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Kashgar wrote:Way too late to have a Dan Dare movie in my opinion. They should have done one in the 1950's when someone like Richard Todd, hot foot from playing Guy Gibson in The Dambusters, could have given it a go complete with cardboard backdrops and wobbly scenery. Mind you I've never understood the fascination with the endless need to revive Dan Dare in any case. He's been venerated at the expense of other characters of his ilk far too may times. My, I do seem to be being tetchy this morning.
I tend to agree. (About Dan Dare, not you being tetchy. ) I felt the strip looked old fashioned when I encountered it in the Sixties. I can appreciate the importance of it now, and it was wonderful stuff, but it's niche material and I'm amazed a moviemaker would think a Dan Dare movie could work today.
It'll either be modernized completely and annoy the Dan Dare purists (therefore pointless to call the movie Dan Dare) or it'll be faithful to the original and alienate the wider audience that it needs to be successful.
Perhaps the moviemakers think Dan Dare has a far larger audience than he actually does?
While I'd have liked to have seen Lew Grade's aborted TV series, with its inspired casting of James Fox as Dan and Rodney Bewes as Digby, I must confess that I don't have any high hopes for this new film either. That's not to say it couldn't be done successfully however - the problem its that it would need an inspired writer along the lines of Dr Who's Russell T. Davies to pull it off, and unfortunately such people are few and far between.
The trick would be to capture the attention of a modern audience that's largely unaware of Dan's history, while remaining faithful to Frank Hampson's original vision (and it's worth remembering that my brother who's 61 this year was only just old enough to read the last few episodes of Hampson's run when they were originally published). As I see it the best idea would be to approach the whole thing in terms of parallel worlds, starting with a mysterious spaceship bearing 'Royal Space Fleet' markings crash-landing at our Heathrow Airport...!
Why would it "need" to be "camp"? That kind of "everybody in the past talked funny, harboured a secret gay attraction and was racist" attitude is starting to make more people than the 'luvvies' would dare to admit get pretty angry. Also for some reason "the past" is 1900-1979, anything before and after was a harmonious multicultural wonderland where nothing ever went wrong.
If they were going to do it properly (which they won't), and base it on the proper version from The Eagle (which they won't) they could do no better than copy "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow", a film which essentially chucked scientific and historical accuracy very very far out of the window and just told a good story!
Go on, er, filmy people, tell us the story of Dan Dare's mission to Venus in 2000 (after his training flights to the cities on the moon in 1995, nae doot) and the brutal dictatorship of little green men he finds there... you know you want to!
PS: No romance, of either kind, or crying. Or screaming "NNNNOOOOO!" under dripping pipes. Plumbing in the future that is the past will be leakproof.
You do kind of wonder why people would think a Dan Dare film would do well at the box office. I think it'd make a cool live-action TV series, but keep it with the 50's vibe. There's the technology available today to create the special effects for such a show, to give justice to Frank Hampson's vision of DD's world. The same kind of technology sure has been a contributing factor to the success of the new Doctor Who.
As for romance: I think Lex and Jocelyn might have had something going on. I recently read Titan's Safari in Space. In it there's a scene with them hanging out together at the beach. Well, Sir Hubert's there too. But I could see Lex and Jocelyn having a 'thing'.
I think that to make a successful DD show would be to play it straight, with that 1950s feel. Just take it as read that Britain won the space-race. I think it would be fun. But only if it were played as a serious drama. Utilising Hampson's vision of the future: holographic TVs and gas pistols. Everything retro.
And there was also the Revolver (later Crisis, then in some US reprint) version by Grant Morrison (which was pretty bloody good) and a Virgin comics version by Garth Ennis which was modeled on the hideously under-rated 2000AD version.
That Morrison series, Dare, was dreadful. Bleak and depressing and steeped in sixth-form politics, it was everything a Dan Dare story shouldn't be.
The first thing anyone who wants to write a character like Dan Dare should realise is that he's a hero. Sadly this seems an elusive concept to so many modern comic writers.
I'm with Chris on the Revolver strip. No, it wasn't the traditional Dan Dare story, but then, that was rather the point. It was about heroism becoming undervalued in an increasingly bleak world, and Morrison chose Dared to illustrate the point because he was the ultimate old fashioned hero.
It's such a lazy approach to writing. "I'm going to change these characters to fit the story I want to tell." If you can't stay true to the characters then don't bother. Sadly, far too many writers are doing it these days.
Who knows, a DD film might be a success: George Lucas only created STAR WARS after he was unable to secure the rights to FLASH GORDON, [an equally archaic concept as DD, even in the 70s] but apperently this went down well with audiences.
There's obviously a lot of archaic FLASH GORDON- styled imagery in STAR WARS: they just gave it a glossier sheen with 'lived-in' looking scenarios.
Maybe this success can only truly be 'done once' however, as modern audiences are so jaded with endless fantasy imagery onscreen.
I have never once seen a live-adaptation of a comic book that came anywhere near the dynamic version of a good printed example: the two mediums of film and comics are non-compatible, in my view, despite modern aids like CGI.
Robbie Moubert wrote:It's such a lazy approach to writing. "I'm going to change these characters to fit the story I want to tell." If you can't stay true to the characters then don't bother. Sadly, far too many writers are doing it these days.
But Morrison wasn't actually changing the character, just deliberately presenting a distorted view of his world. The 'real' Dan Dare (or a version of him) was still being published at the same time in the eighties Eagle.
You really think the Dan Dare that Morrison presented in that series was the same heroic character that appeared in the Eagle? It wasn't just Dare's world that was distorted but Dare himself.
Yep, it was a different Dan Dare, just as the 2000AD one was. But then, the pulp hero 40s Batman, then the sci-fi 1950s/60s Batman was much different from the grim'n'gritty one from the 80s.
Spaceship Away does a very traditional Dan Dare. But I can't see the mag appealing to many outside the Eagle enthusiasts. Nothing wrong with that but it's little more than fanfiction (and I don't mean that as an insult).
Characters have to change or, like the old Dare, fade into near oblivion. No kid reading Action or Battle would have wanted the Vicar In Space version of Dare for 2000AD. Likewise, no politically-minded teen/twenty-something that was reading Crisis/Revolver would have wanted the fairly simplistic (again, no insult intended) Eagle version.
) I felt the strip looked old fashioned when I encountered it in the Sixties. I can appreciate the importance of it now, and it was wonderful stuff, but it's niche material and I'm amazed a moviemaker would think a Dan Dare movie could work today. 
