ROCKET MAN

ACTOR BILLY CAMPBELL LOOKS BACK ON BRINGING DAVE STEVENS’S HEROIC COMIC BOOK CREATION,THE ROCKETEER,TO LIFE

- OLIVER PFEIFFER

THERE’S SOMETHING ENJOYABLY QUAINT AND old-fashioned about Disney’s 1991 big screen take on Dave Stevens’s comic book hero The Rocketeer. It concerns an impressionable stunt pilot called Cliff Secord who stumbles upon a highly secretive rocket-powered jet pack that enables him to fly heroically. However, the Howard Hughes-engineered device also attracts the unwanted attention of the mob, the FBI and a slick, self-centred matinee idol.

Set in 1938, during the golden era of aviation and the rise of the Third Reich, like early Indiana Jones films The Rocketeer had MacGuffin-seeking Nazi antagonists and leant on nostalgia for 1930s movie matinee adventure serials. Unlike Indy though, an established star didn’t play the title role and there wasn’t a world famous director to ensure its box office success.

This was also the early 1990s, almost 20 years before the MCU’s equally airborne debut Iron Man led to superhero supremacy. Instead it was a time when comic book adaptations were largely defined by highly stylised,

star-studded affairs like Tim Burton’s dark, brooding Batman or Warren Beatty’s primary coloured marvel Dick Tracy. But The Rocketeer ultimately had no discernible box office stars to speak of at all.