The single most recognizable thing about the Punisher, the thing that makes Frank Castle Frank Castle, is the skull. A big white skull on black spandex. That’s it. That’s his brand. Every kid who ever flipped through a Marvel comic in the 80s knew that skull and how it blended into his ammo belt. So when Marvel used its corporate synergy with New World Pictures to get this done 1988, someone in the chain of command looked at the most identifiable visual in the character’s entire history and decided to take it off.
The skull only appears as a tiny ornament on the handle of Castle’s knife. You can spot it if you squint.
Director Mark Goldblatt later said he regretted the decision, and that nobody anticipated the backlash. Probably because no one cared about geeks in 1988, and certainly not Hollywood. No one asked them. But in 1989, Batman happened, and all Marvel’s movie adaptation did was make sure their guy looked nothing like a comic book character. Dolph Lundgren got motorcycle leathers, a sewer lair, but no costume whatsoever.
The whole production has that “we’re not really doing a comic book movie” apologetic quality.
Still, it’s a perfectly serviceable revenge picture that could have starred Charles Bronson ten years earlier and Cannon would have made their money back. It was fine.
But I wasn’t looking for fine at the time. I was reading Comics Scene, where every issue had another Marvel or DC property being shopped around Hollywood as the next big franchise. James Cameron’s Spider-Man. Sgt. Rock starring Schwarzenegger and penned by Shane Black. The floodgates that Batman opened in the summer of ’89 were supposed to stay open, and this was one of the first things to walk through them – back when they were selling off character rights for pocket change.
And what got released a year later than promised, on home video instead of in theatres because New World had gone bankrupt and Live Entertainment picked up the scraps, was a cool 80s action movie that just happened to share a name with a comic book.
The action was solid, Lundgren looked the part in a generic sense though the dye job looked a bit rough and his facial hair smeared, and as a Cannon-grade shoot-’em-up it scratched a certain itch I still get.
But nothing about it felt like something the kids I saw every Wednesday at the comic shop would care about.
That was the pattern for most of the 90s. Every comic book property that made it to screen between Batman and X-men just seemed to have an apology baked in, an assurance that this wasn’t really a comic book movie, wink wink – it was a crime thriller, or an action picture, or a dark psychological drama that happened to feature a guy named after a character who once appeared on a four-colour page. Even Blade hid its Marvel origins so thoroughly that half the audience had no idea it was based on a 70s comic character.
After all, what did we expect, yellow spandex?
There was some progress in the 00s, but that embarrassment took years to fully shed, right up until someone finally had the nerve to stand at a podium and say “I am Iron Man”. And the after credit scene that followed.
That was the geek’s mic drop. -Pop
The Punisher arrived on Home Video today in 1991, after a 1989 international theatrical release that never made it to North American cinemas.