ScribbleKing

Movies that Time Forgot: The Shadow (1994)

The Shadow was released in a time when superhero movies were almost more prominent than they are now. It was based not so much on a comic, but on a radio play that started airing in 1931, and which then made it's way to pulp novels and eventually also comics. Not the most popular superhero you can base your movie on then, which didn't really turn out well for movie studio Universal, director Russell Mulcahy and star Alec Baldwin, who had all hoped for Batman-like success for their highly stylized superhero flick. The lack of success is dissapointing, especially The Shadow is actually a really good movie.

Movies That Time Forgot: Treasure Planet (2002)

Now that Disney has officially announced that they will be going back to traditional animation (not like that was really a surprise), it's a good time to look at one of the movies that was actually the reason for Disney dropping out of traditional animation in the first place. And incidentally, it's also the last movie made by the directing team of Ron Clements and John Musker, the directors readying Disney's newest traditional animation, The Frog Princess, for it's 2009 release. The movie I'm talking about is of course Treasure Planet, a $140 million production that made back only half it's budget worldwide, but which is really one of Disney best later movies.

Movies that time forgot: Better Off Dead

I've been a big fan of movies for a long time, since when I first went to the cinema, to be exact (to watch this movie!), and sadly, I was also rather opinionated from more or less the beginning. I would always bore my friends with my 'knowledge' of movies, which I took from what little movie programmes there were on Dutch television at the time. I also read reviews in the newspapers (but I never understood why movies like Police Academy got such bad reviews, while movies I never heard, these so-called art-films, were always praised) and the monthly Mickey Mouse magazine I subscribed to, and took the opinions from those sources to tell my friends which movies to watch and which not. It got so bad that at a time I would just more or less badmouth any movie that they came up with that I had never heard ("I never heard of it, so it simply cannot be good"), but this luckily ended when I started to realise that some of these movies might actually be pretty good. One of the movies that made me realize that was Better Off Dead, which isn't that independent at all, but which bypassed all my sources of movie information nonetheless, And which turned out to be hilarious when I first caught it on video.

Movies that Time Forgot: The Rocketeer (1991)

1991 was the year when I first started fanatically reading movie magazines. I bought Empire and Premiere monthly, sometimes mixing things up by buying one or two of the (not so good) Dutch movie magazines as well. I was almost obsessed for info about the latest movies, and since there was no such thing as internet, magazines were really the only way to be informed about what was coming up. I can remember that in the summer of 1991, almost every movie magazine had huge articles about The Rocketeer, a new movie character that Disney was hoping would turn into a huge success, with theme park rides and sequels being developed before the movie hit the silver screen. The movie was pegged to be a smash, able to compete with the other summer blockbusters of that year, like Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and Terminator 2. The star of the movie, unknown Bruce Campbell, was already written up as the big movie star of the future and with director Joe Johnston (hot off Honey I Shrunk the Kids) at the helm, nothing seemed to be able to go wrong. Well, sadly, it did.