The Big Picture
- George Lucas regrets not having John Landis direct Howard the Duck, believing it would have been more successful.
- The Howard the Duck comics were edgier and more satirical than the film, resulting in a formulaic and boring plot.
- John Landis may have brought a self-aware and funny tone to Howard the Duck, but his involvement would have been controversial due to his involvement in a tragic accident on another film set.
George Lucas' work is a decidedly mixed bag. American Graffiti and the first Star Wars are top-notch, while the Star Wars prequels are... being reevaluated. Yet he defines the greatest regret of his career to be not having landed John Landis to direct the infamous box-office bomb Howard the Duck. That's right. The man that brought the world Jar-Jar Binks (Ahmed Best) in Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace, the man responsible for Darth Vader's (James Earl Jones) ghastly "NOOO!!!" in Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith, and for Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) chasing aliens in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is on record as saying,"My greatest regret in my career is that John [Landis] was unable to direct Howard the Duck. I feel the movie would have been far more successful and saved me the years of hardship following its release." Not for unleashing an entry on every worst movie list for eternity, just the fact that he should have gone with Landis to direct, not Willard Huyck. Where do you even start to pick that apart for its overwhelming wrongness?
Howard the Duck
PGActionAdventureComedyFantasyRomance Sci-FiA sarcastic humanoid duck is pulled from his homeworld to Earth where he must stop an alien invasion with the help of a nerdy scientist and a struggling female rock singer.
- Release Date
- August 1, 1986
- Director
- Willard Huyck
- Cast
- Lea Thompson , Jeffrey Jones , Tim Robbins , Ed Gale , Chip Zien , Tim Rose
- Runtime
- 110 minutes
- Main Genre
- Action
- Writers
- Steve Gerber , Willard Huyck , Gloria Katz
- Studio
- Lucasfilm, Universal Pictures
- Tagline
- A new breed of hero.
Is 'Howard the Duck' Good?
Sure, no one wants to admit that their name is attached to a project that isn't all it was quacked up to be, but it's beyond comprehension that Lucas would even suggest that Howard the Duck could have been saved with John Landis at the helm. There is no one, dead or alive, that could have saved Howard the Duck. Not frequent collaborator Steven Spielberg. Not James Gunn or JamesCameron. Not Alfred Hitchcock, and most assuredly not John Landis.
The premise is simple (which in itself is a problem we'll address soon). Howard the Duck (Chip Zein, voice) is suddenly taken from his home on Duckworld, and lands in Cleveland, Ohio, Earth. He rescues a woman, Beverly (Lea Thompson) from a gang of thugs with his (ahem) "Quack Fu." She lets Howard spend the night at her apartment, and they fall for one another. We learn a laser spectroscope malfunction brought Howard and a "Dark Overlord of the Universe" (Jeffrey Jones) to Earth. They stop global destruction, Howard can't get home again, becomes Beverly's band manager, and joins her on stage for a performance of a song about Howard the Duck.
The 'Howard the Duck' Comics Were Edgier Than the Movie
The Howard the Duck comics of the 1970s were edgier than the film. More satirical than the film. More cynical than the film. All the things that Howard was in the comics were completely abandoned for a formulaic plot and a generic "being different is good" morale. The Howard of the comics is not a nice guy. He's rude, sarcastic, and edgy. Movie Howard is the polar opposite. He is a nice guy. No cynicism, sarcasm, or rudeness, just plain old nice. And frightfully boring as a result. The only nod to any degree of immorality is Howard opening up a "Playduck" magazine to the centerfold and getting ready to "crack some eggs" (wink wink nudge nudge) at the start of the film. The acting is sub-par, although it's hard to saddle the cast with the blame on a script too horrendously awful.
The special effects are decent, at least, except for the animatronics that bring Howard to life. The duck faces never worked well, the electronics in the neck were visible when the mouth was open, and so on. Spielberg could at least hide his shark for most of the movie Jaws. When the animatronic character is the main character, no less the character in the title, that becomes problematic. The problems with the duck also cost them Robin Williams, who was originally cast as Howard's voice, when his improvisational style didn't fit the movement of the duck's bill. And the less said about the implied foul act of human/duck coitus, the better. A good, even great, director simply can't make something special with those types of production issues.
John Landis Would Have Been a Bad Choice for 'Howard the Duck'
But let's pretend we live in a world where Howard the Duck actually worked. The script was good, hewing far closer to the source material. The acting was top-notch Oscar bait. The animatronics for Howard were ground-breaking, bordering on flawless. Robin Williams was still the voice for Howard. Had this been the case, Landis would indeed have had something to work with that was right up his alley. The edgy, anti-establishment vibe of the comics would shine for a director whose past credits included Animal House and The Blues Brothers, not exactly films that feature nice, polite protagonists. The Kentucky Fried Movie was proof-positive of his penchant for parody, and as for the effects, this is the man who turned a man into a werewolf on film in full, gory detail in An American Werewolf in London. It could have been a perfect match of director and project.
Yet as we know, the world we live in has a Howard the Duck film that sucks. Howard the Suck. At best, Landis may have gotten more out of the actors, getting them to embrace the absurdity of the film and turning it into something more self-aware and maybe, just maybe, even funny. But at the time, Landis was embroiled in a trial over an accident on the set of his sequence in Twilight Zone: The Movie. The segment features a bigoted man (Vic Morrow) who is forced to live in the shoes of those he had previously derided: a black man in the Klan-era South, a Jew in Nazi Germany, and a Vietnamese man in the Vietnam War. It was the last piece, where Morrow was carrying two children across a river while being chased by a military helicopter, that things went south when the chopper crashed, dismembering Morrow and the two children. Landis downplayed safety concerns on set, avoided child labor laws by keeping the children's names out of official paperwork and paying them under the table, and even pushed for the use of live ammunition when he was unsatisfied with the fake gunfire. Landis was acquitted, but his career was never quite the same following the event. Given this, Landis' involvement with Howard the Duck would have actually made things worse, with the court of public opinion strongly against the filmmaker at the time. And if George Lucas thinks for a moment that he would have evaded hardship with Landis behind the director's chair, maybe he should pause and be thankful that the scenario never played out in the first place.
Howard the Duck is available to rent on Apple TV+ in the U.S.
