Sy-Fy opens up a further can of SUCK with “The Phantom”
OK, i have had it up to here with these assholes i really have. After last month’s announcement that they were changing their name from the Sci-Fi channel to SYFY, i was a bit miffed. What is so wrong with being associated with a branding that actually describes the content you began showing? But now they have gone and proven conclusively that they are in fact a pack of dicks. And not just a 30 pack, possibly even a complete carton of dicks. What has raised my ire this thoroughly i hear you ask?
The Phantom.
I do not propose to be a huge Phantom fan, in fact i tend to skip over that particular daily strip in the newspaper because it is generally boring, uneventful and hard to follow. I have never gone out and bough a collection of the stories. I didn’t like the Billy Zane movie from the mid-nineties. (though i am pretty usre i didn’t hate it as much as the rest of the world seems to.) I was not impressed by his appearance in the 80′s team cartoon “Defenders of the Earth” in which he constantly called forth the power of “Ten Tigers” (while simultaneously being animated with anywhere from 3 to 20 glowing neon tigers) to fight the evil powers of Ming the Merciless. I did not watch a single frame of the cartoon “Phantom 2020″ which once again attempted to make the character relevant to a young audience. I do not really like The Phantom, there, i said it.
However SYFY have decided that its time to re-imagine him for a new 2009 style audience (though we won’t see it until 2010) and give it the ol’ SYFY touch. Jumping off from the unbridled success of their modern Flash Gordon, they have chosen to retell the tale of the multi-generational jungle hero as a high tech modern day science-fiction story. Good work. Dicks. Most appalling though is the desing we are being presented with for The Phantom himself.
Thanks to the costume designers who have clearly graduated from the X-men school of comic book to film character design, we now have the purple leather/kevlar bodysuit version of “The Ghost who Walks”. No evidence of a skull ring, no domino mask, hell, no diagonal sriped purple undies! More importantly though, NO SOUL. Surely seeing the epic failure of the re-invention of Flash Gordon should have been a brief moment of clarity to these fools, but NO!
the designers say of the suit:
“The Phantom’s body suit is woven of a high-tech, nano-matrix, dark purple fabric, which is pliable, soft and also glitters with a dark metallic sheen. The fabric is a layered micro-weave of Kevlar, Twaron and Heracron fibers, skinned with a titanium-ceramic alloy neurosymbioticmesh, resistant to heat, bladed weapons, falls, impacts and small-arms fire.
“The nano-matrix fabric actually receives and amplifies intra-muscular nerve transmissions from the person wearing the suit to affect its density and movementâ€similar to modern bio-electronic prosthetics. Like an insect’s exoskeleton, the mesh amplifies by a factor of 2.5 times the Phantom’s normal output.
“The Phantom’s ballistic vest and cowl helmet/mask are reinforced with contoured Chobham armor plates and wired for cellular and radio communication. The Phantom also wears black fatigues, and his purple and black boots are similar to sticky-soled rock-climbing shoes.”
I sincerely hope that this early design is given the boot and something a little less DUNE is chosen. Heck even smallville’s Green Arrow costume is more appropriate than this monstrosity.
What do you think? Should the Ghost who Walks just lie down and die? Or should he just punch SY FY in the jaw with his super hard-ass skull ring?
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Well, from my point of view, i actually enjoyed the Billy Zane Phantom. It has just the right amount of “toungue-in-cheeck-osity” to make it fun and enjoyable. I know it gets ragged on, but to me, its a fun hour and a half every so often.
And also, Quinnie, since when do dicks come in a thirty pack? I’m still getting mine by the dozen……
Quinny,
Well may you say ‘God save the Phantom’, because nothing will save the SyFy channel.
You are of course, correct, and that goes to show how doomed this particular outing is. You are not even a Phantom fan and you can smell the turkey – at Easter-time no less – on this abomination of a costume.
The only good thing to come of this is the possibility the almost-universal disdain and derison of on-line commentators will make them pull this crap and go back to the drawing board.
As a writer I find it astounding how well-paid screen and TV producers can output this crap that moves so far away from the source material; the Phantom, at its core is about simplicity, a man living very close to the environment – so what would he want with nano-frickin’ anything in his costume?
Of course maybe there’s been a tragic mistake.
Maybe that’s actually a sketch of the costume from Die Hard 5: Son Of McClane – “Anti-Terror has a new name”
“Sob. Dad, don’t worry, I’ll make sure they never forget you, they’ll try and find me, but with my new purple stealth suit, they never will. All I’ll leave behind is an ipod recording of your voice, it’ll be the last thing those sons of bitches ever hear, Dad; Your voice, saying “yipee-ki-yay……
ah chris, its so true… so painfully true. i still want to see your phantom meets dracula story…. maybe sci-fi phantom could do that?! sci-fi vampires? maybe all clad in leather. with purple highlights… maybe he can get the ring sometime?
i wanna know whats so wrong with the jungle and the skull cave anyway? or do we just want to try to make the phantom another batman?
sigh… so sad.
so, chris what would you do to a modern day take on the phantom?
Quinny,
I think the challenge for Phantom writers is also the best part about the gig; you got to somehow reconcile a really simple, unadorned hero (a big, strong, low tech guy) with our modern world. You figure out how you want to do that and you’ll end up with an interesting story in itself.
No nanites need be involved.
Chris
Yeah, Billy (too beautiful for hollywood) Zane’s Phantom was good for a laugh, and the Dune outfits worked – for Dune. This is poor. From the description, sounds like all the powers come from this nano-shit suit as well.
I have absolutely no attachment to the Phantom either. I’ve never read any of the comics and I’ve never seen the movie. I really don’t know much about him other than he’s in a jungle and wears a ring. So I’m not going to be so quick to judge this. It actually sound kind of interesting. I’ll have to know a bit more about the new series before I cast judgment.