Howard the Duck
Hey, Do You Remember...?
Christopher Schrader
4.8 • 676 Ratings
🗓️ 24 November 2016
⏱️ 108 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We're kicking off a new tradition where every Thanksgiving we revisit a cinematic "turkey" - a movie that bombed at the box office and was reviled by critics and audiences alike. And this year, that turkey... is a duck.
Yup. The HDYR gang is going all the way back to 1986 to take another look at the first major misfire from George Lucas - Howard the Duck. This isn't just a terrible adaptation that completely betrays the spirit of its source material, it's also widely regarded as one of the worst films ever made. In the immediate aftermath of its failure, Lucas boldly declared that history would regard Howard a lot more favorably than its detractors did at the time. Well... here we are three decades later. Let's see.
Topics include: why the original plan to do this as a fully animated film was sidelined, the consequences of turning it into a live-action feature, all of the creepy elements that went completely over our heads as kids, the tonal whiplash that it's never able to reconcile or recover from, the silver lining of its disastrous performance, THAT scene, and much much more!
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, do you remember Howard the Duck? |
| 0:07.0 | Hello and welcome to Hey, do you remember Hey Do You Remember, a show where we reminisce about a movie or TV series we grew up with, then take off the rose-tinted glasses to see how it holds up. |
| 0:32.2 | I'm Chris. |
| 0:32.8 | I'm Donna. |
| 0:33.7 | And I'm Carlos. |
| 0:34.6 | And today we're revisiting Howard the Duck. |
| 0:53.1 | Thank you. And I'm Carlos. And today we're revisiting Howard the Duck. George Lucas. |
| 0:54.0 | It's 1985. You're hot off the unparalleled success of the Star Wars trilogy |
| 0:59.6 | and two Indiana Jones movies. You now have enough clout to do anything in the world you want. |
| 1:05.3 | So what's your next project going to be? It's a movie about a talking duck. And that's exactly what he made. |
| 1:12.8 | You have to remember, this is back when everything he touched turned to gold. |
| 1:16.9 | So even if you were a nervous studio executive, skeptical about a cinematic adaptation of a comic |
| 1:22.5 | book character most people had never heard of, you trusted George. |
| 1:26.1 | His track record was impeccable, and especially |
| 1:28.5 | if you were Universal Studios, who had previously declined the opportunity to jump on board that |
| 1:33.6 | Lucasfilm money train, this was your chance to rectify that mistake. Lucas had been interested |
| 1:39.0 | in bringing Howard to the big screen since the early 70s, and once he was finally in a position |
| 1:43.6 | to make that happen, |
| 1:44.7 | he recruited frequent collaborators, William Hike and Gloria Katz, to develop the script. |
| 1:49.6 | And here's the thing. They knew this weirdly existential comic about a misanthropic duck and his |
| 1:54.8 | pitch-black sense of humor was probably not an easy sell for a general audience. So that wasn't |
| 2:00.1 | their initial intention. They saw it |
... |
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