The First (and Only) Live-Action Plastic Man Goes to the 1984 Democratic National Convention

There's no current shortage of live-action superheroes running around these days -- I mean, did you ever think we'd see a day where there would be a live-action Crimson Fox? -- but there's still plenty of untapped potential in the comic book archives. 

Where, for example, is Plastic Man?  The Jack Cole-created stretchy crime fighter has been far from an unknown figure since his first appearance in 1941, commanding several solo comic book series along with his own cartoon and plenty of appearances in other DC Comics-related properties.  Sure, his powers are a bit tough to do in live-action, but that's what terrible CGI is for!  It is a bit odd that the character, a fun-loving creation with a good back story, decent name recognition and an affable sense of humor that would appeal to younger audiences, has never appeared as a live-action figure.

Except that one time.

In 1984, Arlington Television picked up the two-season animated TV series "The Plastic Man Comedy/Adventure Show" for syndication a few years after the show had concluded its Saturday morning run on ABC.  Not content to just repackage the old material, director Steve Whiting shot additional bookend footage for the show, featuring actor and comedian Mark Taylor (billed as "Taylor Marks") as the lead character in all his plastic glory.


The segments aren't exactly action packed - they're mostly making Plas making gags about the show coupled with some rudimentary special effects.  But the costume design is good, and Taylor seems to be having a good time, so it's not all that shocking that the syndicated package became a minor hit, with Taylor's Plas getting the attention of the San Francisco-based "Evening Magazine."

In fact, Taylor's incarnation of Plastic Man was enough of a hit that Whiting and Taylor took it on the road to the 1984 Democratic National Convention.  According to Noblemania's great interview with him, "I did a more lame version of what [Sasha Baron Cohen's 'Borat'] did so well."

Sadly, Taylor's Plastic Man didn't fare much better than the Democrats that year, and he was soon retired to the footnotes of history.  Taylor went on to continue his stand-up comedy work and, as of 2011, works in a hospital as a physical therapist - a perfectly appropriate calling for someone whose portrayal of an infamous comic book character who can assume any physical form is, to date, the definitive one.

Rutger Hauer is upstaged by his own sweater in these 1982 interviews for BLADE RUNNER

The press tour is nothing new for celebrities, but Rutger Hauer came prepared for his American press interviews for the 1982 release of BLADE RUNNER with a stealth co-star -- an amazing sweater that upstages any question that could possibly be asked.  This was obviously an intentional decision, as there were at least two different interviews recorded in one day in the same office setting.

The first, by John C. Tibbetts, addresses the sweater right away, and does manage to enter into some interesting discussion about the nature of villainy.  (It's not stated on the YouTube link, but I believe this comes from an interview made for Kansas City's CBS affiliate, for whom Tibbetts worked at the time.)



The second interview, conducted by Bobbie Wygant for the Dallas/Fort Worth NBC affiliate, is even more entertaining, as Wygant dispenses with any notable questions about the film itself and instead asks repeatedly about how Hauer feels about special effects.  He's a professional, but he's clearly ready to get off the tour.  (The elephant in the room of Hauer's choice of garb is never addressed.)  Stay tuned for the ending, in which Wygant records additional reaction shots - not an uncommon thing in TV interviews, but very strange to be watching without any type of editing.

The Brief, Wondrous Life of the Cable Music Channel

MTV quickly became a cultural juggernaut in the 1980s after its 1981 launch, bringing new music to millions of households whose access to music videos had been previously limited to late-night programs.  It's not surprising that others attempted to cash in on their success, and in the fall of 1984, enterprising media mogul Ted Turner made his attempt to do so with the blandly-named "Cable Music Channel." 

The network launched at midnight EST on October 26, 1984, with a very awkward press conference featuring Network President Robert Wussler, Los Angeles Councilwoman Peggy Stevenson (who declared the day "Cable Music Channel Day"), General Manager Scott Sassa (who now works for Robert Rodriguez's El Rey Network) and Turner himself, promising that the network will "stay away from excessively violent or degrading clips toward women that MTV is so fond of running."  Heck, don't just read my description - watch the awkwardness unfold.




CMC tweaked the MTV format slightly, doing live VJ segments with unseen VJs rather than the bigger network's pre-recorded video segments.  This gambit, along with the veering away from "controversial" music videos, failed to pay off, and the network didn't find an audience, even with commercials like the one below, featuring Randy Newman, Steve Miller, Corey Hart, Little Richard and Sparks (!).



It's not that the network was really even given a chance to succeed.  On November 29, only 34 days after the network's launch, it was sold to MTV Networks for a rather pathetic sum of a million dollars, signing off the very next evening with the same video that launched the channel - Randy Newman's "I Love L.A." - interspersed with goodbyes from the folks who worked at one of the shortest-lived cable channels in history.

The Less-than-Auspicious Other Debuts of Wonder Woman

The common consensus seems to be that Wonder Woman's appearance in BATMAN V. SUPERMAN, the first (or second, if you count 1989's ALYAS BATMAN AND ROBIN) time the character has appeared in a feature-length theatrical film as a live human being, is the highlight of the movie.  However, Diana Prince's earlier debuts in other formats haven't been nearly so notable or well-received.

The first time the character appeared in live-action was in the prospective television pilot for a "Wonder Woman" TV series entitled "Who's Afraid of Diana Prince?" in 1967.  Clearly inspired by the successful "Batman" series of the time, Elle Walker plays Diana, who lives with her nagging mother who demands she not go save the world on an empty stomach.  She does, briefly, become Wonder Woman (and is then played by Linda Harrison), but mostly it looks like a zany comedy about a man-crazy single woman who sometimes saves the world.  It's... not good.


Wonder Woman's animated debut came along a few years later, and may be even less noteworthy, as she's not even the star.  In the 1972 episode of "The Brady Kids" animated series, itself a spin-off of "The Brady Bunch" but with fewer parents and more magical talking birds with the voice of Larry Storch (as was the style at the time), Jan Brady visits the university library in order to research Euclid and meets librarian Diana Prince.  When the aforementioned magical talking bird zaps them back to ancient Greece, zaniness ensues.



As with much '70s kids animation, it's pretty awful, and the randomly-appearing laugh track (which even goes off when Wonder Woman makes her first appearance!) doesn't help matters any.  At least Wonder Woman gets to do something and the Grecian setting pays some reference to her origins, so it's mildly better than the 1967 pilot -- or it would be, if it wasn't over four times as long.

Chewbacca speaks English in this footage from "The Empire Strikes Back"

I'm not a huge STAR WARS guy - enough to see THE FORCE AWAKENS in the theater within the first week, but not enough to see it on the first night.  (My geekdom is genetic, so I was bound to see it eventually.)  That said, I'm still kind of astonished that there hasn't been a lot of mention about this footage that was clearly not used in THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK that shows Chewbacca speaking English in a severe accent.



Unlike some of the behind-the-scenes footage in which Peter Mayhew is just speaking his lines as filler, this seems more like the character speaking his dialogue "in character."  I'm reasonably sure this was never meant to be part of the film itself, but it's still a curiously finished segment that shows Mayhew was committed to the character, even when his lines were going to get replaced completely by the yowling noises we know today.