Pre-2000 Superhero Films

This is my brief recollection of superhero related movies as I grew up. The first one I can actually name is the old, original Adam West Batman movie where the Joker, Riddler, Penguin, and Cat Woman all team up. Obviously this movie is more campy and played for laughs. I also would catch re-runs of the Lynda Carter Wonder Woman series here and there. 

The next major release was Superman, a movie that was able to take itself seriously, but not too seriously. It perfectly blended humor, good acting, style, new special effects, music, and plot. My only minor gripes are that Superman is a little skinny (especially after seeing Hemsworth and Evans as Thor and Captain America) and the whole world reversing thing. But Christopher Reeve was Superman. He looked the part, sounded the part, and could act the part. He also played Clark differently rather than relying on glasses to do the acting for him. 

Superman II was not as good, but it did have some cool things in it. There was a little more camp and cheesiness, and some of the effects weren’t as good, but the fight near the end in metropolis was pretty epic. Later I would learn that there was originally a superior version, but it was scrapped for this one because of a director change. The short version is that Richard Donner completed most of the film, got fired, and was replaced by Richard Lester. In order to put Lester as the director, he had to have the film at least 51% with stuff he shot. So he reshot some things, reverted some other things to a previous (and inferior) version of the script, and injected a lot of unnecessary levity.

Superman III was bad. Like, really bad. It was entirely directed by Lester, who decided to make it into a Richard Pryor comedy that happened to be guest starring Superman. Its level of camp was only outmatched by the Adam West Batman series. Though, it did have one major thing going for it – seeing Clark Kent fighting an evil Superman was a highlight.

Superman IV was kinda a “greatest hits” of past movies surrounding an environmental activism message, with some added stuff they just made up (like his “brick-building” vision powers). But it was a little better than 3. There was also a Supergirl movie starring Helen Slater. Like a lot of the entries on here, I liked it because of the superhero aspect of it, but even back then I could realize that it wasn't as good as the first Superman movie. 

At some point during all these Superman movies, Marvel made a Fantastic Four movie and three (count 'em, THREE) Captain America movies. These movies were the very bottom of the barrel in terms of quality and budget. They made Superman III look like The Godfather. They were so bad that the Fantastic Four movie was never released and the Captain America movies were shown on TV and only released direct--to-video. Speaking of TV, there were a couple of shows I liked to watch but only caught them occasionally because I never knew when they were on – The Greatest American Hero and The Incredible Hulk. The former was a humorous take on 

the superhero concept, but watchable. Hulk actually frightened me a little, but I loved it. It was decent, and Marvel’s only live-action product that could claim to be so. Apparently there was also a Doctor Strange TV movie what was widely panned, as well as a Nick Fury TV movie starring David Hasselhoff, but I never saw them, never heard about them, and only learned about them years later. 

One other superhero movie of note was Condorman, Disney’s take on the concept. Like a lot of these entries, it had a couple of high notes and a lot of low ones. There was also a terrible Masters of the Universe (aka He-Man)movie, starring Dolph Lundgren. This one was so bad I don’t even know where to begin, other than Lundgren had the physique for the role. Everything else was terrible, from the plot to the dialogue to the acting to the sets.

At the end of the 80’s, Tim Burton’s version of Batman made its way into theaters, and it was darn near perfect for its time. Also, the version of the Batmobile used was the best one to this day. As a kid I thought there should have been a fight between Batman and the Joker, but now I realize that wouldn’t happen, as Joker is more of a psychological villain. It was dark, plausible, and really well made. It provided a new standard for comic book/superhero movies to aspire to. Unfortunately, it was short lived.

Batman Returns was good in some ways, but got a little campy in others. It retained the darkness, and continued the formula of having established actors playing the main roles, but ended up being a little too silly visually and didn’t have as tight of a plot.

Batman Forever lost the darkness (replaced by neon) and favored style over substance. Not only did we get a new director, but a new Batman. Tommy Lee Jones was horribly underused, and it seemed like the director was going for a happy medium between Tim Burton’s version and Adam West’s version. And there were nipples on the bat suit. Nipples.

Batman and Robin was so bad it was funny. Seriously, it was really bad. This was the worst of the four Batman movies to date. Unlike the Superman movies where the fourth one was a little better, each one just kept getting worse. At first I thought it must have been a parody – nothing made sense. They had started these movies on such a high note, and I couldn’t believe this is where they ended up. To this day, George Clooney has said he’d personally refund anyone’s money for seeing it. The only really good things to come out of the Schumacher movies were the soundtracks. No, not the orchestral music in the background – but the collection of pop songs by Seal, U2, and Smashing Pumpkins.

There were 3 live-action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movies made in the 90’s. The first one was actually pretty good. It had a decent plot, good action, good humor, and was made for a teenage audience. It had a lot of the markings of something that was low-budget, like poor lighting in some scenes, probably because they had to spend the money on animatronics and extra actors. The second one reverted to a much simpler, cartoonish plot and reined in the violence to make it more palatable for 1st graders, and the third one got worse. I had hoped for a more mature, young-adult take on them like the first movie, but instead they got closer to the original Saturday morning cartoon. Along the same line, a show I only somewhat paid attention to (mostly because my brother watched it) was Power Rangers. I was old enough to recognize the repetitive nature and level of camp, but if I’m being honest, the concept of the robots forming a giant robot was something I loved, stemming from both Transformers and Voltron.

Then there was the Super Mario Bros movie. God, this one was terrible. Like a lot of others in this list, it suffered from a poor script, inept direction, and a small budget. This one was unique in that it was the product of a video game, rather than a comic book or animated series, so there was basically no source material to draw from in order to create a story. It shoehorned in references and was just bad. It’s best we forget it and move on.

Marvel's animation department scored two hits with the X-Men and Spider-Man cartoons.

These were well made, looked great, and had decent voice acting and special effects. It was a substantial step up in terms of quality content, and made advances into getting some decent comic book related properties some exposure. Batman also had a resurgence with the animated series by Bruce Timm, which branched into a Superman series and other things. I loved the Batman series, but didn't get into the other stuff because we didn't have the right cable channels or something. 


Another notable entry is the TV film Generation X, loosely based on the comic book of the

same name. It had Banshee and Emma Frost (both also seen on X-Men: First Class) with a small handful of mutant students. For some reason, all mutants had telepathic abilities for the plot to work. It wasn't great, but it wasn't as terrible as it could have been. Now that I think of it, it's sad that this is the comparison I had to make for a lot of these things - it wasn't as bad as it could have been. Like, it's not He-Man bad, or Fantastic Four bad. But it definitely isn't good. Marvel also apparently made a Punisher movie starring Dolph Lundgren that turned out about as well as one might expect - full of bad 80's action movie clichés and dim lighting. 

Shaquille O’neal  starred as Steel, a character connected to the Superman universe. However, the movie was so bad they divorced themselves from anything Superman related because DC probably didn’t want it associated with their best character. 

Though not really a traditional superhero, the next inclusion is one that helped change a lot of the image and culture around this kind of content. Buffy the Vampire Slayer came out on the WB network, a budding cable station at the time. The writing was good, each season had a direction, the characters had definite growth, and the rules of the established world were kept. Its creator, Joss Whedon, had previously made a movie about Buffy but had to change a lot due to the studio’s demands. Seeing such a well made show that could and should have been campy probably helped turn things around. I didn’t start watching it until the show was almost done, and mostly caught it (and its spinoff) on re-runs.

That same year, Todd McFarlane’s Spawn also premiered. I was very much in the Marvel camp and didn’t like Image Comics because of how the company came about, so I didn’t read Spawn, but I loved the HBO animated series. I had hoped that the same level of care would have been given to its silver screen incarnation, but, no. It turned out to be mediocre at best with obvious directorial ineptitude and a lacking budget.

The final entry was Blade (note – I haven’t seen any of them). Like Buffy, it wasn’t as much of a comic book movie as it is a vampire movie, perhaps cashing in on Buffy’s success. (I’m not disparaging the movie – just noting that Joss Whedon had a hit TV show at the time). It was well received, but I wasn’t around for it because I was out of the country.

 So, looking back, we had only a few bright spots among a litany of low-budget and poorly produced films and shows. Everything else was some combination of camp, schlock, cheese, cliché, and drivel that usually was made by the lowest bidder with little experience. These types of movies were often seen as just big versions of a kids show, or almost like a live-action cartoon geared towards 9 to 12-year-olds who didn’t think deeply about content so the producers didn’t want to waste effort on making a quality product. These kinds of source materials (comic books, animated cartoons, video games, etc.) were the things I was interested in, and I accepted that high quality, Hollywood-level movies about these things just couldn’t or wouldn’t happen except for the odd accidental hit like the first Superman or first Batman movie. But I always held out hope that one day a movie would be made that would take the source material seriously and have the necessary budget and experienced director/producer team to make it happen.

I can admit that when I was young, I enjoyed them for the concept of the superhero and seeing them use their powers/abilities and could forgive the clunky plot. But upon watching these as an adult, I can understand why my parents would roll their eyes when I mentioned wanting to watch one of them. But it's not my fault that good, well-made adaptations of my kind of entertainment weren't around. I would have loved to have something as good as what we have now around, but it was out of my hands. In other words, I had to put up with the bad in order to get the good parts. It was worth it to me, but not to others who just wanted to watch a good movie. In this way, you could say that I had some of the same mindset as Kevin Smith, who basically supports, promotes, and likes anything that is comics/geek culture in an effort to get more of it made. His theory is that if we could mobilize the comics/geek subculture to drop a ton of cash on a movie then Hollywood would get the bright idea to make another one, and the more exposure it gets hopefully more people who weren't originally comics fans might give it a shot and discover that it's actually not so bad.