whats your favorite Superhero movie before they were cool?

[Major Comma]

I am talking any movie before the first X- Men film .
after that we got Spider- Man and everything else .
you can also talk about the best and the worst of the current crop.
But i am primarily interested in your favorites when good superhero films were few and far between.

[section 8]

the original (Keaton. Burton) Batman obviously
and the Crow

[rick]

That's pretty easy for me.

The 1966 Batman movie, Superman II and Doc Savage.

[Crowley]

Batman Returns, Superman 1 and 2 and the Hulk TV movies and even the Nicholas Hammond Spider-man show, though the Japanese one looks sooo much better.

[the4thpip]

I'd say Rocketeer.

[Ben Morgan]

Haven't seen any from before the first X-film

[ninjapeps]

Batman Returns, definitely.

[Phil Hunn]

The first Burton Batman movie, probably.

Where DOES he get all those wonderful toys?

[JohnPopa]

I'd also go with 'The Rocketeer.'

[DocAbsurd]

Mystery Men ranks as one of my favorites. And if you analyze it carefully, Baron Munchausen can be considered a super hero flick.

Hell, I've always regarded it as an alternate Justice League. You've got the Flash (Berthold), Martian Manhunter (Albrecht), Black Canary (Gustavus), Green Arrow (Adolphus), and Snapper Carr as the Baron.

So I'm odd.

[OzBat!]

The 66 Batman Movie. The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai across the Eighth Dimension. The Rocketeer. Superman 1 and II.

[jesse_custer]

Tim Burton's Batman. The combination of Elfman and Prince was brilliant, the set design unforgettable, Nicholson the master of insanity, and a very interesting Michael Keaton.

And if it counts, Sam Raimi's Darkman. Over the top style yet emotionally resonant.

[scout1279]

Superman and The Rocketeer. Despite all the new ones, they are still two of my all time favorite movies, superhero or otherwise.

I loved Burton's Batman when it came out, but when I watched it recently, it just didn't hold up. Same with Batman Returns. I still thought Michael Keaton, Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeifer were quite good, but everything else was kind of boring.

[JKCarrier]

Gotta be Superman I. The plot has a lot of problems (especially the ending), but Donner, Reeve, et. al. got the character and the tone so perfectly. Neither too pretentious nor too camp. They gave us a hero that even a post-Watergate America could believe in.

[Chiroptera]

Superman and Captain America.

Yeah I said it!
I don't care how crappy the acting was, the story for Cap was awesome, the actor really provided a believable and admirable Steve Rogers, and for it's time that Costume was pretty damn good!

Those two movies were the ones that made me believe there could BE such a thing as a good Superhero movie.

[SUPERECWFAN1]

The Crow was one where you could watch and it was just awesome. Its rare when the music can make a comic book movie , but here the 90's alternative music made this film even better. Whoever did the soundtrack made all the right choices.

Brandon Lee (may he RIP) was the perfect actor for the Crow , his villains were the types you wanted to see pay. And watching him go about revenge was cool.

[Major Comma]

I am actually a fan of the Captain America movie too .
Matt Salinger was a pretty good Cap and it stayed pretty true to his origin story.

[The Beast Of Yucca Flats]

Batman: Mask Of The Phantasm
Superman 1 & 2
Batman (1989) & Batman Returns

[Major Comma]

In the recent Starz inside Special Comic Books Unbound,
Salinger talked about how hard it was to work in that costume.
And he STILL looks like Steve Rogers!

[DubipR]

Rocketeer still holds up strong to this day. I'm also in the minority on this one, but I happen to like The Phantom. Donner's first Superman is still good.

I re-watched Burton's Batman recently. While its stylistically nice, man that plot is terrible. Sam Hamm should be ashamed.

[Major Comma]

DubipR,
I LOVED The Phantom!
I thought it had a kind of Indiana Jones vibe to it .

[DubipR]

DubipR,
I LOVED The Phantom!
I thought it had a kind of Indiana Jones vibe to it .

I'm a huge fan of the 1943 serial of the Phantom as well. I thought Zane did Falk's creation justice, by getting the mannerisms down of Kit by reading the novels and studying the comic strips. And don't forget....Catherine Zeta Jones was in it before she got tainted by Michael Douglas.

[scout1279]

I liked The Phantom too. I thought they were intentionally going for the 1930s movie serial vibe, and pulled it off, IMO. It was fun. Also, I hd a big crush on Billy Zane at the time, so that helped.

I also liked The Shadow. This one is actually still a big favorite with my whole family. It's another one where I think the filmmakers were trying to capture what the movie would have been like if it were made in the era it was set in, and is similarly misunderstood.

[Major Comma]

The shadow has been playing on encore a lot lately and i watch it every time.
I heard awhile back that Sam ram Raimi wants to adapt the Shadow and "improve upon the original film".
Whats to improve?
It was fine the way it was.

[Chiroptera]

I loved both the Shadow and the Phantom. I didn't even know they were poorly received until a little while back, here on this very forum.

[Gilda Dent]

Superman 2 (I like the Lester version better, heathen that I am)

The Adventures of Captain Marvel and King of the Rocket Men serials.

Superhero movies have been cool for a very long time, since the early days of the cinema.

[NickThompson]

Mystery Men :)

[Erik Burnham]

I'll throw in for the Phantom, the Shadow, the Rocketeer, and that Capt. Marvel serial. ("Hey, that was deliberate!")

Loved The Mask and Ninja Turtles. The Crow, Dick Tracy, and Blade...

and Mask of the Phantasm.

Yeah, those are the ones. I loved 'em all.

[Weapon Ick]

Is Ghost World cool? I have met very few people who think so. I love that movie.

[Tetsuo_man]

First two superman movies, Batman (1989), Batman Returns, Rocketeer, Blade, and Toxic Avenger films.

[Major Comma]

Gilda ,I wouldnt touch the Donner cut with a 10 foot pole!
I saw the Lester version on my 20th birthday.
It doesnt need fixing .
Not in my opinion anyway.

[Pink Bat Maxine]

Superman 2 (I like the Lester version better, heathen that I am)

I do too....... alas, the Donner cut seems to suffer from 20/20 hindsight. It's interesting to see as a curiosity, but nobody can complete a creative work 30 years later and have it be true to the person they were then. We change too much, and that makes the whole endevour seem somewhat iffy to me.

[EZMOHR]

Superman 2 (I like the Lester version better, heathen that I am).

Lester's version is better. By far.

I will go with a dead heat between Superman: The Movie & The Crow.

[Sally Sensational]

Flash Gordon!

http://i126.photobucket.com/albums/p114/jennyneneh/gordon.jpg

I'm actually not kidding.

[TCJohnson]

In order

The Crow
Rocketeer
Superman

[Ben Morgan]

Oy, I loved Mystery Men

[Squidboy]

Blade and the Batman movies (especially Batman Forever, even though it's cheesy as hell, Jim Carrey=awesome)

[Gilda Dent]

I first fell in love with those old movie serials as a kid, maybe ten or eleven. This was before the four to six networks, when there were still low budget local UHF stations that weren't affiliated with anyone, and tended to run things like monster movie theater or kung fu theater, public domain movies and shorts, and tons of classic reruns because they were cheap or essentially free.

One summer we were sent to my dad, which is to say mom had found a new boyfriend and wanted to ride around in his long haul truck, so she dumped us all unceremoniously on him with no warning.

My brother and I were stuck in a makeshift bedroom in the basement created by throwing a discarded piece of carpeting across the concrete, a pair of cheap twin beds bought at a thrift store and a single dresser/end table nicked off of someone's lawn between them. We were between the laundry area and dad's tool bench. Across from the beds dad threw a couple of old, mismatched bookcases, picked up at the junk yard, and this was our room.

My dad wasn't poor--he was a mechanical engineer at a small engine manufacturing plant--he was just cheap. Still, this was better than whatever room mom's boyfriend du jour could manage, so we were happy.

Especially with our brand new bribe that mom had acquired for us, to buy our affection before deserting us. A new TV of our very own. Brand new, 12" black and white, bought with trading stamps from a trading stamp retail store. I forget the brand. They went out of business pretty quickly after that as grocery stores went big business.

So there it was, sitting on the table in our make shift room, our own, brand new TV.

Dad wouldn't let us watch it during the day. It was bad for us to be inside during the summer, we were told, and stepmom enforced this rule religiously. Jiro would find a group of boys to play with and I'd take off with a book and read. The big people didn't seem to mind if we slept in, however, and we could watch our new treasure after supper, so we did late each night. Starting at 10:00 each night the local live late night show would begin. It was at 10:00 because that's when the local news starts in the midwest, and independent stations didn't do local news, or really any news, and they wanted to draw in those who either didn't care or hated local news with its five minutes of sports, five minutes of weather, a two minute human interest story, four minutes of program notes, teasers, and national headlines presented without much if any context and about a minute of actual news.

My brother and I were not local news people.

To our ten and eleven-year-old eyes, this was a glorious program, something magical. It had a live host! He'd come out of a tin-foil rocketship, talk in ominous tones about that night's slate of top-notch programming, make corny jokes, and invite the audience to say a pledge to watch the show each night.

Each night would begin with a serial adventure, Captain Marvel, some detective thing, and our favorite, King of the Rocketmen. A good scientist battled evil scientists wearing a rocketpack. Sometimes the serial was an old genre movie chopped up into ten minute pieces to create a serial. Following that we'd get a badly dubbed Japanese monster movie, a badly dubbed Hong Kong kung fu movie, all of which were about Wong Fei Hung and no two of which featured the same actor or were set in the same time frame, or an old public domain movie of some sort. At each commercial break, the host would breathlessly comment on what had just happened, and when they came back, he'd recap and speculate. Half the running time was the host doing his schtick.

It was like a 50's Saturday double feature combined with a live kid's show transported to 1988. We loved it, and ate it up. It was something magical, something that belonged to us, and it wouldn't surprise me if we were, in fact, the only people actually watching. Four hours of shorts, cheap imports and public domain movies and bad schtick repeated again and again, and we'd eventually either fall asleep or fall asleep and then claim proudly to have made it all the way to the end.

They must not have had much material, as we saw King of the Rocket Men two and a half times that summer and it got better every single time. We dissected every segment the way a new issue of Final Crisis is dissected. We argued over who the best Wong Fei Hung was. We marveled at giant flying turtles and argued about whether King Kong could really beat Godzilla.

This may have been the summer that made me a nerd.

I have a home theater that looks and sounds better than any theater I can go to to actually see a new theatrical release, and nothing I watch there recaptures the sheer joy of sitting up in my bed eating junk food snuck in during the day and watching decades old scratched up prints of badly made scifi and kung fu with the wires showing and a cheesy overacting host on an often fuzzy 12" black and white screen and then analyzing it with the intensity of graduate students with a newly discovered Dickens novel.

No entertainment experience since can quite match it.

[Buzz Dixon]

DANGER: DIABOLIK
http://strangeink.files.wordpress.com/2006/06/dangerdiabolik00.jpg
http://bp1.blogger.com/_wNbKUBaTTBI/RZmXDnuoUpI/AAAAAAAAAKQ/UHh8hfL-TPY/s1600/Danger_Diabolik.jpg


deep
deep
down

[suedenim]

Is Ghost World cool? I have met very few people who think so. I love that movie.

Really? Why? I loved that movie. Not a "superhero" movie, though it is a "comic book" movie (for one I've never read.)

[Corrina]

That's pretty easy for me.

The 1966 Batman movie,

This would be it for me.

"Somedays, you just can't get rid of a bomb."

I have never really like the live action films. Batman Begins and Iron Man are my favorites. I was never a big fan of the rest of them, though Superman II has it's moments. (Knell before Zod!) That was ruined by the amnesia kiss at the end, though. Stupid ending.

ETA: I also liked Darkman! Darkly funny.

[rebelchelle]

Superman 1 and 2
Batman (Michael Keaton and Jack Nicholson)
Flash Gordon
Captain America

[RachelEvil]

Mystery Men.

[OzBat!]

Gilda's post makes me wish I had a basement and a 12" b&w tv.

[rick]

No entertainment experience since can quite match it.

Gilda, that was beautiful.

I loved those old serials back in the day too.

They ran them on Saturdays right before “Tarzan Theatre”, and I got to watch quite a few that way. Plus in those pre-Rocky Horror Midnight Movie days every once in awhile they would run an entire serial in one setting at an all night feature.

And yeah, Commander Cody and the Rocketmen were the best.