7 Bizarre Early Versions of Famous Characters
It's easy to assume that the whole world swooned the moment it saw Batman or James Bond appear on screen -- certain characters are just so undeniably awesome that they couldn't possibly fail. But the reality is that lots of your favorite franchises had to suffer through ill-conceived false starts before rounding into shape, at which point their creators hoped you would forget all about the early efforts.
That's why it's so strange to look back at ...
Batman's (Racist) Black-and-White Films of the 1940s
The Version You Know:
The first Batman comics came out in 1939, but it wasn't until the 1966 show with Adam West that the Dark Knight really became a cultural phenomenon. Suddenly, Batman's adventures weren't only accessible to the intellectual elite who knew how to read speech balloons.
Clearly it's also where Nolan got this idea from.
Then Tim Burton resurrected the franchise with the 1989 film, and it's been an unstoppable box office juggernaut ever since. Mostly.
The Original Version:
Turns out there's an older live-action version of Batman that DC Comics understandably doesn't like to talk about.
With the black and white, there's always the uneasy feeling that those legging might not be leggings at all.
Why? For starters, in this low-budget 1943 Batman serial, the costumes were crappy, the Batmobile was a regular car, and the Batcave was ... well, a cave. An empty, bat-infested cave where Batman drops criminals to terrorize them.
Also, it's kinda racist. In this version, Batman is actually a government agent fighting against the "shifty-eyed Japs" -- that's his entire origin. No traumatic witnessing of his parents' murder as a child, just "the government asked him to put on a bat costume and punch Asians" (the CIA had to stop doing that in 1957). This Batman truly didn't give a fuck: When he wasn't letting innocent window cleaners fall to their deaths or losing his cape and mysteriously regaining it, he was stashing cigarettes in his costume:
And not bothering to reshoot the scene after dropping them.
Twenty years later, a producer slapped together some episodes of the serial into a movie -- those sophisticated '60s audiences thought it was hilarious, so ABC turned it into a campy humor TV show.
James Bond's Cheap Made-for-TV Movie
The Version You Know:
Even if you've somehow never seen a James Bond movie before, you probably still know that the first person to play everyone's favorite nymphomaniac superspy on film was Sean Connery in Dr. No (1962). The movie turned the already successful literary character into an international sex god, spawning like 80 freaking sequels.
You actually have to name all of them on the British SATs.
However, the first Bond novel was actually Casino Royale, not Dr. No. Ever wonder why they didn't adapt that one first?
The Original Version:
Because they did, only as a low-budget black-and-white TV movie no one watched, way back in 1954. Before Connery or any of the others, the first onscreen James Bond was ... um, some fucking guy. Watch this clip where the villain (Peter Lorre from Casablanca) tortures Bond with a pair of pliers -- the most shocking part is that "Jimmy Bond," as he's called throughout the movie, has an American accent. Because he's a U.S. government agent.
"Budweiser. Shaken, not stirred."
The one-hour movie aired as part of CBS's Climax Mystery Theater and failed to cause thousands of women to throw themselves at the actor, so it was deemed a disappointment. Still, at one point Bond's creator, Ian Fleming, was in negotiations with CBS and NBC to expand the movie into a TV series and even wrote some scripts, but there just wasn't enough interest from the networks to make it happen, for some reason.
"Bond ... Jimmy Bond, license to kill ..."
"An audience? A franchise? My sex drive?"
Eventually someone realized that a Bond film would be way better with some hairy Scottish guy in the lead, and the rest is history.
The Version You Know:
Probably the best thing to come out of Grindhouse, the Quentin Tarantino/Robert Rodriguez tribute to bad movies that lived up to its premise, was a fake trailer called Machete about a badass Mexican maniac played by real-life badass Mexican maniac Danny Trejo. The trailer was so popular that it spawned an actual movie of its own, complete with all the violence and sex the original promised.
And all the "disappointing Lindsay Lohan nudity" it didn't, but you're gonna have to go to Google for that.
This hard-R picture was successful enough to warrant an upcoming sequel, Machete Kills, but what many viewers don't realize is that this franchise does not mark the first time Rodriguez brought the batshit insane character of Machete Cortez to audiences.
The Original Version:
So what other ultraviolent Robert Rodriguez picture contains the first onscreen appearance of Machete? Does he make a cameo as a psychotic hit man in Sin City? Or a vampire slayer in From Dusk Till Dawn? Or maybe he's a desperado in Desperado?
Nope. He's the exasperated uncle in motherfucking Spy Kids.
"Is that tomato juice on your jacket, Uncle Machete?"
"Uh ... yeah, V8."
You see, when not making the types of films that testosterone-fueled teenage boys wish their lives resembled, Rodriguez makes family-friendly movies in the Spy Kids series. Machete Cortez has appeared in all four movies as the brother of the kids' dad, Gregorio Cortez (Antonio Banderas). His part in the story involves watching after his niece and nephew, inventing wacky new gadgets for the kids to use, and, sadly, not brutally murdering anyone. Here's a clip where the little spies go through his workshop and find tiny light sabers, spy planes, and such:
Maybe it's just a name coincidence? ("Machete" is the fourth most popular baby name in Mexico, after all.) Nope: Danny Trejo already confirmed that "Machete Cortez in Machete is what Machete Cortez in Spy Kids does when he's not taking care of the kids." We're looking forward to the inevitable crossover, Machete Spies Kids.
Jason Bourne's 1980s TV Movie
The Version You Know:
When The Bourne Identity came out in 2002, it offered a fresh new take on the by-then tired superspy genre: Fast-paced action! Conflicted personalities! Shaky cameras!
Matt Damon!
Damon stars as Jason Bourne, an amnesiac badass who tries to figure out who he is while everyone else tries to kill him. Four Bourne movies have been made so far, with the latest one replacing Damon with Hawkeye from The Avengers -- they probably hope to keep making these movies with different actors until the end of time, like with the James Bond films.
The Original Version:
There's another thing Bourne stole from Bond: the part where the character also starred in an earlier TV movie no one knows about. Back in 1988, when Matt Damon was only ... 18? Seriously? How old is that dude? Anyway, back then, ABC aired a version of The Bourne Identity starring Richard Chamberlain as the title character.
Not Damon!
The plot is pretty much the same, but whereas the 2002 version is tightly paced and more tense than running out of toilet paper in a mall toilet, the original was criticized for being painfully slow and boring, in large part due to its outrageous three-hour length (four hours with ads). Another reason why the remake worked was the chemistry between Matt Damon and Franka Potente, but the '80s version had none of that -- compare this (flagged by YouTube) make-out session with Damon and Potente from 2002 with this awkward, almost hilariously bad bedroom scene between Chamberlain and his co-star, Jaclyn Smith.
There are also certain ... size differences.
You can watch the original Bourne Identity here, or you can do something more productive with those three hours, like rewatching the remake one and half times.
The Naked Gun's Failed Sitcom
The Version You Know:
The Naked Gun movies have grossed over $200 million at the box office, baffled countless weapon fetishists looking for spank material on Google Images, and helped shape the sense of humor of many of you reading this. The still-popular films star Leslie Nielsen as rugged/clueless detective Frank Drebin, whose deadpan expression in the middle of ridiculous situations accounts for about 90 percent of the hilarity.
The rest comes from watching O.J. Simpson getting the shit beaten out of him.
The Original Version:
Before the Naked Gun films, Detective Drebin made his debut in Police Squad! (1982), a short-lived sitcom that has been called "one of the biggest flops in television history" -- it was cancelled due to abysmal ratings after only a month, with four episodes aired. Think about that: The show that inspired one of the funniest movie franchises ever failed harder than Rob Schneider's sitcom. This is despite the fact that Police Squad! featured the same type of humor, the same visual style, and even the exact same intro music as the wildly successful movies. Oh, and also the same deadpan delivery:
In fact, many of the same gags that viewers apparently found so insultingly unfunny were shamelessly recycled for the movies, like the one with the extremely tall officer eating a banana (here's the original, and here's the remake). Even the accident-prone Officer Nordberg appears on the show, except he's white and not played by a notorious wife-killer.
As far as we know.
So why did it fail? According to ABC executives, the problem was that the episodes were so densely packed with jokes that it was impossible to put a laugh track on them, so TV audiences didn't know when to laugh. We'll pause here to let that sink in.
OK, moving on.
Bill Murray as Hunter S. Thompson, 18 Years Before Johnny Depp
The Version You Know:
Hunter S. Thompson is one of the most influential people in both journalism and the field of doing your job while high as all fuck, but let's face it: When most people hear his name today, they automatically think of Johnny Depp's portrayal in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
"So, Johnny, you'd be playing an eccentric-"
"I'm in."
The movie follows Thompson and his kamikaze lawyer, Dr. Gonzo (Benicio del Toro), as they explore the heart of the American dream by getting shitfaced in Las Vegas. Depp became so associated with the role that he played Thompson again in The Rum Dairy and, basically, Rango. He also still hasn't relearned how to speak properly.
The Original Version:
However, Depp wasn't the first person to play Hunter S. Thompson on screen. Nope, that honor belongs to Bill Murray, who portrayed Thompson in a 1980 biopic called Where the Buffalo Roam.
Murray's mouth was still deformed from the cigarette holder when he shot Caddyshack.
And see the mustache next to him? That's Peter Boyle, Young Frankenstein himself, as attorney Carl Lazlo ... which is actually just another name for Oscar Zeta Acosta, the guy who inspired Dr. Gonzo. The film is based on Thompson's real adventures with Acosta -- remember the scene where they freak out a hitchhiker in Fear and Loathing? That's here, too:
The reason you haven't heard of this movie is because, by most accounts, it really sucked. Variety called it "frivolous," Leonard Maltin said it was "dreadful," and Roger Ebert reportedly puked on a piece of paper and they printed that as his review. Thompson himself called it dumb, but praised Murray's performance -- in fact, the two lived together and shot guns to prepare for the film, and they became good friends as a result.
Well, shit, why didn't they just make a movie about that?
The Version You Know:
Among Star Wars fans, Boba Fett has gained a reputation for being the ultimate badass, despite doing nothing to earn it. He just stands around looking cool.
Pretty sure he's actually sleeping in there most of the time.
He's basically the sci-fi equivalent of a mob movie hit man, and as such, it makes sense that he first showed up in The Empire Strikes Back, the dark and disturbing second installment that proved to viewers that there are things in this universe even cooler than space wizards and swords made out of laser.
The Original Version:
Except Empire totally does not mark the first appearance of Boba Fett. In fact, he first showed up two years earlier in the exact opposite of the most respected and highest rated movie in the franchise: the ridiculous Star Wars Holiday Special, in which he co-starred with Bea Arthur and the band Jefferson Starship. Oh, and Boba's pet dinosaur.
Most of the special concerns Chewbacca's family celebrating "Life Day" in Furrytopia or whatever their planet is called. But in an animated sequence, Chewie and Han Solo end up stranded on a planet where Han contracts an alien virus (presumably in an alley behind a cantina). Luke Skywalker and the droids travel to this planet to save Han, and that's when they meet Boba Fett, who at first pretends to be their friend.
Or in Chewie's case ... more than a friend.
Fett is then caught Skyping with Darth Vader and outed as a villain. Rather than shooting Luke's friends in the back while they're distracted, "the best bounty hunter in the galaxy" jet packs away like a pussy. You can watch the whole cartoon on YouTube, at least until George Lucas finds it and erases it from existence.
Joe Oliveto publishes the dark comedy serial The Dark Triad under the pseudonym Adam Lexington. Follow him on Twitter and read his blog. Robert is a columnist for Freakin' Awesome Network and would like for you to follow him on Twitter. Maxwell Yezpitelok also has a Twitter, but you knew that at this point.
For more bizarre originals, check out 5 Insane Early Drafts of Famous Movie Characters and 7 Bizarre Early Versions of Famous Cartoon Characters.
If you're pressed for time and just looking for a quick fix, then check out 3 Sinister Reasons You're Addicted To Junk Food.
And stop by LinkSTORM to learn why Han Solo was actually the one banging his sister.
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Related Reading: For crazy foreign versions of your favorite characters- like Super Mario in German hell- click here. If you're more interested in the truth behind the fiction, read this article and discover the real people who inspired fictional personalities. Even Kramer was based on a real man! And speaking of racism, clicking here will reveal the prejudice behind some of Disney's most famous creations.
