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Tuesday, June 04, 2002
 
Ok, so I'm finally gonna get around to talking about the Gen 13 movie. Now, there's a complicated backstory as to why I never watched this 1998 film before.

Basically, Gen 13 is a comic book produced by Wildstorm Productions. Wildstorm is sort of an autonomous comic book company working within a larger one. At the time of the movie's creation, Wildstorm belonged to Image Comics, an independant comic company and the third largest in the American market. Now, producing this movie took lots of work, including securing the talent (Mark Hamill, John deLancie, and Cloris Leachman, to name a few). I believe this film started production in either 1995 or 1996, shortly after the comic book's creation. Various unnamed production problems delayed the film from being finished until 1998. Now, to release this as a direct-to-video movie, Wildstorm gave the distribution rights to Buena Vista Pictures (basically Disney, but with Touchstone and Hollywood Pictures thrown in. Still Will Eisner). Unfortunately, during the postponements, Wildstorm's owner, Jim Lee, decided to move Wildstorm from Image Comics to DC Comics. DC Comics is fully owned by Time-Warner Entertainment, which owns Warner Bros. Pictures. As a consequence, Buena Vista Pictures is in no way eager to release a film about a property owned by the competition.

However, there's still hope to see it. The movie's available on the bootleg market. How they got it, I don't know, but there is an indication it was shown at a San Diego Comic Con as evidenced here. For the life of me, I can't confirm this, though.

Whew, that was a lot.

All right, the movie is just a mildly entertaining adaptation of the Gen 13 miniseries which showed how the team came to be. It's done in the Batman Animated Series style, but they say curse words. I liked it except for a few things:

-- Rainmaker is a background character and Burnout is only in one scene (and he doesn't get any dialogue). Neither of them are a part of the team at the end of the movie.
-- While I think Cloris Leachman is perfect fot the part of Helga, it's hard not to think of her Frau Blucher character from Young Frankenstein.
-- John deLancie seems an odd choice for the voice of Lynch. I would have thought someone with a more gravelly voice would soung better. Maybe Michael Ironside.
-- The producers got rid of the character of Bliss, and instead made Fairchild Threshold's long-lost sister, despite the fact that they already named each character's respective fathers and made no attempt to say they were half-siblings.

I don't think I wasted my money on this (go e-bay!), and if you ever want to watch it, just give me a call.

Man, I don't think I've ever put so many links in one post as I have today...

posted by Phillip at 5:15 PM 0 comments
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