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Nov 25

This time Richard Pryor really has his pants fullClick for larger image

Lord Cholmondeley Comments: Step aside Lois Lane. There’s a new heartthrob in Superman’s life.

Published 1983

Actually, that cover IS a classical work of art!I would touch it without protective gloves.I've seen worse. Far, far, worse.Interesting, but I would still read it in public.Middlng: Neither awful nor awfully goodWould not like to be seen reading that!Awful... just awful...That belongs in a gold-lame picture frame!Gah... my eyes are burning! Feels so good!Good Show Sir! (Average: 4.15 out of 10)
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17 Responses to “Superman III”

  1. THX 1139 Says:

    “Just drop me – I’ll never recover from The Toy!”

  2. Bruce A Munro Says:

    “Really has his hands full?” You mean, unlike when he was dealing with three murderous Kryptonians? To be fair, Superman does face an enemy more terrible than General Zod in this movie: a really awful script. This movie almost killed the franchise, before Superman IV came along and brutally beat it to death with a chunk of kryptonite ore.

    The cover is … boring. It portrays Superman flying while carrying an overacting Richard Pryor, and is basically showing something from the movie, but really Superman playing taxi service isn’t very exciting. A bit wordy, and apparently nobody involved in the cover design had actually read Kotzwhistle’s novelization of E.T., let alone the “sequel”, otherwise they wouldn’t have taken the risk of reminding people what the author had done.

  3. A.R.Yngve Says:

    Someone described SUPERMAN III as a Richard Pryor movie that just happens to have Superman in it. It even skims past a spectacular scene with Superman twisting a tornado upside down, just to give Pryor more time to DESCRIBE it.

    (Although I must admit Pryor is really funny in this movie, but what did you expect?)

  4. Francis Boyle Says:

    Kotzwinkle (noun): A Yiddish insult meaning that guy who did the ET novelization.

  5. fred Says:

    The artist had Christopher Walken in the room with him saying “More wrinkles!” every 20 seconds.

  6. Bibliomancer Says:

    Now that I see that this book is NOT FOR SALE I want a copy very badly.

  7. JuanPaul Says:

    I agree wit A.R.Yngve on Richard Prior in this. It’s actually worth watching as a Richard Prior comedy. Also, it has Robert Vaughn in it as the bad guy!

  8. Shocklines Says:

    The best part is undoubtedly the quote marks around the tagline. It’s as if it’s a) meant to be something Richard Pryor is saying and b) the subtle way the cover designer was saying “Don’t blame me for this tagline — someone else made me say it.”

  9. Bruce A Munro Says:

    @Francis Boyle: I was just messin’ with the name. IIRC, he also wrote a rather strange fantasy entitled “Dr. Rat” in which a lab rat sides with humanity in an animals-vs-humans war. [1]

    [1] We humans win when we kill the unicorn.

  10. A.R.Yngve Says:

    Superman must be a rather frustrating character to write a novel around.
    “And so, after the greatest crisis of his life, Superman remained exactly the same as before.”

  11. Bruce A Munro Says:

    @A.R. Yngve: that’s comic book superheroes in general isn’t it?

  12. A.R.Yngve Says:

    @Bruce A Munro: Yes. Pretty much.

    (The Superman version of HAMLET: Super-Hamlet reverses all tragic events by spinning the Earth into a time-warp, and imprisons his father’s brother in the Phantom Zone. Then he goes back to exactly the way he was before his father’s ghost appeared, without any traumas or brooding.)

  13. Tat Wood Says:

    I’m with Bruce and ARY: novelisations of hit films were an admission of defeat if your career wasn’t going so well but carried the stigma of being blamed for the film’s lack of logic or rounded characters. Alan Dean Foster more or less survived the process but even he’d have trouble with this screenplay: how do you convey Dick Lester’s meticulous slapstick and sly casting in prose?

    This cover’s pretty much the film poster and has the problem of Christopher Reeve’s nether portions vanishing. Unless his left leg is significantly longer than the rest of him, there’s no way this pose works.

    (Maybe they were trying to offload some unsold Stretch Armstrong dolls by slapping capes on them).

  14. B. Chiclitz Says:

    The problem is that they left out the part where Superman sets RP on fire* by accidentally turning his heat vision on him, out of frustration with having so little to to do with the film.

    *No sacrilege intended. Pryor really was a great comic. RIP.

  15. THX 1139 Says:

    If you saw this movie as a kid, the bit at the end where the supercomputer goes nuts and turns Scottish jazz singer Annie Ross into a robot will forever be imprinted in your memory as “WTF were they thinking?!”-level scary.

  16. Bruce A Munro Says:

    @THX 1139: it was certainly something, wasn’t it? In retrospect it made me think of Borg assimilation, but faster and more, hm, industrial. Cybermen, too.

    Richard Pryor was funny, if not particularly convincing as a scientific genius (perhaps a Papa Schimmelhorn type savant?), but the parts of the movie with Superman in them didn’t seem quite sure if they wanted to be a comedy or not, and it got a bit cringey at times.

    Bah! Enough movie analysis – we’re here for the covers.

  17. GSS ex-noob Says:

    I think this is ineligible due to the rigorous GSS rules.

    Also it’s just the movie poster art.

    Also the movie was terrible, so the thought of what Kotzwinkle must have done to the already-bad writing is horrifying.

    Other than Supes’ leg disappearing, the art isn’t bad — it’s recognizably the people it’s supposed to be.

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