Okay, turns out one guy asked for it, but I forgot about it during the year hiatus, and this is the movie that got me back to the blog, so without further ado . . . .
Howard the Duck (1986)
The Plot:
Howard is a duck from another world, who gets sucked through space and across dimensions and deposited in Cleveland, Ohio. He meets up with Beverly, a family-friendly punk rock girl (played by Lea Thompson with a display of weapons-grade cuteness), who takes him in and seems oddly drawn to him. Bev introduces Howard to a doofy scientist, Phil, (played by a not terribly famous yet Tim Robbins), who happens to be dating one of her bandmates.
Phil also happens to work with Dr. Walter Jenning, who created the device which brought Howard to Earth. When Jenning tries to use it again, though, he ends up calling down one of the Dark Overlords of the Universe, which possesses him while it incubates to take form in our world.
Howard and his friends (including Dr. Jenning/the Dark Overlord) have various misadventures, including a trip to a country Cajun sushi restaurant where Howard is almost cut up and cooked by the locals, until Dr. Jenning uses his newfound powers to destroy everything and rescue Howard.
They get back to the lab, and Dr. Jenning starts to use the device to bring more Dark Overlords down, intending to put at least one of them inside Bev. Howard and Phil get a neutron disintegrator that the lab had made for the military and use it to destroy the device and to fight the Dark Overlord, which has come out of Dr. Jenning and is now a giant stop motion monster.
In the end, the day is saved, Howard becomes the manager for Bev's band, and everything goes back to normal. The movie didn't do well, though, and there ended up being no sequels.
Fitting it into the WW4C:
Okay, this breaks all the rules, like I said in the title. It's not a Disney movie. It is a Marvel movie, but from before Marvel was acquired by Disney. However, I'm going to allow it.
The whole "Duckworld" idea, which is present in the movie and in the comic wasn't the intent of Howard's creator, Steve Gerber. Gerber meant for Howard to be from the same universe as Mickey, Donald, and Goofy--the universe I wrote up earlier as Calisota. Even in the movie, there's nothing to say that there can't be intelligent dogs or mice there as well. So I'm going to say that Howard is from Calisota. With the last name Duck, he might even be related to the McDuck clan.
What's more, the device (the name of which I've forgotten, to be honest) which brought Howard to Earth kind of reminded me of Thor, where the Rainbow Bridge which allowed for travel between the worlds created Einstein-Rosen bridges - wormholes. (Which would make Howard's world Duckheim, I suppose.) In addition, Howard gives a good idea of what happens when a character from Calisota travels to another, non-cartoon world: it ends up as a "real" humanoid animal.
I'm torn over whether Howard should end up in the WW4C or the Marvel universe. I kind of want him in the Marvel universe, alongside Iron Man, Thor, Hulk, and Captain America. (I really do want this; I would love a remake of Howard the Duck in-continuity with those movies.) However, since the Marvel universe is only a sideline to this blog, and because the tone of the movie seems more in tone with the WW4C, I have to put him here.
It's questionable how heroic Howard was in the 1980s and 1990s. He is a master of Quack Fu, and although he's not the type to seek out trouble, he does seem to stumble across it fairly often. If Howard was involved in superheroics, it's only reluctantly, but when trouble did come up, he'd step up to the plate.
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