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Heavy Metal is the Heavy Metal of Heavy Metal movies
The science fiction and fantasy magazine, Heavy Metal, has been in print for over 40 years. In that time there have been more stories told in the publication than can be counted on the hand of every mutant, robot, and mutant robot in the history of fiction. But the stories you probably know best are from the 1981 animated film, Heavy Metal.
Anthology films are a strange breed. By their very nature, they have a very limited time to get in and get out of the stories they tell. It's a limitation that invites creatives to take big, weird swings rather than worry about typical tropes and narratives. Heavy Metal is an anthology film whose stories have one shared strand of DNA: an evil, green orb called the Loc-Nar that is telling those stories to a young girl before he devours her. You know, just your very normal, typical frame story.
There are other commonalities, of course. The voicework of the late, great John Candy features in almost every one of the short stories, each tale is gruesomely violent, and, as you may recall, all but one of the vignettes prominently features large, naked breasts. I'm just reporting the facts here, folks. The only orbs more tempting to man's dark nature than the Loc-Nar according to Heavy Metal, are ones of the secondary sexual mammilian variety.
On today's episode of Every Day Animation, creator of the HBomberguy YouTube channel, Harris Bomberguy joins the podcast to talk about what a weird, strange trip Heavy Metal is. We dig into the films and people it inspires. Did you know that Elon Musk got the idea to put a car in space from Heavy Metal? He did! And that frame story was written by Dan O'Bannon, the writer of the original Alien and also Return of the Living Dead. The story, "Harry Canyon," is also pretty clearly an inspiration for the Bruce Willis classic, The Fifth Element. Anyway, we have a grand old time talking about Heavy Metal. Listen:
And on tomorrow episode, the host of the upcoming Sword and Scandal podcast, Chico Leo, is going to talk about the legacy of the Alex Toth classic, Herculoids. we'll see you there.
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