The Fantastic Four

But other shows they did, Justice League, they did a pilot, it sucked.

Fantastic Four, Corman did that.

Well, that was because...

Constantine wanted to retain the rights and the only way to do it is he had to uphold his contract that he had to be in production at a certain date or the rights were back to Marvel.

So he got together with Roger and they made this incredibly bad but very famous Fantastic Four movie and then he retained the rights and then he did...

You know, the Fantastic Four and then the Fantastic Four Rise of the Silver Surfer.

Both were atrocious.

And the third one that came out, Marvel had basically given all the rights.

But anyways, the second that Serleena turns into a sexy Victoria's Secret model, she's immediately grabbed by a creep looking to have his way with her.

With this creep being played by actor Michael Bailey Smith, famous for such roles as Ben Grimm in the 1994 Fantastic Four film, as well as Belthazor in the Charmed TV series.

He would also play a security guard in the 1999 movie reboot of My Favorite Martian, another movie where we would witness him get chomped and eaten by an alien.

Much like we see him get eaten by Serleena shortly after his approach.

This massive collectible book is packed with 300-plus pages of interviews, behind-the-scenes stories, and classic Film Threat coverage featuring Sam Raimi, John Waters, Quentin Tarantino, Tim Burton, David Lynch, and a whole army of indie film outlaws.

We're talking Natural Born Killers, Reservoir Dogs, Ed Wood, Roger Corman's insane Fantastic Four movie.

But this isn't some dusty museum piece.

The compendium tells the story of Film Threat itself, the xeroxed zines, the late nights, crashing film festivals, the Detroit to LA migration, and sticking it to the studio PR machine.

Mm-hmm.

You know? They, there's, there's a reason why Marvel 2-in-1 and Marvel Team-Up was a series of, you know, stories that connected or didn't connect because that was it.

It was the idea that Spider-Man could team up with Mysterio or could team up with Doctor Doom or with the Fantastic Four.

Um, yeah, we'll give you an issue to do that.

And like th- even, um, the Mole Man, I forget the actor's name.

He played Mole Man in Fantastic Four.

Um, when they pick him up-

Uh, Dan Hedaya

...

the fucking Corman Fantastic Four-

Yeah

... which we've talked about on this show-

That's the important difference between Roger Corman and the people he trained.

He also directed the Fantastic Four movie that they had to make to retain the rights that didn't get released.

He also directed Fast and Furious 2.

To be clear, I'm not saying he directed Too Fast, Too Furious.

So what an Ashcan film is, it's a term in the industry where it's a movie that's only made by a studio just to hold on to the rights of something.

The sort of very infamous one of these is the 1994 Fantastic Four movie that was produced by Roger Corman that was terrible.

I don't think it was officially released.

You can get copies of it, but it was not an official movie.

It was just done to keep the Fantastic Four rights.

And that's what happened with this one.

So New Line Cinema was going to lose the rights to adapt Tolkien's novels.

You're just kind of hearing a little bit of a lament for this lost episode.

Think of it as my version of Doomed, the documentary about the 1994 Fantastic Four movie.

And will that will that lost episode increase in in curiosity with amongst listeners? I don't know.

I seriously doubt it.