“The Comic Bucket List” is a limited column where we review 25 comic books and graphic novels we’ve been meaning to read for years. We discover if they were worth waiting for, or if they never quite lived up to the hype they promised.
BATTLE CHASERS
1998
Joe Madureira, Munier Sharrieff, Adam Warren
It’s become well known that Disney has an immense history with creating some of the most racist characters of pop culture. There’s their noted hatred toward the Jewish religion, and even the infamous lyric to “Arabian Nights” in “Aladdin” that reads: “Where they cut off your ears if they don’t like your face,” and that film came out in 1992. But many of them are considered rather irrelevant when you bring up the name Uncle Remus.
The 2002 Spielberg fueled mini-series “Taken” is one of the few mini-series I’ve ever watched two times in a row. It’s at least fourteen hours in length. And I watched it two times in a row. “Taken” is just that good. The epic mini-series aired in the summer of 2002 on the Sci Fi Channel here in America, and on the 25th anniversary of “Close Encounters of The Third Kind.” While Science fiction was never really my niche as a pop culture fan, “Taken” is a whole new level of the genre that defies any and all conventions. It’s a mini-series that doesn’t just build up to something humongous, but it leads somewhere pretty incredible.
I really can’t imagine a film like “The Land Before Time” being released today. As a kids film it teaches about strength, courage, and the willingness to look for hope in darkness. But as a film in general, director Don Bluth offers a story drenched in sadness, terror, and an almost endless amount of sadness. “The Land Before Time,” like much of Bluth’s work, has held up monumentally well over the year with a beautiful eye for detail, painting a massive world on the threshold of evolving in to something new, while also losing much of its own species to death and turmoil.
What does “Hunchback” teach the audience? Whether you’re gorgeous or ugly, if the hot girl says you’re cool, you’ll become the hero. Also, the nice guy always finishes last. Surely Quasimodo rides off in to the sunset with his crowd of supporters in the end, but who is Esmerelda going home with later that night? “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” is a bastardization from Walt Disney, where they take the tragic and brilliant tale of Quasimodo and water it down so much it’s barely an adaptation when we see it in animated force.
Occasionally silly, but still unique and very entertaining, director Tobe Hooper’s “Life Force” is a great contrast to his penultimate “Texas Chainsaw Massare” which relied on muted colors and grimey shades of brown and black to depict his world of vicious violence. “Life Force” is a vibrant and brilliantly filmed horror science fiction film filled with bold shades of bright blues and reds, with a premise that’s all too entertaining to ignore. Hooper doesn’t just create a vampire or alien film, but collides them to form a demented amalgam of a horror classic.
