The Black Hole!

The Black Hole is the Disney company's first foray into the PG world. It began its life as a disaster movie in space, first concocted in the early 70's when The Poseidon Adventure and Earthquake and such films ruled the day. But it wasn't made and sat idle until the success of Star Wars kick started it into production. I've always thought of this movie as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea meets 2001: A Space Odyssey.

We begin with the Palomino and a rather oddball batch of folks (two spacemen, two scientists, and a reporter) who are strolling around in space looking for new planets. The come across a large black hole and on its perimeter a long lost Earth vessel called the Cygnus, a ship which just so happened to have been the ship our obligatory female scientist's father had been on. They of course get aboard and find a madman who has murdered and mutilated his crew and uses them as zombies to assist him in the operation of the ship. He also as a cadre of robots with their leader Maximillian a particularly devilish creation. The heroes have a robot too named Vincent who seems able to whatever the plot requires and do it with aplomb. There are explosions, gruesome deaths (implied not seen) and an ending which is just as weird as Kubrick's classic though not nearly as long. 

Despite the success of Star Wars at the box office, The Black Hole fared less well though more than making its money back.  Oddly it wrought not one but two different comic adaptations. One from Whitman had Dan Spiegle drawing and adapts the film and then gives us two issues devoted to what happened after the movie ended.

The second adaptation was by Disney itself and tapped Jack Kirby and Mike Royer to draw a sixteen part comic strip version. To get a look at that check out this link. I would love to get this collected somewhere but I don't know of that happening anytime. I'd appreciate any news folks might have on that front. 

The Black Hole is not really all that great a movie. It's populated with slightly stale stars of the day (Maximillian Schell, Anthony Perkinds, Yvette Mimieux, Earnest Borgnine and Robert Forster) and gives us Roddy McDowell and Slim Pickens as the voices for featured robots. It's at once a dark brooding movie and one that's too pat and too cute. The robots point to the problem with some designs coming straight from Saturday morning cartoons and some having a tougher edge, and they don't seem to belong in the same visual universe. I don't dislike the movie but it's a failed opportunity, a movie that has all the parts but doesn't really use them well enough, the whole not being at all the sum of those parts. 

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