Today the Overthinking It staff tackles the pressing question of which 80s franchise they would most like to see revived, inspired by the upcoming Ghostbusters revival and by our general obsession with the decade of (many of) our births. By the way, Were You Aware that Beverly Hills Cop, Robocop, Short Circuit, Escape From New York, The Thing, Scanners, and Police Academy are ALL scheduled for sequels or remakes? Truly, there is no new thing under the sun.
Read Part 1 today, and stay tuned for Part 2 tomorrow—and your chance to vote for the winner.
Conan, by Belinkie
I always liked the Schwarzenegger Conan the Barbarian movie, but I didn’t truly get the awesomeness of Conan until I read Robert E. Howard’s original stories. Howard wrote pulp fiction during the Depression, for magazines like Weird Tales and Fight Stories. And when you read his stuff, you feel like a ten-year-old reading under the covers by flashlight. Here’s the beginning of an early Conan story, “The Frost Giant’s Daughter”:
The clangor of the swords had died away, the shouting of the slaughter was hushed; silence lay on the red-stained snow. The bleak pale sun that glittered so blindingly from the ice-fields and the snow-covered plains struck sheens of silver from rent corselet and broken blade, where the dead lay as they had fallen. The nerveless hand yet gripped the broken hilt; helmeted heads back-drawn in the death-throes, tilted red beards and golden beards grimly upward, as if in last invocation to Ymir the frost-giant, god of a warrior-race.
Goddamnit, Robert E. Howard, you are a magnificent bastard! I love the way this guy writes. He just goes for it, you know? A lot of people will dismiss this as pretentious cheese, and maybe it is. But it’s the most glorious pretentious cheese ever put to paper.
Now I’m not going to deny that the second Conan film, Conan the Destroyer, is pretty weak sauce. (For starters, the producers wanted the violence toned down to get a PG rating.) But the third film is already written, and by all accounts it is awesome. It’s by the screenwriter of the original, John Milius, and it’s called King Conan: Crown of Iron. The title alone makes me happy.
I’m just going to quote some of the awesomeness that this screenplay contains, as recorded in this script review. Here’s Conan, imparting some wisdom to his young son.
Arnold Schwarzenegger was one of the first action movie stars of the 80s. Perhaps he was one of the first action movie stars, period. His predecessors to that title – Steve McQueen? Clint Eastwood? – had dramatic credits to their name as well as escapist fare (Papillon, Play Misty For Me, etc). But Arnold Schwarzenegger will never direct Million Dollar Baby. Explosive action movies sit at both the beginning and end of his range.