Pacific movie serials, Thunderman (1948) and Thunderman vs. the Riot Ray (1950) ****
We are left with two movie serials that are like silvery postcards from a lost or abandoned American dreamtime, a place where nobody swore and our deities wore crumpled clothing just like we did. Whatever their merits, these generally well-done and well-acted pieces would arouse public interest in Thunderman to the point where an orchestrated campaign to embed the character in the national group-mind could begin in earnest.
Bugle Pictures, Thunderman in the Underworld (1951) ***
Somehow, Victor Richards realised Thunderman as a bulkier, older-looking man, with the forced bonhomie that comes with a drink problem and a generally depressed, defeated manner. In short, Thunderman had become a perfect American dad, like mine and everybody’s that I knew, who didn’t look like he was even getting any from Peggy Parks.
Ironically, this metamorphosis into Thunderdad seems to have completed the character’s descent into the sorry material world, and to have ensured his acceptance at the heart of the national psyche. This, at the time, seemed to be the rumpled, careworn and increasingly tipsy Thunderman that America felt comfortable with, that America wanted.
Brothers Bros, Thunderman (1978) ***
It is as if Thunderman’s corporate owners had perhaps come to realise that a divine, imaginal entity cannot be conjured into ordinary, physical, American reality without becoming ruinously degraded in the process, and had instead elected to create a smooth and gorgeous artificial American reality where such a being could comfortably exist. Looking back from today’s perspective, the seamless, moneyed and good-looking vision of America conjured by the film looks very similar to the yuppie dreamland that, with Ronald Reagan, would arrive within a year or two. For all the film’s proficiency, there remains something about it that is only bland and reassuring – yet in spite of, or perhaps because of this, the movie was enthusiastically received, making a sequel inevitable.
Brothers Bros television series, Littleburg (2001–2011) ***
This was a perfectly serviceable high school mystery-adventure, if one of the participants being etc. etc. fits your criteria for ‘serviceable’. And if you don’t mind that the series’ only compelling mystery is ‘Why haven’t they called this thing Thunderboy?’ (Spoiler alert: whenever a superhero changes a successful name or basic costume, or drops out of the continuity altogether, it’s always because they were dying sales-wise or, as in this instance, because there was talk of legal action from the character’s plundered creators, Thunderboy’s being the estate of Simon Schuman and David Kessler.) The take-home message from this period of the character’s screen career would seem to be, ‘it’s OK to do something with the superhero Thunderman, as long as it isn’t really a superhero story, and as long as you don’t really mention Thunderman’. However, these shows would seem to have once more raised the tantalising possibility of Thunderman as a viable on-screen property, as the following entries surely attest.
Brothers Bros, Thunderman Comes Back Again (2006) **
It’s well enough done, and with the then current beginnings of the CGI superhero movie boom in the air, it must have seemed like a sensible idea, yet the only vision the movie offers is a yearning nostalgia for the Saul Richard days – leading man Christopher Gent is Richard’s near doppelganger – and it does nothing to demonstrate why the twenty-first century would need a Thunderman. But, with Massive’s properties like Freak Force heralding the start of the Massive Cinematic Universe, Brothers and American must have felt an urgent need to get their most famous character up there on the cinema hoardings again. It would take them around seven years.
Brothers Bros, Man of Storms (2013) **
Since the late 1980s, the comic book industry has been suffering from the self-inflicted malaise of having to realise its originally delightful children’s characters as ‘dark’, grim, and, if possible, psychopathic versions of their former selves, to service the needs of a dwindling crowd of habituated superhero fans, whose physical age has long since outstripped its emotional equivalent. Well, in Man of Storms, that malady/fashion finally catches up with Thunderman. As for the film’s eye-boggling special effects, I should confess that I would rather see an enormous fake rat-tail dragged across a studio floor while Vera Marshall acts her horrified response than witness the gleeful citywide carnage depicted here; the knowledge that whatever spectacle we are seeing is achievable given enough money robs it of any genuine wonder or awe. When most of our contemporary superhero movies are showcases for their escalating special effects, then the question of which film has the greater cinematic or artistic value becomes a matter of competing CGI workshops, and goes better unasked.
Brothers Bros, United Supermen (2017) *
The basic incoherence of the comic book business is perfectly represented in the making of this movie. As is apparently standard practice in today’s film industry, rather than have a coherent and well-conceived script from the start, the current preference is to assemble an expensive cast and then shoot a lot of scenes that the producers or director thought would be ‘cool’. Then, at the editing stage, when it’s realised that there is nothing remotely resembling a story, the actors are called back in to shoot the additional footage necessary to make any kind of sense of the existing travesty.
All this happened to United Supermen, with one added complication being an abrupt change of directors halfway through the process, and another being the ridiculous tale of what has been called either ‘Monkey Christ Thunderman’ or ‘Thunderasta’. What had happened was that after finishing the initial shoot on United Supermen, actor Stephen Beacher – who had played Thunderman since Man of Storms – had moved on to his next role, this being marooned hermit Ben Gunn in a new adaptation of Treasure Island. The method-school actor had already grown dreadlocks and a lengthy beard in preparation for the part, and when he was recalled as Thunderman for the reshooting of United Supermen, his pirate-movie’s producers insisted that he be neither shaven nor shorn. This might have still been somehow salvageable had a thrift-conscious and priority-blind Brothers Bros not entrusted the necessary digital retouching to someone who was plainly barely competent, and who left both Stephen Beacher and Thunderman looking, indeed, like the notoriously botched ‘Monkey Christ’.
At least here, at the bitter end of the character’s trajectory into physical being, Thunderman has finally gained some kind of resemblance to a religious figure. Can we stop now?
