TV Verdict

Have you ever wondered what would happen if Batman met R2-D2? Of course you have. We all have. Well, it happened this weekend in Framingham, Mass.

There was Batman, sitting in the Batmobile, parked just outside the Sheraton Framingham Hotel, and who came rolling up? R2-D2. R2 looked around, and started playing the 1960s Batman theme song. As he did, Batman just sat there, hanging out. OK, so it wasn’t the epic team-up adventure fans might’ve hoped for, but, hey, it’s R2 and Batman.

This scene and ones like it were among the highlights of the annual SuperMegaFest, the Massachusetts answer to Comic Con. Except not really. Comic Con gets producers and stars and Hollywood bigwigs, while SuperMegaFest gets a guy who once played a stormtrooper. I kid. Some notables present were Leslie Neilson (Forbidden Planet and the Naked Gun series) Doug Jones (Abe Sapien from Hellboy), Jonathan Frakes (Riker from Star Trek: The Next Generation), original Beatles drummer Pete Best, Peter Tork of the Monkees, Dawn Wells (MaryAnn from Gilligan’s Island), Richard Kiel (Jaws from the James Bond series), three actors who’ve played Jason in the Friday the 13th series, comic book artist Ethan Van Sciver, and a truckload of professional wrestling celebrities. More importantly, it was a chance to spend six months’ worth of wages on action figures, graphic novels, DVDs, and all manner of movie/TV memorabilia. But you don’t want to read about how I bought a complete collection of Skrull Kill Crew or a, uh, “legal grey area” DVD of The Gong Show Movie, you want to hear about the celebrities.

Here are the Q&As I managed to get to:

Biggs and a stormtrooper

They might not be the marquee names, but Garrick Hagon and Anthony Forrest have played well-known roles in the Star Wars mythos. Hagon played Biggs, Luke’s pal from Tatooine, whose scenes were mostly deleted until the 1997 Special Edition and other sources finally got them seen. Forrest played the stormtrooper on the receiving end of the Jedi mind trick in the much-loved “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for” scene.

Forrest said he got a painful sunburn on his first day visiting the set in Tunisia, which then became tortuous once he put on the fiberglass stormtrooper costume.

Hagon confirmed that his Biggs moustache was all him, and not created by the makeup department. He said he has mixed feelings about people describing it as a “porn star moustache.”

Hagon, when discussing his deleted scenes, says George Lucas always walks a fine line between the fans and the lawyers. When a bunch of Star Wars deleted scenes popped up on YouTube, the lawyers insisted that they be taken down. Then, a week later, Lucas posted the same scenes on YouTube himself, so fans could still enjoy them.

Forrest played the mugging victim at the opening scene in Tim Burton’s Batman, and he said it was an odd experience. Burton, he said, stood atop a crane high above the massive set, shouting down only the barest of directions to the cast. The actors playing the homeless panhandlers, he said, would not break character all day long, no matter what.
“I started to wonder if they were real,” he said.

Jonathan Frakes

Frakes started off by saying he’s “cautiously optimistic” about the upcoming Star Trek reboot under the direction of J.J. Abrams. He said he visited the set of the new Enterprise bridge and was impressed, speculating that more money was spent on this new film than on his two ST directorial efforts combined.
“Not that I’m bitter,” he said.

All 10 Star Trek movies are being prepped for a DVD re-release to go along with the release of the Abrams version, Frakes said. For a DVD extra, he, Patrick Stewart, William Shatner, and Leonard Nimoy filmed a roundtable discussion about all things Trek, moderated by Whoopi Goldberg. Shatner alleged that he’d never seen an episode of TNG, after which Nimoy told him, “You’re full of s***, Bill.”

Frakes said he grew Riker’s famous beard during the break between the first and second seasons of TNG, and Gene Roddenberry, the show’s creator, decided he liked it. After that, Frakes said, it got complicated. Roddenberry and makeup artist Michael Westmore spent an afternoon drawing all over Frakes’ face with eyebrow pencils to determine the perfect “nautical-looking” cut for the beard.

Upon hearing of one fan’s adoration of the animated series Gargoyles, Frakes said, “You’ve got good taste.” He praised Gargoyles for its smart writing, and he added that voice acting is “an actor’s dream,” because there are no lines to memorize and you could do it in your pajamas.

Frakes’ latest directorial effort, The Librarian: Curse of the Judas Chalice, will debut on TNT on Dec. 7. It’s the third in the Librarian series, and he said everyone involved likes the character and is committed to keep the series going for as long as possible.

Richard Kiel

The first question for the seven-foot two-inch Kiel was if he got to keep the famous Jaws teeth from his two Bond films. The short answer was no. Every time the director said cut, the teeth were immediately removed and placed in a special container. They were then kept in a safe overnight.

Kiel is still friends with Roger Moore, and the two had lunch together a mere two weeks before SuperMegaFest. Kiel said that for the last few years, Moore has been the spokesman for UNICEF, where he has raised hundreds of millions of dollars for children in third world countries.

Kiel said he’s proud of his work in the 1981 comedy So Fine, which, he said, bombed due to bad marketing. All the ads and posters had to do with the movie’s “So Fine Jeans,” which were woman’s jeans with a see-through rear. He said the posters sold the movie as exploitation and not the screwball comedy it was meant to be, and that drove away women, along with their husbands and boyfriends.

Kiel played a wealthy gangster in So Fine, and part of the set was an 8-foot-tall painting of him. He managed to keep the painting, even though it was too big for his house at the time.
“We kept it in a hallway,” he said. “It scared everyone in the middle of the night.”

Kiel was originally cast as the Hulk in the 1970s Incredible Hulk TV series. Not only did he have to endure uncomfortable contact lenses, but the green makeup left stains all over his bathtub, his bed sheets, and his car’s white interior. When producers said they decided they wanted more of a bodybuilder-type to the play the Hulk, Kiel pretended to be upset, but in reality, he was grateful, he said. There is one shot of him as the Hulk in the pilot, though, seen when carrying a woman out of burning building.

Doug Jones

Jones has spent most of his career working under heavy prosthetics, so the question always comes up as to which of his roles was the most physically uncomfortable. The answer was no question, he said–Bug Buster, a 1998 action comedy starring Randy Quaid as a general battling alien insects that have invaded a small town. Jones played the “Mother Bug” from the film’s finale, who gets into a fist fight with Quaid. The outfit was heavy, awkward, and he could barely see. It wasn’t until after the scene was filmed that he discovered he had accidentally injured Quaid.

As Abe Sapien, Jones couldn’t see much either, especially when Abe wears his watery goggles. During one scene, a “walk and talk,” he was walking alongside Ron Perlman. When they stopped abruptly, Jones tried to hit his mark by subtly placing his hand against Perlman’s back. At that point, director Guillermo Del Toro cut, and asked Jones to take his hand off of Perlman’s butt.

Jones said the three characters he’s enjoyed playing the most have been Abe Sapien, the Faun from Pan’s Labyrinth, and the Angel of Death in Hellboy II. Each of these characters has a duality, Jones said, which he enjoys exploring in his performances.

As one of the Gentlemen in the “Hush” episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Jones said there was a duality at work there as well, in that the Gentlemen are so polite and courteous with each other, even while cutting out people’s hearts. During filming of the episode, Jones said, there was much concern from the network, fearing that a mostly-silent episode would drive viewers to change the channel. Instead, the opposite happened, in that viewers couldn’t take their eyes off the screen.

And that’s SuperMegaFest in a nutshell. See you next year!