Rock & Rule
When I posted the soundtrack for Frauds, I said that there are a few obscure films that I really go out of my way to point out to people. Rock & Rule is another one. The story is about an aging rock star named Mok (obviously inspired by Mick Jagger) who kidnaps a singer in a rock band because she has the perfect voice to summon a demon from another dimension, whose powers Mok wants to harness to rule the world. The story's a little bare and the film seems unsure if it's for kids or adults (more on that in a moment), but the animation is truly spectacular (including early computer animation and a monster that's quite literally made of meat), the characters are distinctive and likable (Mok is easily one of cinema's most charismatic villains), and the soundtrack is rock solid. Too bad there was no soundtrack album.
The story behind the film is an interesting one. Canada's Nelvana animation studio began making a name for itself in the '70s. Their resume included countless TV commercials as well as a handful of animated specials and the Bobba Fett segment of The Star Wars Holiday Special (I just keep coming back to that damned special, don't I?), and by the '80s they'd branched out into weekly television, animating countless popular shows. But it was their 1978 Halloween special The Devil and Daniel Mouse that was the inspiration for the studio's first feature film, which was to be called Drats (Nelvana was approached to work on Heavy Metal, but they turned it down in favor of Drats). The film went into production around 78/79 without a script, merely as a family friendly concept about a mutant rock band in a futuristic society who made a deal with the devil to become stars (essentially the same plot as Daniel Mouse).
Huge portions of Drats was storyboarded and animated, but as the scriptless project evolved, so did the character design, so footage had to be scrapped and re-animated. Somewhere along the way, the film turned from family fare into something slightly more adult, a few of the era's biggest stars (Debbie Harry, Iggy Pop, Cheap Trick, Lou Reed and Earth Wind and Fire) were recruited to provide original music, and the name was changed to Rock & Rule. Nelvana made a deal with MGM to distribute the movie but, due to the haphazard way the film was put together, the animation studio missed their deadline and by the time the film was completed, the heads of MGM had changed. The new regime had virtually no interest in the film -- though they did insist on some cuts and the recasting of one voice actor -- so they did virtually nothing to promote it.
With only the minimalist of minimal promotion (including this comic book and segments on "Night Flight" and "Lights, Camera, Action") and no accompanying soundtrack album, the movie garnered little interest from the adult audience who'd been dazzled by the substantially more adult Heavy Metal a few years earlier, and after a blink-and-you-missed it run in theaters, it was dumped on home video to gather dust. Nelvana sank $8 million into the film and probably would've gone belly up if not for the success of their next big project, The Care Bears Movie. In the USA, Rock & Rule showed up infrequently on HBO and in 1985, the film was aired on Canada's CBC... the interesting thing is that somehow CBC wound up with the original print of the film, complete with the original voice actor, a few missing scenes and a vastly superior audio mix. Many who caught the film in those early days (which wasn't that many, though I was amongst them) were enamored by it, but still the film languished. In May 1983, American Film Magazine boasted it as "nominee for the Instant Midnight Movie Award," but it was nearly two decades before ROCK & RULE achieved that status:
It's no secret that word on the internet spreads faster than wildfire -- if the net had been more prominent in 1983, perhaps the movie would've been more successful. By the turn of the century, animation buffs who were familiar with Rock & Rule began pointing it out to other animation buffs. A fan site popped up. Bootleg videos and VCDs of both the home video and CBC versions began showing up regularly on eBay, and copies of the store-bought VHS, Beta and laserdiscs climbed into the triple digits. Suddenly this little film that had been ignored for the better part of two decades began to finally find an audience. The film's still not incredibly well known, but many more people have seen it now than 25 years ago. In 2005, the movie was released on DVD, in both a single-disc edition and lavish two-disc edition that includes a wealth of extras including the alternate CBC print of the film (unfortunately the original print was destroyed in a fire, so the CBC version is duped from a fairly good-quality video).Yet us fans are still awaiting an official soundtrack. Wow, I really didn't set out to write a full abridged history of the movie...
Anyway, here's the Marvel Super Special comic book tie-in. This book itself is pretty unique as well. Instead of hiring artists to re-interpret the animated movie, they simply cobbled together a comic book using screen caps from the film. Doubtlessly the techniques for taking screen-caps was much more primitive back then -- some are crystal clear while others are fuzzy. The more worthwhile aspect is that the book includes a 14 page making-of, which goes much further in depth than I did here...
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