Book Legends Revealed about how a 1987 film was, in a way, a New Gods films over thirty years ago!
RELATED: Ava DuVernay to Direct DC's The New Gods Movie for Warner Bros.
In the mid 1980s, Cannon Films was riding high. Their strategy of making lots of low-budget films was working out, as their Chuck Norris films were making HUGE money on extremely small budgets. Here's the thing, though, their entire strategy was making lots of cheap films so that they only needed one of them to hit it big to pay off everything else. Now that they were making so much money off of their Chuck Norris films, they decided to start spending more money....a LOT more money.
In the mid-1980s, the hottest new media franchise was Masters of the Universe. Cannon outbid everyone to get the license to turn the toy line into a film. Here's the thing, though, the owners of Cannon knew nothing about Masters of the Universe. They just knew that it was popular. When they then got a chance to take over production on the next Superman film, they quickly agreed (they knew who Superman was, ya know?). They spent so much money when both films disappointed at the box office, Cannon went out of business.
But anyhow, since they didn't really know the material, director Gary Goddard and writer David Odell had a lot of freedom with the film, creatively...
Okay, so I know what you're thinking, "Gotcha, Brian, Masters of the Universe was barely like the Masters of the Universe TV series, but so what?"
Aha, but that's where the New Gods tie-in!
Go to the next page to see Gary Goddard write about how the film was essentially an ode to Jack Kirby...
Page 2: [valnet-url-page page=2 paginated=0 text='Dedicated%20to%20Kirby!']
Jack Kirby once made a comment to the Comic Shop News that Masters of the Universe was the best New Gods film and Goddard wrote in to Byrne's comic book series, Next Men, to say:
"As the director of Masters of the Universe, it was a pleasure to see that someone got it. Your comparison of the film to Kirby's New Gods was not far off. In fact, the storyline was greatly inspired by the classic Fantastic Four/Doctor Doom epics, The New Gods and a bit of Thor thrown in here and there. I intended the film to be a "motion picture comic book," though it was a tough proposition to sell to the studio at the time. "Comics are just for kids," they thought. They would not allow me to hire Jack Kirby who I desperately wanted to be the conceptual artist for the picture...
I grew up with Kirby's comics (I've still got all my Marvels from the first issue of Fantastic Four and Spider-Man through the time Kirby left) and I had great pleasure meeting him when he first moved to California. Since that time I enjoyed the friendship of Jack and Roz and was lucky enough to spend many hours with Jack, hearing how he created this character and that one, why a villain has to be even more powerful than a hero, and on and on. Jack was a great communicator, and listening to him was always an education. You might be interested to know that I tried to dedicate Masters of Universe to Jack Kirby in the closing credits, but the studio took the credit out."
Fascinating.
You can really see it in the film.
Hopefully, though, DuVernay will make it so that the best New Gods film is an actual, you know, New Gods film!
That's it for this installment! If you have any ideas for interesting pieces of comic book history, drop me a line at brianc@cbr.com!