Aug 25, 2011

Universal Still Keen on an Invisible Agent

Universal Still Keen on an Invisible Agent

Four years ago we first heard about Universal's efforts to revive their classic monster franchise The Invisible Man in the form of a period spy movie. Then nothing. I'd assumed the project was dead. But today, Dark Horizons reports that Batman screenwriter David Goyer's take on the famed franchise character is still alive. “It’s a period film," Goyer told the LA Times' Hero Complex blog, "but it’s period like Downey’s Sherlock Holmes. It’s period but it’s a reinvention of the character in the sort of way that Stephen Sommers exploded The Mummy into a much bigger kind of mythology.” I like the sound of that. In 2007, Variety reported that Goyer's story was conceived as a sequel to H.G. Wells' original tale, and "[centered] on a British nephew of the original Invisible Man. Once he discovers his uncle's formula for achieving invisibility, he is recruited by British intelligence agency MI5 during WWII."

At the time, the trade article called this concept "a new take" on the Wells classic, but the idea of an invisible spy has actually been done before, even in that same era. Universal's own fourth entry in its original Invisible Man series was called The Invisible Agent (1942) and featured the first Invisible Man's grandson volunteering to use his formula and aid the Allied cause during WWII, as a spy behind German lines. Then in 1958, future Danger Man/Secret Agent creator Ralph Smart cut his teeth on the espionage genre with a television series called H.G. Wells' Invisible Man, in which the character (very unlike Wells' version, despite the titular possessive) worked for British Intelligence in a contemporary Cold War setting. (It's an enjoyable show, featuring a number of familiar spy faces who would go on to appear in Bond movies, The AvengersDanger Man and other Sixties spy shows.) In the Sixties, Eurospy movies like Matchless and Mr. Superinvisible flirted with the invisible spy scenario. The 1992 Chevy Chase take on the character, Memoirs of an Invisible Man (directed by John Carpenter!), also had an espionage element, with Sam Neil as an unscrupulous CIA agent in pursuit of our transparent hero. More recently, the Sci-Fi Channel ran a show about an Invisible Man who worked for a top secret government agency. None of that, of course, is any reason why there can't be another Invisible Man spy movie, and, personally, I'd welcome a WWII spy movie in the vein of the movies Goyer mentioned!

4 comments:

Christopher Mills said...

And of course, there was the 1975-76 series, The Invisible Man starring U.N.C.L.E.'s David McCallum as a scientist who accidentally makes himself permanently invisible, and then goes to work for the U.S. government as a secret agent.

In 70s television, if you had any sort of superpowers, you only had two alternatives: spy or fugitive. McCallum's character took the Steve Austin, Jaime Sommers, and Diana Prince route and went to work for Uncle Sam....

Tanner said...

Yeah, and there was also that short-lived Seventies series in the wake of The Six Million Dollar Man about an agent with a perm and a watch that made him invisible for six minutes at a time or something like that. What was that one called? I know I've got some DVDs around here somewhere, but I'm too lazy to dig them up... I think the guy was either Smith or Jones?

David said...

That was called "Gemini Man" and the star was indeed Ben Murphy, aka Kid Curry/Thaddeus Jones.

I remember as a kid I preferred it to the McCallum show because of the watch, which was cooler than peeling off a mask of yourself to "go invisible."

David said...

BTW, it looks like the McCallum show is due to arrive on DVD soon:

http://www.tvshowsondvd.com/news/Invisible-Man-The-Complete-Series/15898