#FreeWillyFriday: Free 4 All (shoulda been)

 

We're back with another #FreeWillyFriday, and it seems I may have gotten the cart before the horse.

Last week I talked about my fascination with crossovers in relation to a rather simple poster that featured Willy teaming up with two other famous orcas. That was a result of the convenient wordplay of “3 Willies,” but as any comic book fan knows, the team-up is usually the second part of the crossover.

First comes the fighting.

Most comic team-ups start with fisticuffs, as writers take their turn answering the age-old question of who would win in a fight (the answer is always “whoever the writer wants”).

Comics have pitted the X-Men against the Fantastic Four and Avengers, the Justice League against the Suicide Squad, cowboys versus aliens (it was a comic first) and even set up some grudge matches between other properties. Predators clashed with Aliens in comics years before the movie, and comic book legends Frank Miller and Walt Simonson delivered “Robocop vs. Terminator” in 1992. That never led to a movie, but it did spawn a video game.

It also led young Evan, who at that point had seen maybe the first “Robocop” and read about “Terminator” in a book fair purchase about movie monsters, to come up with “Robocop vs. Darkman,” which never made it past a second page in my notebook, despite my exhaustive knowledge of watching “Darkman” on NBC once.

This “Free Willy” poster was probably born out of my fondness for Godzilla movies on TBS' “Super Scary Saturday.”

I always found the movies where Godzilla shared the title with an opponent more interesting than the ones where human beings battled a giant, radioactive lizard.

While I remember the 1997 “Godzilla” more fondly than a lot of people (mainly for the stuff with Jean Reno in Madison Square Garden, which was more “Jurassic Park” than classic kaiju), the 2015 version at least had the big G facing off against other colossal creatures. They seemed to cut away to talk about feelings and stuff too often for my taste though. Aren't there more appropriate venues in which Brian Cranston can explore the human condition?

When I revisited this installment, I was struck by the obvious title choice I missed: It should have been called “Willie vs. Jaws: Free 4 All.”