THE PAGEMASTER (1994) has nerdy, insecure Macauley Culkin get locked into the library, fall and knock himself unconscious, then wake up as an animated character in the world of books — can he make it through the realms of horror and adventure to return home? Jekyll and Hyde show up in the horror section, just briefly enough to qualify for the appendix. To their credit, the transformation is spectacular, much better than the other animated film I caught recently (Hyde is less impressive). Overall, though, this feels like an elementary school educational film about the joys of reading, and I don’t mean that as a compliment.“Eight percent of all household accidents involve trees.”
Although I watched my brother Craig in Jekyll & Hyde: the Musical last year, I wanted to catch the “official” production (in the sense it played on the Broadway Television Network) with David Hasselhoff in the lead roles (at some point I’ll watch them back to back for better comparison). The two have significant differences — Hyde’s assault on the sex worker Lucy doesn’t happen onstage here — and Hasselhoff is, well, Hasselhoff (though he’s clearly thrilled to be performing on stage).
This was overall enjoyable but despite all its talk of Good vs. Evil and the Evil Hiding Inside Us I’m not sure it has anything deep to say no the subject, though Facade is a terrific song (“Are we one man or two? Are we evil or good? Do we all walk a line that we’d cross if we could?”). While this uses the March/Tracy template, it makes several changes, some of which work, such as Jekyll being more attracted to Lucy than March or Tracy’s Jekyll were to Ivy. Others don’t — there’s no reason for Jekyll to have Utterson deliver drugs to him in one scene except that provides a witness when he transforms. “Do you seriously believe your drugs can change what God has set in motion?”
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE (2000) starts out like a Dr. Strange riff as Jekyll (Adam Baldwin) announces he’s giving up Life Saving Medicine in favor of Big Bucks Plastic Surgery. Alas, when he takes a honeymoon trip to Hong Kong he decides to drop in on the local hospital for some shop talk — that makes it a tax-deductible business trip! (gotta say, I think the IRS might disagree) — and wouldn’t you know, triad thugs working for the sinister Dragon show up demanding treatment for an injured mobster. When Jekyll fails to save him, the mobsters kill Jekyll and his wife… but the mystic Tong (Anthony Wong) revives Jekyll and gives him a new name so the triad won’t catch on. Hmm, what name do you suppose he gets?
It turns out that Jekyll was not only revived, he’s become the incarnation of the Tiger, a spirit destined to oppose the Dragon and its evil (Tong does admit most dragons in Chinese folklore are not villains). For openers Jekyll drinks one of Tong’s herbal remedies and transforms … except other than some weird tiger patterns on his skin, he doesn’t seem very different.
This TV pilot isn’t dreadful; it would have felt perfectly in keeping with the CW adventure stuff of a decade or so later. It’s not particularly good, though, and setting it in Hong Kong raises White Savior issues — not only with Jekyll but the Hong Kong PD winds up working with a Chicago cop who has a score to settle with the Dragon. Having a white dude become the Chosen One of some non-white culture is (as I’ve mentioned before) another trope that hasn’t aged well.
While I can understand sticking the Jekyll and Hyde name on a standalone movie to sell tickets, I don’t think it serves a pilot film well. Sure, some people will tune in for the name but I doubt many of them would come back when they realized they’d been tricked. Little Easter eggs (Jekyll’s wife’s name is Muriel like Fredric March’s in the 1932 version; a coworker at Tong’s shop is named Mary Riley) don’t change that. “You’re telling me you brought me back to life using tea?”
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