Tuesday, March 11, 2014

FEMALE COMIC STRIP CHARACTERS IN THE MOVIES



I had mentioned last week that I was planing a post on female comic strip characters, who made it to the movie screen. When I came up with this idea last month I thought it would be easy. Then after some research I found out somethings that complicated matters. I was mainly thinking of a handful of well-known film version. I was looking on IMDB and found that there were more than one film for some of these characters. To complicate matters more, these are hard to find. Some never made it to VHS let alone DVD. In a way this is okay, because:
  1. This character is not one of my favorite comic strips.
  2. The descriptions of the plots on IMDB suggest that, like the comic strip, it has a right-wing slant.
  3. There are now three versions of the 70s musical based on this comic, the 80s movie, a made-for-TV version and new big screen version with an all African-American cast.

I was planning to call this "Female Comic Strip Characters on the Big Screen," then I remembered that one of the movies I wanted to feature was a made-for-TV movie. The character has never been on the big screen (However, a big screen version is in the works).

I could only find the trailers for an 80s movie based on a British character, a handful of episodes of a short-lived 80s TV series and some old newsreel footage of the actress, who played the character, and the artist, who created the comic strip (I might post because my juvenile sense of humor enjoys how this man calls his eraser "his rubber").

The Italian comic strip that spawned this post has a few "underground" film versions and a 90s TV series, that apparently aired in this country on the Playboy channel late at night.

I found two other versions of one of the characters I was going to feature on You Tube. There was a Columbia serial of the 40s and a 70s made-for-TV movie. Neither was very good, but at least the 70s TV movie had Jill St. John playing the lead character.

Then I noticed that one of the characters I intended to feature was the star of the "one of the longest running film series in movie history." Was I going to actually buy a box set of these movies and watch them all? I watched them on Sunday afternoons in junior high on KSPR. Isn't that good enough?

Then I realized, I might be over my head. My real aim was to just point out movies about these characters that are out there, not right a book. However, this will probably become an on-going series.


I plan to start with a movie based on Guido Crepax's Valentina and, hopefully, follow it with a post on the 80s/90s Brenda Star movie with Brooke Shields. So, as the old saying goes "See ya in the funny papers!"


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