Monday, October 28, 2013

Creepy TV: Swamp Thing (1990)

DC Comics' track record with adaptations of their properties on TV hasn't been very good. Unless it has to do with Superman, it's not going to last.

One such case was the first series based on a DC property sold to a cable network. That would be Swamp Thing, which spent three seasons on USA, but hasn't been seen since reruns had aired on Sci-Fi (now SyFy) & Chiller in recent years.

Dick Durock reprised his role from the 2 feature films in the 80's, enabling Swamp Thing to be a little more eloquent than he'd been presented in the comics to that point. His nemesis, Anton Arcane, would be a regular on the show, played by Mark Lindsay Chapman (Louis Jourdan played Arcane in the first film). The series blended together the original origin, as written by Len Wein and illustrated by Berni Wrightson, with a mid-80's revamp by Alan Moore that made Swamp Thing an elemental, giving fans the best of both worlds. Ex-MTV personality Kari Wuhrer (Remote Control) joined the show in season 2 as a synthetic woman created by Arcane, but now with an independent personality.

As you'll see in the intro, DIC co-founder Andy Heyward served as a co-executive producer as well, as DIC would produce an animated miniseries a year later.



MTE Entertainment, which co-produced the series with Michael Uslan's Batfilms company, was an arm of Universal, marking this the only time DC & Universal did any business together.

Rating: B+.

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