Over the last few decades, comic book movies have reached heights of storytelling and spectacle that readers could never have DREAMED of. But for every triumphant high—The Dark Knight, The Avengers—there have always been a good number of stinkers… some bad enough to become punchlines or talking points, but most mediocre and ultimately forgotten…

Until they end up here.

The Discount Spinner Rack is where you’ll find the worst, the weirdest, and the most puzzling of comic book movie misfires. We’ll take a look at the things that actually work and the parts that absolutely don’t, and decide whether it’s worth your time and your dime. In the end, movies will be marked down on a scale from $1.00 (a surprise gem) to $0.05 (better used for kindling). In the final chapter of the BATMAN KNOCK-OFF PULP HERO TRILOGY, we’ll be traveling deep into the Bengalla Jungle… wherever THAT is… to SLAM EVIL with the lifeless 1996 flop, The Phantom!

In 1989, Tim Burton’s Batman changed the face of blockbuster cinema forever.

As a result, the early nineties were littered with films that chased the imagined trend that Batman represented: retro ‘40s art deco urban pulp heroes. But trends come and go, and after a half-decade of derivative flops like The Shadow and Dick Tracy¹, it seemed as if the shine had finally worn off this particular fool’s gold. Hollywood, however, never misses a trick… and before they finally let go of this particular obsession, they made a desperate last gamble: they jammed TWO successful ideas together, hoping the product would be as popular as both.

“It’s ‘Batman meets Indiana Jones’!”

Funny thing about the Phantom: depending on your reckoning, he might technically be the first superhero.

The character was created in 1936 by writer/artist Lee Falk for a syndicated newspaper comic strip—predating Superman by a full two years. Now, the Phantom doesn’t have any superpowers (so if that’s your criteria, then he’s outta luck)… but he DOES fight crime in a distinctive, colorful costume with a cowl and a bandit mask (although, if “masked crimefighter with a double identity” is what you call a superhero, then Zorro has ‘em all beat). Falk DID, at the very least, innovate the classic trope of blank white eyes peering out from the hero’s mask, which he attributed to the white eyes of Greek busts giving them an “inhuman, awe-inspiring appearance”.

The Phantom’s whole deal is that he’s kiiiiiiind of a legacy hero. See, way back in Ye Olden Days (which is to say, the 1500s), a young sailor named Christopher Walker² was going on a voyage with his father³ when the ship was attacked by pirates. The father was killed, but Christopher⁴ managed to dive overboard and swim to the shore of the small (fictional) tropical nation of Bangalla (initially located in southern Asia, close to India, but then later retconned into being an African nation). There, he was discovered by… (*long, beleaguered sigh*)… native pygmies of the Bandar tribe, who took him in and gradually nursed him back to health.

When Walker⁵ recovers, he makes a solemn vow to bring about “the destruction of piracy, greed, cruelty, and injustice, in all their forms!”

To do this, he first makes himself a costume⁶ based on the Demon God of Wasaka, an idol worshipped by the Wasaka tribe which held the Bandars in slavery, and freed the Bandars. Dressed in a purple body stocking with a domino mask and a set of signet rings, he then set up shop in the convenient local Skull Cave and became the guardian of the jungle and its inhabitants, a mythical figure knows as the “Ghost Who Walks”⁷, or the Phantom.

That’s right, everybody—it’s a culturally-appropriative white savior fantasy!

But Christopher Walker⁸ isn’t the main character of the series. Nope… see, after the first Phantom died, the mantle was passed down to his SON, to carry on the tradition. And then it was later passed to HIS son, and then THAT one’s son, and so on, and so on—inadvertently creating a myth among evildoers that the Phantom is an immortal, indestructible avenger who’s lived for centuries. (It’s all very “Dread Pirate Roberts”⁹.) But the Phantom we pick up with in the comic strips is actually the twenty-first Phantom, KIT Walker.

The original Phantom strips were set in present-day 1936, with Kit operating as the masked adventurer from his Skull Cave in the Bangalla jungle—fighting piracy and oppression with his wits, physical prowess, a trained wolf named Devil, a white stallion named Hero, and his twin automatic pistols. Aaaaaaaaaand… that’s kind of it! The strips have been running continuously ever since then (changing creative hands multiple times along the way), and have gained tremendous popularity across the globe¹⁰¹¹—the character quickly making the jump to comic books, cartoons, TV shows… and in 1996, a movie.

Now, in the early 1980s, legendary director Sergio Leone was apparently keen on getting an adaptation of The Phantom made himself—even going so far as to scout locations, meet with Lee Falk, and start work on a screenplay. But the interest simply wasn’t there for the project in the ‘80s, and Leone ended up walking away from the project to direct Once Upon a Time in America instead¹².

The first REAL swing at turning The Phantom into a feature film wouldn’t come until the early ‘90s—hot on the heels of, you guessed it, Batman. Paramount Pictures hired Joe Dante (Gremlins, The ‘Burbs) to direct the film, and Dante collaborated with Jeffrey Boam (Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Lethal Weapon 2 and 3) to develop a screenplay. Things seemed to be on-track to shoot in Australia… but at the last minute, the studio pulled the plug on the production over budgetary concerns.

But wouldn’t you know it, a year later the studio started moving forward again… except by then, Dante was working on another project. So the studio hired Simon Wincer (D.A.R.Y.L., Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man, and—swear to God, I’m not kidding—Free Willy) to direct the Dante/Boam script, minus the demon finale. So… fair compromise, right? All’s well that ends well?

HA! A ha ha…! Oh, we’ll get back to this…!

Filling the bright purple shoes¹³ of the Ghost Who Walks would be Billy Zane, fresh from his role as a demonic trickster in Tales from the Crypt Presents: Demon Knight—beating out both New Zealand actor Kevin Smith¹⁴ and BRUCE FRIGGIN’ CAMPBELL, who was apparently in contention until the very last minute!¹⁵ Zane, as it happens, was already a huge fan of the character, and spent a year and a half training to get into superheroic shape for the role, so he wouldn’t need to resort to a rubber muscle-suit to look strong.

The Phantom came out in 1996, a scant year after Batman Forever had arrived in all its neon, be-nippled glory to crush box office records. And to the surprise of no one… it was a HUGE flop. The film brought in a meager $23 million dollars total against a $45-to-$50 million budget—trampled in its opening weekend by Michael Bay’s The Rock, Brian De Palma’s Mission: Impossible, and Jan De Bont’s Twister.

What had gone wrong? Superhero films were still doing fairly well at the box office, even for lesser-known properties (The Mask raked in $352 million, The Crow squeaked out $94 million, and even Judge Dredd managed to crack a hundred mil). But there did seem to be a growing stigma attached to these pulp-hero movies, given that both The Rocketeer and The Shadow only managed to bring in returns in the mid-to-high 40 millions. Were audiences finally just fed up with trend-chasing movie studios cashing in older, outdated I.P.s in the vain hope of tricking viewers into thinking they were gonna get another Batman?

OR… was there, perhaps, some extremely specific creative choice that torpedoed this film from the word “go”? Some kind of egregious miscalculation that turned the movie into a stone-cold dud—like if you were baking muffins and used salt instead of sugar?

IN THIS ISSUE: Magic skulls, pirate cults, and Billy Zane in a purple full-body condom! (It’s not as much fun as it sounds.)

This is where I must reveal the deep, dark, horrible secret of this film. You see, when Joe Dante was writing this movie with Jeffrey Boam, they were writing it as a COMEDY. The plan was to play it as a spoof of the genre, with over-the-top villains and absurd situations playing out in ludicrous ways. But when Dante dropped out and Wincer stepped in, he used the exact same script that Dante had been writing… but apparently, no one noticed that it was supposed to be a farce. So they shot it like a serious adventure movie.

After a truncated recap of Christopher Walker’s¹⁶ problematic origin tale, we jump forward to a deeply hokey treasure-hunting sequence in the Bengalla¹⁷ jungle, in which a trio of goons—lead by head henchman Quill (James Remar)—discover one of the three mythical Skulls of Touganda in a native burial chamber. Then one of the three shmucks gets strangled to death by a mummy with ZERO explanation—we don’t know if the mummy was supernaturally controlled, or if it was some elaborate booby trap was tripped. This feels like a moment that was meant to be playful and intentionally a little bit ridiculous… but director Simon Wincer plays it as a moment of straight danger and intrigue, and it lands with a hollow thud.

But the most IMPORTANT thing to note here is that Quinn, with his brown fedora and battered leather vest (then later in a full black trench coat and black fedora) is pretty shamelessly an evil Indiana Jones.

He’s bullish and quick to use a gun like Indy, but he’s also disrespectful of native cultures, and works for profit rather than academic interests. I’m not sure if this was intended as a critique of imperialist cultural exploitation, which Dr. Jones represents to an extent…? (I doubt it, though, as the Phantom ultimately turns the crooks he captures over to the British colonial authorities.) But however you want to look at it, Indiana Jones is all OVER these first sequences—which start as a pale imitation of the opening of Raiders of the Lost Ark, before transitioning into a loving homage (or rather, blatant rip-off) of the famous Nazi truck-chase sequence, before ENDING on a cross between Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom’s rope-bridge sequence, and a similar rope-bridge sequence in the William Friedkin film Sorcerer!

UNLIKE the holy sites in the Indiana Jones films, though, the Bengalla jungle has a champion to protect her artifacts and culture from the prying hands of treasure hunters. Summoned by the drums of the Tougandan people from his Skull Cave, the PHANTOM charges into the fray, in his bright-purple costume, astride his brilliantly white stallion Hero! (It’s, uh… it’s not exactly effective jungle camo. Frankly, it’s kind of amazing he doesn’t get shot immediately.) He’s also got his attack wolf, Devil, at his side.

Now… how to describe the Phantom?

I’d argue they did a pretty good job with the presentation. Apparently the Jim Henson Workshop was involved with the development of the costume, which is kind of baffling (we’ll get more into that for Favorite Bits)—but the overall effect is that he looks like he jumped right out of a comic panel!

But as a character, the Phantom doesn’t get the brooding mysteriousness of a Batman, the hard-nosed unflappability of Dick Tracy, or the cruel playfulness of the Shadow. No, Billy Zane’s Kit Walker, whether in or out of costume, is… just a really chill dude.

Now, I DO want to give Zane credit for this choice. It’s clear that his take on Kit is that this is a guy who grew up in the Bengalla Jungle, heir to a long dynasty of theatrical warrior heroes who protect magical skull artifacts from pirates and grave robbers—and by the time we meet him, he gets regular visits from the ghost of his murdered dad (Patrick McGoohan, from The Prisoner, Scanners, and about a million other things). So Kit would just be used to the weirdness of being a superhero, and as such, nothing would ever PHASE him. Zane plays the character as extraordinarily casual; he just rolls with whatever comes along. No biggie!

But again… that characterization would make a LOT more sense in a comedy. When the Phantom pops up in the office of the British Jungle Patrol captain, scarfing down a finger sandwich and joking that he prefers coming in through the window, it deflates the Phantom’s mystique as a masked avenger. Which is great if you’re going for laughs… but terrible if you’re shooting for a real adventure movie.

Another issue is that the Phantom doesn’t really have a terribly strong motivation as a character. I mean, Kit himself didn’t even make the vow to fight “piracy, greed, and cruelty in all their forms”—his GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GREAT-GRANDFATHER did. He’s just doing it ‘cause it’s the family business.

So to solve this little issue, the movie gives Kit two of the most stereotypical motivations imaginable. First of all, it turns out that Quinn—evil Indiana Jones—killed Kit’s father years ago, stabbing him in the back and stealing his belt as a trophy (though the former Phantom managed to nail Quinn with a solid punch, leaving the mark of the Skull Ring on his face).

The SECOND motivation is that the bad guys after the Skulls of Touganda end up targeting the adventurous, do-gooding niece of the New York Tribune’s owner: globe-trotting heiress Diana Palmer (Kristy Swanson, the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer), who’s hot on the trail of the infamous Sengh Brotherhood¹⁸… and who just happens to be Kit’s estranged college sweetheart.

Yep, Diana is the Phantom’s Lois Lane, his one true love, his inevitable and predestined ‘ship… which means she doesn’t really have to be very interesting, does she? She’s just a plot device; the goil he has to save because he has to be with her at the end. It’s 100% stock. Sure, the movie makes couple of vague gestures to her being feisty and “not like other girls”, but she’s still a damsel in distress for half of her screentime. The Phantom has to rescue her from being kidnapped TWICE in a hundred-minute movie.

So the Phantom is an explicit jungle protector with deep ties to the indigenous culture of Bengalla¹⁹, and Diana is world-travelling explorer who comes from fabulous wealth but chooses to live a more rugged, authentic life, and respects cultures foreign to her. Who would these two be facing up against? Why, obviously an imperialistic American business tycoon who seeks to steal and exploit the resources of other cultures to amass undreamed-of power for himself! (So, like… a typical capitalist.)

Main baddie Xander Drax²⁰ is a grinning, leering, ostentatious goon. Of the entire cast, Treat Williams is the only one who seems to be on the original screeenplay’s comedy wavelength, ‘cause he’s going HUGE with this suave, pin-striped huckster—taking him far afield of sinister and well into the realm of the ridiculous. He’s just… so… JOLLY! He’s always got a huge smile on his face and a can-do attitude. When the preening magnate get his hands on two of the three Skulls of Touganda—triggering a powerful indoor tempest that blows out several stained-glass windows—he looks up at the destruction being wrought with a huge, gleeful grin and shouts, “I LOVE this!!!”

By the end of the film, the parallel is drawn between Drax’s capitalist pillaging and outright brutal piracy, as the baddies (and their indignant hostage, Diana) track the last skull to a secluded tropical island and run afoul of the Sengh Brotherhood. Turns out the majority of the order is living in a hidden base in the caves surrounding an active volcano, and they’ve built themselves a little Buccaneer Cove down there—complete with the partial deck of a sailing ship reconstructed into the cavern itself. (‘Cause they’re pirates! They need to have a ship, right? It’s the only way they can feel at home!)

The Brotherhood all wield cutlasses and daggers, and they’re dressed in generic pirate garb from the 17- and 1800s…

… Their underground lair is SHOCKINGLY well-lit, so you can see the plaster-and-foam amusement park artifice of it all (complete with phony sharks swimming in an obligatory moat). This sh*t is goofy as HELL, but Simon Wincer really seems to think this is thrilling, harrowing stuff! Are we really supposed to be on the edge of our seat just ‘cause they’ve been captured by…

… Wait: Kabai Sengh, the leader of the Sengh Brotherhood, is played by Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa? SHANG TSUNG himself?!?

Well damn—I think this movie just went up half a star!

So Tagawa gets in a good amount of monologuing—the best part of the movie, IMO (“Now, let me see… When was the last time we had visitors here: below the ocean’s surface, DEEP in the bowels of this uncharted volcanic island? … NEVER! Congratulations… You pathetic, doomed fools are the first!”). But before long the Phantom shows up, causing a Universal Studios stunt show to break out—pirates somersaulting over guard rails, heroes swinging in and out on ropes, and the Phantom shooting the swords outta the hands of his enemies with his twin pistols (which, bizarrely, is the ONLY thing the Phantom uses his guns for). Meanwhile, Diana joins in on the fight with the help of…

… Oh, wait, jeez—I completely forgot to mention: CATHERINE ZETA JONES is in this movie!

Yeah, that’s right—she shows up at the start of act two as Sala, the sexy leader of an all-woman band of airplane pirates²¹! She’s supposed to be the slinky, sexy femme fatale henchwoman for Drax… which ultimately amounts to making catty remarks from the sidelines and kissing the Phantom one time (which has seemingly no effect on him). Finally, Diana literally asks her “why are you so mean?”—a question that apparently shakes her to her CORE—and she later decides to switch sides and stay close to Diana once they’re surrounded by smelly, sleazy pirate scum (“I think us girls should stick together” she says, after one of the creeps tries to claim Diana as his property). It’s a redemption arc! Except we have no reason to care about this character!

Anyway, a big scuffle ensues! Kabai Sengh is eaten by rubber sharks, the pirates are incapacitated by a big net, and the Phantom leads Diana and Sala to a mini-submarine launch to escape from the island. But before they can leave, he gets ambushed by Evil Indiana Jones and Drax, who puts all the Skulls of Touganda together, and unleashes the awesome power of… A GREEN LASER!

Hmm.

So… these skulls are the MacGuffin of the movie. The entire internal mythology of the film is bent around them, including the Phantom’s origins—turns out in the film that Christopher Walker²² was recruited by the Bengalla natives to safeguard these skulls specifically. Drax claims that putting them together will create a “force more powerful than any army”. If this is a Batman/Indiana Jones pastiche, then this is the movie’s Ark of the Covenant.

So it’s a little deflating when he finally puts ‘em all together, lightning flashes, thunder rumbles, and it turns out that the skulls are about as powerful as a hand phaser from Star Trek.

With the three skulls now firmly in his grasp, Drax inadvertently vaporizes Quill, showing us just how scary this power is. Oh, sh*t! He’s gonna zap da’ Phantom! And then, I guess, maybe take over the world or something—it’s not clear!

… Ah ah ah…! You see, shortly before his fatal shark-ening, Shang Tsung mentioned that Drax didn’t have a heretofore-unmentioned FOURTH skull—a totem that controls the power of the other three!

Can you guess where it is?

Yeah: as Drax opens fire with the skulls, ol’ Mr. Magenta Magnum whirls around and throws out his fist… and his skull ring shoots out a blast of violet light (just like on the poster!). Thus, the grand final battle turns out to be a duel of GREEN lasers versus PURPLE lasers, in a glorified staring contest… TO THE DEATH.

But before you know it, the Phantom wins (more on that below), and the whole volcanic island starts blowing up—more pirates flipping over guardrails, more unconvincing explosions, yadda yadda yadda. But the Phantom escapes at the last second with Diana and Sala, and they all go back to Bengalla—where the Phantom FINALLY reveals to Diana (and to us, the audience) the secret of the Phantom’s immortality: that he’s actually the twenty-first Phantom, the latest in a long lineage, and… and…

… Wait.

(*scrubs back through entire movie*)

… That was supposed to be a MYSTERY?!?

I’m not kidding when I tell you this: I actually did not realize that this was supposed to be a big final twist reveal until I went back to write this review. Because in NO way, shape, or form does the movie successfully make the Phantom mysterious!

And yet… if you look at just the SCRIPT for the film, it’s actually very well structured to tease the notion that the Phantom MIGHT just be an immortal. The origin sequence shows us a kid’s dad being killed by the Sengh Brotherhood, and he swears to become the Phantom. JUMP CUT to 1938 where Kit is regularly visited by a Ghost Dad that we know was killed by a member of the Brotherhood (but we don’t realize his killer was Quill until the final act). Similarly, Quill keeps talking about how he stabbed the Phantom in the back, and the pirates all apparently have stories of having killed the Phantom; we THINK they’re talking about Kit, only to discover that there’s been a litany of these guys.

This is all IN THE TEXT of the film… but it doesn’t come across at all because the filmmakers didn’t know how to emphasize the mystery enough to get an audience to NOTICE it.

And that’s the movie in a nutshell. It’s the apex of these trend-chasing, soulless cash-grabs: something vaguely shaped like movies that you recognize, but without any of the spark of creativity behind it. Too broad to be exciting, too po-faced to be funny… with no clear idea of what it wants an audience to feel, or how to successfully evoke it. Splitting the difference between a comedy and an action film just leaves you with a doofy, cornball adventure film where we’re not sure what we’re expected to take seriously—so we can’t take ANY of it seriously.

IS IT WORTH YOUR DIME?: I mean… it’s not TOO objectionable. There are worse ways to spend two hours. But it’s an almost completely neutral viewing experience. You might get a sensible chuckle or two out of it, but it’s not gonna make an impression on you; you’d have more fun playing solitaire or sorting your sock drawer.

DISCOUNT PRICE: $0.10

FAVORITE BITS:

1. Purple Threads? Outta Sight!: It’s always about the costume with me, and this is… a weird one. The Jim Henson Workshop was involved with the development of the Phantom’s look—and that may be puzzling at first, given that he’s seemingly just wearing a spandex leotard with a rubber cowl and domino mask. But the Phantom’s outfit is actually covered with an elaborate, intricate pattern, silk-screened into the fabric layer by layer so that it shows through more clearly in some light, but reads as just purple in others. That’s a technology that would end up being used to give Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man suit a sense of depth and muscularity in the Sam Raimi films! But the pattern incorporated into the Phantom’s outfit is swimming in skulls, both as part of a repeating fringe pattern running through the entire suit and as the muscle pattern on his torso.
   
   He is, essentially, Skull Man! The design subtly incorporates the Phantom himself into the film’s Skull mythology without drawing too much attention to itself.²³
2. Microscope Misfortune: Look… this isn’t really much of an effective scene. It’s not even a particularly logical one. But CONCEPTUALLY, it makes my skin crawl. Drax has discovered that the head of the New York Library has spilled the beans to a newspaper reporter that he’s investigating the Skulls of Touganda, so he rigs up a microscope with eye-pieces that shoot out tiny little scalpel blades when you turn the focus wheel:
   
   Then he invites the man over for a meeting, and after the guy lies to his face about sharing the information, Drax asks him to check out something in the microscope. So he peers into the eyepieces, and turns the wheel, and… GGGGAAAAHHH, it creeps me out! We don’t see anything graphic, but we hear the blades and the man screaming—and then we see Drax snap the man’s discarded glasses, quipping, “Well, I guess you won’t be needing these…!”
3. The Phantom vs. Shang Tsung: The one and only genuinely compelling action sequence in this movie is the big third-act sword fight between the Phantom and Kabai Sengh—because Sengh is the only villain who seems genuinely DANGEROUS. Cary Hiroyuki-Tagawa brings a tremendous intensity and athleticism to the stunt choreography, which is sloppy and slow everywhere else in the film but is tight as a drum here. And Billy Zane manages to match him move for move, so the whole sequence just FLOWS. There’s also a wonderful little moment where one of the other pirates tries to break in to battle the Phantom himself, but Sengh storms up and stabs the interloper in the side, snarling, “… This is MY fight!” If only the rest of the action sequences had this kind of energy!
   
4. Drax’s PowerPoint Presentation: Exposition is always a tricky thing to work into a film. You want the audience to be clear on what exactly is happening so that they can understand the stakes, but without making it too obvious that that’s what you’re doing. So it’s TRULY an elegant solution when, about halfway through the movie, Drax brings all his lieutenants together in a board room, shuts off the lights… and starts a slide show, wherein he explains the three skulls, how they work, and his plans to bring ‘em all together. After a final slide of Drax’s corporate logo, the lights come up, and everybody awkwardly claps like they don’t know how to react. One sympathizes. (Though at least the scene picks up a bit when one of the mafiosos present tries to storm out on Drax’s whole operation, so Drax just grabs a nearby decorative spear and CHUCKS it at the guy, pinning him to the wall…!)
5. “UNBELIEVABAAAAALLLLLLE…!!!”: So… about that final battle between Drax and the Phantom. It IS incredibly embarrassing that they end the movie with two grown men miming a laser battle with each other while lights flash and some early C.G.I. energy beams get comped in. But the payoff almost makes the whole thing work! As Drax is leaning in, seemingly getting the Grimace on the ropes… our violet avenger redoubles his efforts, pushing his fist forward, and Drax, seemingly DELIGHTED by his impending doom, exclaims in astonishment before being vaporized in a giant fireball with a final, echoing cackle of glee!

NEXT ISSUE: FREE!!! I’m finally free from this insipid film and these terrible pulp hero movies! It’s time to get back to some SUPERHEROES, dammit… and given the imminent return of Marvel’s Merry Mutants with this year’s big Avengers crossover-palooza, I think the time is right to revisit the very, very first of the defunct 20^th Century Fox’s defunct cinematic franchise, X-Men. BE THERE!

1. … Not to mention The Rocketeer, The Crow and Judge Dredd, which were at least on the right TRACK by being based on actual comic books, but suffered from being based on characters the general public had largely never heard of (and in Dredd’s case, being a terrible movie to boot). ↩︎
2. … Which, yes, is distractingly close to “Christopher Walken”—so every time his name pops up, I’m going to include a Walken quote. ↩︎
3. Also named Christopher Walker… ↩︎
4. “I hid this uncomfortable hunk of metal up my ass for two years. Then, after seven years, I was sent home to my family. And now, little man, I give the watch to you.” ↩︎
5. “Mayors come and go. Blue-bloods tire easy. You think you could go fifteen rounds with Muhammad Shreck?” ↩︎
6. Why, exactly, is that costume purple, though? Well, it was essentially a coloring error! Falk had initially wanted the color of the costume to be grey, and in fact referred to the suit as grey in many of the daily strips. But the first Sunday edition of the strip, released in 1939, clearly depicted the Phantom in a dark purple outfit… without Falk’s input or approval! Falk was shocked, but eventually just rolled with it. ↩︎
7. … Get it? “Christopher WALKER”? “The Ghost Who WALKS”? Eh? ↩︎
8. “The ICE… is gonna BREAK!” ↩︎
9. … You don’t know who that is? Inconceivable! ↩︎
10. Fun Fact #1: the longest-running comic book to feature the Phantom is from Australia, and it happens to be the bestselling comic book in the nation’s history! ↩︎
11. Fun Fact #2: the Phantom comics were distributed in care packages during World War II, and made their way to Papua New Guinea, where they became EXTREMELY popular with the local tribes. The character’s likeness would eventually come to be painted on ceremonial shields and other tribal artworks. ↩︎
12. Which… in my honest opinion? Not a great movie. ↩︎
13. … Yes, I know he actually wears plain ol’ black boots, IT’S A JOKE…! ↩︎
14. The guy who played Ares on Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess, NOT the filmmaker who played Silent Bob. ↩︎
15. I feel like Campbell would have been a better fit for the Dante version of the movie anyway… but we’ll get to that! ↩︎
16. “I’m the Anti-Christ. You got me in a vendetta kind of mood. You tell the angels in heaven you never seen evil so singularly personified as you did in the face of the man who killed you.” ↩︎
17. Changed from “Bangalla” just for this movie, for some unfathomable reason… ↩︎
18. Changed from the comic strips’ “Singh Brotherhood” to avoid offending the rather sizable population of people in the world actually named “Singh”… ↩︎
19. One COULD call those ties a kind of appropriative, colonialist soft power, but I digress… ↩︎
20. So, SO close to being a palindrome…! ↩︎
21. They board airplanes mid-flight and rob the passengers! It’s a conceit taken directly from the comic strip, apparently! ↩︎
22. ”You know how you get that dent on your top lip?…Before you were born, I told you a secret. Then I put my finger there and I said ‘shh’” ↩︎
23. Funny thing, though… the Phantom wears TWO rings: the skull ring (which he brands his enemies with) and the CROSSED SWORDS ring (which he marks his ALLIES with, to let the natives know that they are a trusted comrade of the Phantom when he’s not around). Kit is wearing BOTH rings in the movie, but the script never brings up the second one. Were they saving the story of the crossed-swords ring for the SEQUEL? Or were they just reluctant to explain that the Phantom brands his enemies AND his friends with equal zeal? You decide! ↩︎