A few days ago, I had a chance to re-read the most recent reboot of the Superman comic continuity, Geoff Johns' Superman: Secret Origins, and while I know the book has had mixed reviews from the fan community, I personally loved every page of it. Johns managed to bring a classic flavor to the Superman books that was clearly influenced by the Richard Donner films, the first of which he has often said is his favorite movie (that might be why he “co-wrote” the “Last Son” arc with Donner himself, who mentored Johns in the entertainment industry before he moved on to comic books). Looking back through the miniseries, in which artist Gary Frank perfectly captures the spitting image of Christopher Reeve as the Man of Steel and pits him against classic villains like the Parasite, Metallo, and of course Lex Luthor, I couldn’t help but wish that the films themselves had stayed the course of quality, so that we could have seen similar battles up on the big screen. But no- following the series peak with Superman II, all fans had left to look forward to (other than two more appearances by Lex Luthor, which gave new meaning to the term “overkill”) were Richard Pryor as a bumbling computer technician and a mullet-headed “Nuclear Man” with deadly goth fingernails.
Where did the Superman films go wrong? Well, it all pretty much comes down to the firing of Richard Donner after the first film’s release, and his subsequent replacement with British filmmaker Richard Lester. Lester may have been a good director, but he had no respect for the character or the source material, so after finishing the half-completed
Superman II (partially shot by Donner during the production of part one), Lester took the series into camp territory, and things only got worse from there. Had Donner stayed aboard the franchise, he claims he’d already made plans for future installments (alternating directorial responsibilities with friend and creative consultant Tom Mankiewicz) that would have featured more villains from the comics- and given what we ended up with for a
Superman III and
IV, they couldn't possibly have been any worse than what we ended up with. But if Donner HAD stayed on the franchise, who might he have included in the ensuing sequels to Superman? And who could have played them? That, dear reader, is where I come in.
Taking into account a limited time frame- let’s say between 1980, the release date of
Superman II, and 1987, the year of
Lethal Weapon (‘cause hell, the guy would have to make other movies eventually)- and the fact that the established cast would stay pretty much in place (including Annette O’Toole as Lana Lang, who I’m just going to assume would get the part even with Donner helming the film), I’ve compiled a casting call of possible characters who could’ve appeared in Donner-helmed Superman sequels, along with my opinion of who would be the best to play them.
SUPERMAN- Christopher Reeve
Of course, you couldn’t have had a superhero franchise without its star, and Reeve proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was the only one who could’ve embodied everything that Superman stands for during the 80s. Hell, he emerged relatively unscathed from
Superman III, and he gets a pass on
IV because he clearly just didn't give a crap anymore- likely due to his disappointment that the budget had been so severely cut
after he’d already signed on to do it, but
before shooting began. With Donner behind the camera, though, Reeve could have been even
better, lasting throughout three, four... hell, maybe even five or six movies! My only disappointment would be that we’d never be treated to Reeve’s fantastic “angry drunk” Superman from part three... but then again, we never know where Donner might have taken it...
BRAINIAC- David Warner
The next logical villain for Superman to face after Lex Luthor and General Zod has always been Brainiac, the alien twelfth-level intelligence with a fetish for cities-in-a-bottle- and of all the villains on this list, Brainiac has come closest to actually making it onto the big screen (nearly all the unproduced Superman scripts and treatments featured the character in one form or another). Donner has openly claimed that Brainiac was next on the filmmaker’s list to feature as a cinematic antagonist for Christopher Reeve, so Brainiac would probably have been the villain of
Superman III (let’s assume it’d still come out in 1983).
Given that time frame, there’s only one actor I could see cast in that part: David Warner, the man who played Jack the Ripper opposite Malcolm McDowell’s H.G. Wells in the film
Time After Time (among his nearly 200 other appearances in movies and television). The guy exudes an icy intelligence that’s tailor-made for Brainiac, and better still, Warner had worked with Donner before, as the photographer in
The Omen (Donner’s first major release), so the two would already have a decent working relationship. From the Ripper to
Tron’s Sark to Batman TAS’s Ra’s Al Ghul, Warner knows how to work cold, dispassionate malevolence like no one else- there wasn’t a soul alive who could have done Brainiac more justice.
METALLO- Mel Gibson
Try to put aside your media-nurtured conception of Gibson as he is now (racist, misogynistic, generally a horrible human being), or even your idea of Mel as a superstar leading man from the ‘80s and ‘90s, and think about where he was in... say 1982. Fresh from
Mad Max and
Gallipoli but not yet the guy from
The Road Warrior, Gibson was just breaking into the Hollywood scene, but he wasn’t a familiar face yet, and he was probably hungry for work. In a bout of alternate-universe irony, imagine that Donner, who would later cast Gibson in his star-making role of Martin Riggs in the first Lethal Weapon film, instead decides that he would be perfect for the part of John Corben, small-time crook and con man who, after a near-fatal car accident, ends up in a cybernetic body powered by a Kryptonite heart. Corben has never had much personality, anyway, so you’d need someone with an abundance of screen presence to make that character work; say what you will about the man himself, he would’ve been good for the part. And hey, we would’ve gotten to see Christopher Reeve vs. Mel Gibson! It’d have been quite the showdown.
BIZARRO- Christopher Reeve
If
Superman III was good for anything whatsoever, it was for showing us just how versatile an actor Christopher Reeve really was. Reeve could do variations of his own characters, turning on a dime from sympathetic to raging and even frightening. That is EXACTLY what you’d need for Bizarro. The character is a victim in a number of ways, and is very similar to the Frankenstein monster, so the performer would have to make Bizarro identifiable and sympathetic for the audience; but when Bizarro gets angry, that should be a shocking thing, and the viewer has to be a little afraid of him when he loses his temper (this is a creature with the power of Superman, after all- you don’t want to see him get angry!). Though he never had the chance to play such a part, I know that Reeve could have nailed the role of the misunderstood monster. And it wouldn’t even be that difficult to get Superman and Bizarro into the same frame, thanks to what would probably be extensive make-up- it’d probably be even easier than the Clark/Dark Superman fight from III!
MR. MXYZPTLK- Gilbert Gottfried
Here’s a weird bit of trivia for you: in an early treatment for
Superman III written by producer Ilya Salkind, Mr. Mxyzptlk was actually one of the film’s two villains (the other being, of course, Brainiac). Salkind’s treatment ended up being ditched, however, because it would have been way too expensive to shoot (and it featured Supergirl, Kal-El’s cousin in the comics, as Superman’s new love interest- eeeeew...), and Mxy has since appeared on Lois and Clark, Superboy, and technically even Smallville.
If my timeline criteria were just a little closer to the 90s, I would have gone with Warwick Davis as the mischievous 5th dimensional imp Mr. Mxyzptlk instead (his part in the Leprechaun films being the big deciding factor), but since Davis spent most of the eighties as an adolescent (he was only eleven when he played Wicket in
Return of the Jedi), I had to leave him out of the running. The only other guy I could come up with was Gilbert Gottfried, who actually later voiced Mxyzptlk on the Superman animated series, and who was at this point in his career doing stand-up after a failed one-season run on SNL. Lazy casting? Hell yeah- but it was either him or Wallace Shawn (Vizzini from
The Princess Bride), and I don’t think Shawn would fit as well into the orange-and-purple costume. Though he would look pretty good as the early, purple suit-wearing Mxy. Hell, those two incarnations don’t look anything alike anyway- let’s just say Gottfried would play one, and Shawn would do the other!
THE PARASITE- Vincent Schiavelli
Hmm. The Parasite's kind of a tough one. There have been a lot of different iterations of the character with a lot of different personalities. Personally, I like the idea of him as a hapless schlub who sort of stumbles into these energy-draining superpowers, and finds them so intoxicating that he doesn't care who he has to hurt in order to "feed" himself. And if you're going to feature a "hapless schlub" in a movie set in the eighties, you could do a hell of a lot worse than to cast the late Vincent Schiavelli in the part. Schiavelli made his whole living on being quirky, from playing the oddball Mr. Vargas in
Fast Times at Ridgemont High to, of all things, the evil Monkey Grinder in
Batman Returns; however, I just keep coming back to him as the subway ghost who teaches Patrick Swayze everything he knows in
Ghost. There's sort of a malevolent undercurrent to the guy, even when he's not trying to be evil, that seems to stem more from social frustration than anything- and that's what Rudy Jones should be like: an outcast, someone who feels ostracized from the rest of society, who finds in his accidental superpowers a means to exact revenge on the rest of the world.
That, and he has to look like a janitor, which in the eighties meant that he had to look creepy and untrustworthy. Check and check.
MONGUL- Arnold Schwarzenegger
This one seems pretty self-explanatory, right? But there’s a little more to it. In the early ‘80s, before
The Terminator would turn him into a major box-office draw, Arnold Schwarzenegger was pretty much just a muscleman for hire, whose only good role so far (
Conan the Barbarian) had featured the Austrian bodybuilder in a predominantly silent role. It’s THIS Schwarzenegger that I would have liked to see as Mongul, the tyrannical space despot, because back then he hadn’t acquired the cult of personality he has now, and he could actually make a go at playing the role- a part that we’ve never seen Schwarzenegger play, namely the megalomaniacal, power-crazed villain-type. Of course, it’d still be Arnold Schwarzenegger under all the yellow make-up (the only prosthetics they might need would be a forehead appliance to give him a bigger brow, but that would be entirely optional), and I can’t imagine how funny it would be to watch him play a scene opposite Christopher Reeve’s Superman- not even a fight, just a simple dialogue scene. But there had better be fighting with Arnold in the film. There’d better be.
DARKSEID- James Earl Jones
I ALMOST listed the great and powerful Darkseid as being played by “Arnold Schwarzenegger w/ James Earl Jones’ voice”, because I thought that you’d need an actor with a truly intimidating visage and physique to make Darkseid the badass that we all know and love... but then I realized that maybe that would be going too far in the Superman/Star Wars parallels, given the guy’s name. Besides, if there’s anything
Conan the Barbarian taught us (other than that Arnold can swing a mean sword), it’s that Jones has a pretty good scowling face, and that’s really all Darkseid has ever done: stand around with his hands behind his back and scowl at people. Sure, sometimes he scowls so hard that the people in front of him are obliterated by his Omega beams, but that’s not really a stunt that requires a six-foot-tall Austrian death machine to pull off, now is it? Heck, that’s just a special effect.
Darkseid isn’t a character driven by action, but rather by intimidation- and James Earl Jones can accomplish that much just by opening his mouth. For a movie, though, I suppose it’s inevitable that there would have to be a final battle of some sort, but honestly, I wouldn’t mind seeing Jones get his hands dirty with the Man of Steel; I think it would actually be more entertaining to see Jones, a big man but not necessarily an imposing one, punch Superman through a wall or grapple with him in mid-air. It’s all movie magic, anyway; to see James Earl Jones putting the smack down on Reeve’s Superman in the skies of an invaded Metropolis, just before Supes snatches an improbable victory from the jaws of defeat- now THAT would be cool.
The Cheats- characters that didn't exist yet
CYBORG- Christopher Reeve
Okay, it's kind of annoying how many Superman villains there are that look exactly like the Man of Steel: clones, parallel world doppelgangers, Russian dictators with surgically-altered faces, etc. The downside of this is that it makes casting kind of redundant; the upside is that it would've actually been really cool to see Christopher Reeve do all of these parts. Like I said, the guy was versatile, and you know it would have been great to watch him really cut loose as a character who's totally, irredeemably evil- the kind of madman who would obliterate an entire city just to tarnish a guy's good name. The Cyborg effects might’ve been kind of difficult to accomplish well, so there would be the danger of a cheese factor with the character, but hell, if you made it around 1984, cybernetic organisms would be all the rage- just get Stan Winston to wrap an endo-skull around Reeve's head, and voila! Instant badass.
DOOMSDAY- Lou Ferrigno
Hmm- another big, muscle-bound character, you say? Well, damn, we’ve already used up our quota of Arnold Schwarzeneggers on Mongul... I guess that only leaves one real choice: Lou Ferrigno!
All kidding aside, Ferrigno would be absolutely perfect as the hate-fueled engine of death known only as Doomsday. As a big, hulking creature bent solely on smashing things, Doomsday bears a remarkable resemblance to a certain other comic character that Ferrigno is notable for playing- but by this point, Ferrigno should have honed his acting abilities with Mr. Green Genes, and would be ready to move on to a bigger, more dangerous monster, bringing with him enough talent to sell the guy on the big screen. The make-up would likely be extensive, so it’s not like he would be recognizable as the Hulk beneath it all (somebody get ahold of Rob Bottin!), but this time he would actually get to wear boots, which I’m sure he would be thankful for. And hey, Reeve vs. Ferrigno! I know I’ve already used that reason for Mel Gibson, but come on- if you’re not geeking out at the thought of Ferrigno pile-driving Reeve’s Superman into the pavement or Reeve tackling Ferrigno through a department store, then what are you doing reading this, anyway?
MANCHESTER BLACK- Malcolm McDowell
As probably the most interesting Superman villain of the last decade, Manchester Black is a slap in the face of everything Superman holds near and dear. He has no regard for the value of human life, he has no respect for any government or authority, and he’s so British that he has a Union Jack tattooed across his entire torso. To play someone this blatantly, effortlessly anarchistic, there would really only be one person who could do it at the time: Malcolm McDowell, the man who played both Alex DeLarge and Caligula. He wasn’t doing much in the ‘80s, so they probably could have snared him; you could argue that we would be a little too old for the part by the mid-eighties (Black is insinuated to be in his early-to-late twenties, while McDowell would’ve been closer to his mid-thirties), but I would counter that NO ONE ELSE could possibly play this part. McDowell’s Alex was the apotheosis of remorseless, smirking British hooligans, and Black is just a step beyond that: a super-powerful hooligan (one that also leads a gang, interestingly) who thinks of morality as a joke and kills on a whim, and who doesn’t even have insanity to fall back on as an excuse- he’s just a thoroughly nasty person. McDowell has the ability to play guys like this, and better still to make them funny and charismatic despite how despicable their actions are.
Sure, Manchester Black is very much a product of his decade, and wouldn’t make a whole hell of a lot of sense shoehorned into the eighties... but a guy can dream, can’t he?