Mystery Men
Ben Stiller's Mr. Furious, Hank Azaria's cutlery-flinging Blue Raja and William H. Macy's Shoveler: a team of third-rate superheroes with dubious powers, out to save Champion City. It bombed in the summer of 1999 and left behind a cult and the Smash Mouth "All Star" video.
The Mystery Men began life in Bob Burden's Flaming Carrot Comics, introduced in issue #16 as a flashback-and-dream sequence about the blue-collar superhero team the Carrot belonged to. Universal's film left the Flaming Carrot out entirely, with Hank Azaria's Blue Raja as his stand-in, and Dark Horse published four issues of Bob Burden's Original Mysterymen Comics in 1999 to meet it. Getting there was messy: a $13 million deal with Danny DeVito fell apart over control of the soundtrack, Ben Stiller was approached to rewrite and direct and declined, and in April 1998 the job went to commercial director Kinka Usher, for what remains his only feature.
The lineup was the joke. Stiller's Mr. Furious gets strong when he gets angry; William H. Macy's Shoveler wields a shovel; Kel Mitchell's Invisible Boy is invisible only when nobody is looking; Paul Reubens' Spleen fights with flatulence; Janeane Garofalo's Bowler carries a bowling ball with her dead father's skull inside; Wes Studi's Sphinx can cut a gun in half with his mind; Greg Kinnear's Captain Amazing is the billionaire hero they have to rescue from Geoffrey Rush's Casanova Frankenstein. Tom Waits built the weapons as Doc Heller and Eddie Izzard led the Disco Boys. Shooting ran six months, from October 21, 1998 into April 1999, and the original ending was reshot after test audiences rejected it. It was Reubens' first major film role since his early-1990s retreat from public life.
It cost $68 million and opened wide on August 6, 1999 to $10 million and sixth place, finishing at $33.5 million worldwide. Reviews were mixed-to-warm (59% on Rotten Tomatoes, 65 on Metacritic) and audiences graded it a C+, but the Los Angeles Times' Kenneth Turan predicted it was bound for "cult film heaven." The Interscope soundtrack did better than the movie: it licensed Smash Mouth's already-released "All Star," whose McG-directed video arrived as the song climbed to number four on the Hot 100 and toward a Grammy nomination. Stephen Warbeck wrote the score in 28 days.
The cult arrived on schedule. Cast members have talked up a sequel nobody expects, and Garofalo kept the Bowler's skull ball, which she puts out every Halloween.
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