Word: comical
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...would have the gigantic steel cojones to make a movie of Watchmen? Written by Alan Moore, illustrated by Dave Gibbons and colored by John Higgins, the serialized comic book came out in 1986. This was the pre-Internet age - Moore pounded out his scripts on a manual typewriter - when most comics had an afterlife only in the back-issue bins. Yet Watchmen quickly achieved status as the Grail, the Bible, the Citizen Bob Kane of its medium. (TIME canonized it as one of the 100 best novels since 1923.) And it continues to expand its reach. Last fall Gibbons...
...From the start of the Watchmen cult, film people knew two things about the comic book: (1) that it simply had to be made into a movie and (2) that it couldn't. An epic superhero saga, spanning 45 years, with six major characters who all sport double identities and crucial, intertwined back-stories, does not lend itself to the narrative turbo-thrust of a standard action film. Indeed, the superest hero of the bunch - Dr. Manhattan, once known as Jon Osterman - is not an action hero; he's a passive one, a contemplative godhead, a sinewy blue nude Buddha...
...story's kernel of genius, which Moore kept popping over 12 monthly installments, is that actions have consequences, even in Action Comics. (That early comic book, which in 1938 contained the first adventure of Superman, was published by D.C., which 46 years later ran Watchmen.) The world of fantasy alters the "real" world it parallels. When superheroes do stuff, it changes the history of the America we've lived through. Moore's alternate history went like this...
...play each other?CM: If it were a sitcom no one would watch it!JW: She would get Hugh Laurie to play me.CM: He’s right. Hugh Laurie is best known now for doing “House”, but he used to be a comic actor. One thing that people don’t know about James is that he literally falls up stairs. So a British comic actor with a sense of physical comedy would work well.JW: This is tough. Maybe Julia Davis, 20 years ago?15. FM: Obviously, you two are absurdly talented individuals...
...Artist of the Year, Aykroyd acted as afternoon emcee and infused humor into the show through comic commentary...