To little notice, the movie of Howard the Duck came out on DVD recently. My pal Steve Gerber was both frustrated and perversely amused by the fiasco that was the film made of his greatest creation. He was largely excluded from the conversion job but he saw enough that, about halfway through its filming, he smelled a possible flop coming, mainly due to the filmmakers' inability to deliver a convincing duck. I remember a lunchtime discussion we had. I'd seen nothing but Steve had seen enough to believe that whatever the merits of the script and other performances, the star just came off as a midget in an unconvincing duck mask.
The topic was whether his reaction was because they really hadn't created a on-screen duck you could accept or if Steve was just being too proprietary because they weren't replicating "his" version from the comics. He was trying so hard not to cause trouble for the project that he leaned towards the latter, figuring that the producers must know what they're doing; that it couldn't be as wrong as it seemed to him. As it turned out, it was…and Steve's hopes that the film would succeed and a lot of that success (and revenue) would rub off on him were for naught.
That day over lunch, I suggested that what the producers should have done was to engage Frank Oz to create and maybe perform the title character. Steve didn't much care for that thought. Nothing in any of Mr. Oz's famous puppet characters reminded him of his Howard's voice or manner. Still, he later told me that even if Howard had wound up looking like Cookie Monster and sounding like Miss Piggy, it would have been closer to what he had in mind than what he got.
In this article, Keith Phipps takes a look back at Steve's duck and what Hollywood did unto it. And this might be a good place for me to insert an Amazon link in case you want to order a copy of the DVD for some reason. I can't imagine what that reason might be but people do a lot of things I don't understand. It came out four weeks ago with a $14.98 pricetag and has already been marked down to eight. The insults continue.