MADness #22: X-Men 2!

It’s another installment of our ridiculous chronological crawl through my work in MAD! We return to the world of superhero movie spoofs with this parody of the film “X2”, written by my CLAPTRAP cohort Desmond Devlin and appearing in MAD #430, June 2003. The movie debuted in theaters on May 2, 2003, so we actually had the parody out BEFORE the film, since this issue was on news stand in mid April. Are we clairvoyant? Is Desmond a Time Lord? Did we use MAD Magazine’s tremendous clout in the world of entertainment to see an advanced release of the film? Nope, nope, and MAD has no such clout. We worked from a copy of the script obtained by likely nefarious means, and it led to an embarrassing error.

Because of the way movie distribution and longevity in the theaters had changed since the 20th century, the MAD movie parody became a lot harder to do. Back in day, movies debuted in single screen theaters in big cities like LA, New York and Chicago. Popular films would play there for many months because they played on far fewer screens, and it could take that long for everyone who wanted to see it to get a seat in the theater. In the meantime, the film would slowly trickle down to the next tier of cities like Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Denver, etc. In that way a movie would play for 6 months to a year in theaters and still be relevant and being talked about. By the 90’s, movies debuted in every tier of city from NYC to small town USA, on 3,000 screens in multiplexes. Even big money-making movies seldom spend more than four or five weeks in theaters these days, and by the time the MAD movie parody came out (usually a three month lag) the film it spoofed was old news.

For a few years in the early-mid 2000’s, MAD tried to do movie parodies in advance of the film’s release. We worked from trailers, bootleg movie scripts, books/comics the films were based on, etc. This led to a number of “mistakes”, where we included scenes that ended up not in the film, or got visuals wrong. The worst of all of these was this parody, where we GOT THE ENDING WRONG.

Here’s how it happened. We worked from a legitimate final working script of the movie… something that is usually pretty accurate barring any major editing in production. In the script’s ending of this film, Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) does NOT die. She goes blind when she’s hit by a mind-controlled Cyclop’s optic blast in a battle in Styker’s base, is blind for the rest of the film, and is alive but blind at the end. That’s how we did the ending.

So what happened? I’ve heard two versions. In one, director Bryan Singer had always planned on having Jean Grey die and then be resurrected in the third film, but kept it ultra secret and didn’t even tell Janssen until halfway through the filming, so the working script was always wrong. Another version is that they filmed the blind ending, tested it with audiences who didn’t like the ending, and then re-edited the film and brought the actors back for some reshoots and new scenes to do a Jean Grey dies ending.

Personally I think it’s a combination of both versions. I do think they shot the original “Jean Grey goes blind” ending, but I think Singer kept it super secret that he wanted her to die so he brought some of the cast back for the final weepy scene in Professor X’s office and a couple of other shots, and had edited it for those in the first place, all to keep it secret for as long as possible. Actually I’d love someone associated with the film to fill me in on the real story.

Why do I think that? If you watch the film KNOWING Jean Grey goes blind in that battle scene, then you see Janssen is ACTING LIKE SHE’S BLIND from that point forward, except in a couple of key reshot scenes. It’s obvious. Singer always intended to use those scenes because Jean Grey was hurt in the battle and her being helped along by others could be attributed to injury, even though if you look at it again you can see she’s acting like she’s blind! Also, look at Wolverine’s hair in the weepy scene in the office and some in the jet after Jean dies. His hair is obviously a giant Wolverine wig covering the hair he had grown out for shooting “Van Helsing”, which he was doing at the time. Looks very different from the other scenes.

I also remember working from trailer clips and references from the first X-Men movie, and I based my drawing of the X-Jet on the first movie’s design. Right after I had finished the art for the spoof, there was a picture book released of the movie that contained some pics of the X-Jet, and it was completely redesigned! I quickly redid the panels featuring the X-Jet to get it right… little did I know we got the ending of the movie wrong so no one would have noticed the X-Jet looking different.

Toon in next week for another thrilling tale of cartooning derring-do, with a look at another “MAD Peek Behind the Scenes on the Set of…” piece!