You maniacs were quite keen on finding out details about that SUPERMAN movie that almost starred Nicolas Cage so, now that the GREEN LANTERN movie’s home video release approaches, I figured it’d be fun to look at the time Jack Blackalmost played the “ringslinger.” So let’s wind the clocks back to that bygone year of 2004. Ironically enough, Kevin Smith had previously been offered the opportunity to pen a GL script, but he reportedly turned it down because he figured his sensibilities didn’t quite align with the project. By ’04, the studio had reconceived the project and was looking to spin it as a light comedy akin to the loose movie adaptation of Dark Horse’s THE MASK that had been a smash hit ten years earlier.
So who did they seek out to execute that reinterpretation? Triumph the Insult Comic Dog.
== TEASER ==Well, the guy who played Triumph, anyway. Robert Smigel had a prolific career as a writer for SNL and LATE NIGHT WITH CONAN O’BRIEN, and he’d done some material that specifically parlayed into this particular gig. Not only had he created the innuendo-laden superhero parody THE AMBIGUOUSLY GAY DUO, he’d also famously “pooped on” STAR WARS fans waiting in line for the first showing of ATTACK OF THE CLONES for weeks ahead of time. He not only had an understanding of this particular area of pop culture, but also a willingness to “take the piss out of it” (as they’d say across the pond.)
Smigel’s vision for a comedic GREEN LANTERN movie was to riff on how the power ring didn’t have to be worn by only one specific hero; it could be wielded by anybody with enough demonstrable bravery. Thus, instead of Guy Gardner being selected as the “alternate GL,” the power ring would actually pick Jud Plato, a slobby IKEA employee, after the guy demonstrated his mastery of fear by eating coyote brains on America’s true arena of bravery - - FEAR FACTOR.
Jud would prove to be an utter disgrace to the title, using his ring to make constructs of elves to get household chores done and even a duplicate Superman to essentially do all his super-heroics while he just kicked back and watched. Interestingly enough, Smigel’s conceit was to set this in a faithful recreation of the mythos, with the Guardians and other Corpsmen being Jud’s straight men because their characterizations were true to the comics.
Around this time, Jack Black was being actively courted to play Jud in this adaptation and, with that casting in mind, you can pretty easily imagine how this flick would’ve played on screen. Though, as he confirms in this press interview, once Smigel’s script leaked to the internet and word leaked out about his casting, fandom backlash proved so hostile that the whole project was taken down. There was a period where the studio was thinking of changing the whole project up to feature a new character instead of GL but Smigel revealed in a later VANITY FAIR interview that he stuck to his guns and insisted that the joke wouldn’t work as well without the angle of it sending up a real, pre-established property.
In the same interview, though, Smigel admits that he can totally see now why this take on GREEN LANTERN wouldn’t have worked, as he’s a huge Charlie Brown fan and he would’ve reacted the same way to an iconoclastic take on PEANUTS. Thus, the project was put back into development as a serious movie and that eventually evolved into the GREEN LANTERN movie we saw this summer.
AN INTERESTING ADDENDUM: The thought of doing GL as comedy may have gone back even farther than this, as Eddie Murphy was supposedly in consideration to play Green Lantern some time prior to Black’s involvement. Whether he would’ve been playing Jud Plato, Hal Jordan or John Stewart is unclear, although Common was actually cast as Stewart in the aborted JUSTICE LEAGUE movie and he was only a few days away from shooting before the project was cancelled due to the Writers' Strike.
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