Welcome to our fantasy casting of the Youngblood movie.
For the uninitiated, Youngblood is an almost universally reviled comic from the early nineties. It was created, written, and drawn by Rob Liefeld, who, interestingly enough, isn't very good at drawing, writing, or creating things. He's one of those 'Xtreme' artists who were popular at that time; one of (if not the) worst of the lot. The thing about Liefeld is that for a split second when you first see some of his art, it doesn't look that bad...
Then you stop and think : WHAT THE FUCK IS UP WITH THAT DUDE ON THE RIGHT?! How's his back...why...but...AAAAHHHHHHH!!!!Most of the time, however, you just take one look...
...and despair. He got paid real, paper money for those pictures, folks. Anyway, everyone always takes jabs at the guy, but I've heard he's actually pretty nice in real life, so we're gonna take it eas-oh, wait...
The really cool thing about Liefeld though is that he's an inspiration to aspiring artists. If he can get a job in comics...Anyway, have you heard the good news? Preach, Brett Ratner, Director of X-Men 3 and Rush Hour 3 !
“Most of the great graphic novels are gone, and ‘Youngblood’ is one of the few comicbooks left with tentpole potential,” Ratner told the trade. “It was a real personal passion project for me, and a lot of people wanted (‘Youngblood’), but the amazing thing about the guys at Reliance is the speed with which they’re able to move.”
Wow, that is one impressively huge pile of bullshit.
But we're not about crying foul on this blog, we're about CRYING HAVOK!!! , which means (clearly) that we're gonna give this flick a fair shake. Heck, we're actually pretty damned psyched about it, so psyched we've painstakingly compiled a list of the actors and actresses we believe could do this 'great graphic novel' justice. To achieve this, we actually gritted our teeth all extreme nineties style and read Youngblood #1, insofar as you can 'read' the unreadable. Now there's been many attempts to restart the series over the years (Liefeld recently released the first series in a collected edition, with the selling point that it had been completely rewritten. Seriously, he hired a writer, Joe Casey, to chop up and rearrange the old issues and change all the dialogue so people can actually read it all the way through without sustaining brain damage), but we read the real deal, the one that started it all, and that's the story we'll be casting.
Youngblood is the story of a government sanctioned strikeforce of superpowered assholes. That's the whole plot, so now you're in the know.
The leader of these assholes is Shaft (yes, really), who's power is that he shoots a bow with no strings and has impossible hair.
Wait, did we say impossible? Silly, all things are possible when you invite The Corey's into your life!
Badrock (Originally called Bedrock, until Hanna-Barbara made Liefeld change it because it's name of the town in The Flintstones) is a big grey rock guy, so a quick repaint is in order.
We haven't seen Michael Chiklis in much recently, maybe they can even get him to wear the suit. The role of Badrock, however, is primarily a voice acting gig, since (judging from the one issue we've read) he seems to be some sort of child in a monstrous body...
Vogue is the token hot chick on the team, and she's no man's slave. When the whole team gets summoned to HQ, she purposefully 'makes 'em wait' for five hours before she shows up. Luckily, everybody else is just standing around when she gets there, at which point they get sent to stop some super villains from breaking their teammates out of a prison transport van. Which means the team was called in just to hang around in costume for no apparent reason. Note that they didn't show up for duty at a set time or anything like a fireman or cop, they were all summoned suddenly and had to drop whatever they were doing to go wait at HQ for five hours until an emergency happened to c0me up.Anyway, on account of Rob Liefeld's particular artistic sensibilities, the only way to accurately portray Vogue onscreen is to digitally graft young Madonna's head onto Dolly Parton's body.
Actually, that sounds ridiculous, but apparently they're doing something very similar with Shwarzeneggar for Terminator 4. That's the rumor, anyway.Credit where it's due, Diehard is actually a pretty sweet codename. He's also probably the coolest looking character on the team, for what little that's worth. He speaks in english, but his inner thoughts seem to be translated from another language
And, then there's Chapel, who is a black man.
And that's the core team of...oops, hold your horses, true believer. You probably think that this group of generic-to-unlikeable characters are going to have some room to grow in their first issue, maybe pique the reader's interest. Hell to tha naw, man. Liefeld likes to hedge his bets by throwing as many characters at you as possible. hoping one or the other of them will remind you enough of Wolverine that you'll buy issue 2. That's why after a thirteen pages of really Bad Dudes gritting their teeth at you, you get to flip the book over and read about more Bad Dudes killing Saddam Hussein. That's right, it's political commentary in the mighty Liefeld manner, with all the subtlety and intelligence you would expect. And we're gonna cast the living shit out of it, next time on CRY HAVOK!!!Read part 2 here!
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