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Now Playing - The Movie Review Podcast

Book Review: Howard the Duck by Ellis Weiner

Now Playing - The Movie Review Podcast

Venganza Media, Inc.

Tv & Film, Film History, Tv & Film:film Reviews, Film Reviews, Film Interviews

4.53K Ratings

🗓️ 15 March 2011

⏱️ 14 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

And you thought the MOVIE was bad..... This book review previously appeared in Issue 11 of Now Playing Podcast's sister podcast Marvelicious Toys. As that show is no longer, the review is published here as part of Now Playing. As we kick off Now Playing Podcast’s Marvel movie retrospective, Arnie turns to one of the strangest literary artifacts of the 1980s: the novelization of Howard the Duck. Written by humorist Ellis Weiner, this long-out-of-print paperback attempts to adapt George Lucas’s infamous cult film into prose, and in the process becomes something far stranger than a simple tie-in. From Hitchhiker’s Guide-inspired dueling narrators to extended satirical tangents skewering Reagan-era America, the book often seems less interested in Howard’s adventure than in mocking the very idea of adapting it. As Arnie recounts in his review, the result is a self-aware, occasionally hostile, and frequently baffling curiosity that seems to resent both its source material and its readers. Is this novelization a hidden gem for Marvel completists, a fascinating train wreck, or quite possibly the worst professionally published book Arnie has ever read? For collectors, it may be a dollar-bin novelty. For everyone else, it might just be proof that some ducks should never leave the pond.{Marvel Misfits Series} {Marvel Series} {Comic Book Movie Series} {Book Reviews}

Transcript

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0:00.0

Now playing it, you just started a new movie retrospective series.

0:06.2

It's going to span, oh, 15 months leading up to the Avengers, and we're doing all of the

0:12.1

Marvel Universe movies.

0:14.4

And where do we start, but where it started, Howard the Duck.

0:18.2

All right.

0:20.2

The very first Marvel comic hero on the big screen was Howard the Duck.

0:25.8

Well, for that review, I read the novelization of Howard the Duck, which I owned as a kid.

0:32.1

And I wanted to share with listeners the thought on this long out-of-print, collectible book that I read for the fifth time.

0:41.7

I want to state going in a number of biases here. First, despite its highly derided reputation,

0:47.1

I was a big fan of Howard the Duck when it came out in the 80s. I pre-ordered Howard the Duck on

0:51.8

DVD, and if you want to know my thoughts on Howard the Duck, the movie, if it is held up over the past 25 years, head over to nowplayingpodcast.com, where Stuart Jacob and I have done a very thorough review of that film. But as a fan of Howard the Duck, I did purchase the Howard the Duck novelization back in 1986. Twice, actually actually as I bought a copy on a teenage

1:11.5

trip to the mall but lost it while shopping at other stores and had to buy a

1:15.1

second copy. As this book is obviously long out of print I hit Amazon.com and got a

1:20.5

used copy in great condition for the princely sum of one dollar. I think this

1:24.9

novel exists now only as a collectible. I doubt if anyone's going to hear a review of the novel of Howard the Duck and go,

1:31.3

ooh, I should order that now.

1:33.3

Or, oh, I was gonna order that, but now I won't.

1:37.3

This novel is a collectible for Howard the Duck fans primarily,

1:40.3

and I'm willing to bet few that order this book online will actually go through

1:44.7

the trouble of reading it.

1:46.1

But I did go through that trouble, and I thought I would share my thoughts with other Marvel

1:49.6

collectors.

...

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