Test Footage For Live-Action Marvin The Martian Movie Should Be Killed With Fire

By David Wharton | Published

This article is more than 2 years old

If there is one single Hollywood trend that I would destroy with a wish were I to discover a genie-possessed lamp, it wouldn’t be all the remakes and reboots. Sure, those are largely awful, but every once in a while you get a good one, like Carpenter’s The Thing. No, with my wish I would banish to oblivion every single kids movie that takes traditionally animated characters and pours their essence into horrifying CGI homunculi to caper and cavort across the screen with live-action actors in dire need of a paycheck. Alvin and the Chipmunks. The Smurfs. Yogi freakin’ Bear. I would cast all of them, every last one, into an abyss unknown to either God or man.

But if I could only destroy one of them, it would be this test footage for a — thankfully aborted — live-action/CGI movie version of Warner Bros.’ Marvin the Martian. To borrow a phrase from Marvin himself: it makes me very angry. (The Marvin bit begins at the 2:09 mark.)

I’ll give you a moment to finish scrubbing your eyeholes with lye before providing a bit of background. As first posted by Cartoon Brew, and then YouTube’d by Bleeding Cool — appropriate, since the video may cause internal bleeding — this footage is from a nixed Marvin the Martian movie at one time in development by director Alex Zamm. Boy, I really want to go back to that previous sentence and give the word “nixed” a hug, don’t you? It’s single-handedly provided us with a happy ending, so let’s all give “nixed” a round of applause.

Assuming you didn’t skip ahead to the Marvin bit as suggested, you were also unfortunate enough to have suffered through two minutes’ worth of Zamm’s similar treatment for the cartoon character “Hong Kong Phooey.” For that we sincerely apologize.

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