Mystery Men at 25: The flop superhero comedy that deserved better

Perhaps it’s fitting that a film about a ragtag rabble of not-so-superheroes failed to take off at the box office. But, 25 years since its release, the Ben Stiller-starring Mystery Men is worth rescuing from obscurity. That it hasn’t generated the cult following of so many other slightly under-the-radar movies of 1999 – think the cannibal horror movie Ravenous, or the Kirsten Dunst Watergate comedy Dick – feels criminal to the point of super-villainy.

The first and to date last feature film by the TV commercial director Kinka Usher, Mystery Men now seems curiously placed within the history of comic book movies. Released on 6 August 1999 in the US, it spoofed the superheroes that came before it, while anticipating – or preemptively satirising, even – the yet-to-happen superhero boom with ideas as sharp as anything seen in almost two decades of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Its heroes, whose powers are every bit as poor as their home-stitched costumes, include Mr Furious (Stiller), who gets a bit cross; The Shoveler (William H Macy), who’s handy with, well, a shovel; the Blue Raja (Hank Azaria), a fork-throwing, turban-wearing relic of the empire; The Bowler (Janeane Garofalo), who bowls with her dead father’s skull; Invisible Boy (Kel Mitchell), who can only turn invisible when absolutely no one is looking; and The Spleen (Paul Reubens), cursed by an old woman to be forever flatulent.

The sharpest idea, though, is the Superman-like Captain Amazing (Greg Kinnear), the film’s one bona fide superhero. He’s a corporate sellout. His costume is covered in sponsor logos. And instead of a sidekick, he has a publicist. Captain Amazing is less irked by the antics of flamboyantly named evildoer Casanova Frankenstein (Geoffrey Rush) than negative headlines – and losing his Pepsi deal.

The kernel of that idea came from Bob Burden, creator of the original Mysterymen comics. Burden envisioned his heroes flying a battle helicopter with an Adidas logo on its side and an arsenal of guns up front. Many of Burden’s ideas were tweaked during the concept’s journey to the big screen, though the spirit of championing “the other guys” remains – second-tier, mediocre heroes who aren’t cut out for the big leagues. In some ways, Burden tells me, the film is “180 degrees” from the comic. “But in some ways,” he admits, “it’s the same thing.”

The Mysterymen were spin-off characters in Burden’s Flaming Carrot Comics, a comic series about, as Burden described it, “the world’s first surrealist superhero”. Wearing (as the name suggests) a flaming carrot mask, Flaming Carrot – who first appeared in 1979 – was too strange to gain any mainstream traction, so Burden introduced the Mysterymen crew into Flaming Carrot stories in 1987. They were, in part, a working-class re-do of the standard DC and Marvel heroes.

“The original superheroes were like demigods from Mount Olympus – Superman, Wonder Woman,” says Burden. “They had almost a mythical origin. Then, usurping them was Marvel. In the early days, they were middle-class superheroes. What I did was usurp all that, with blue collar, mill town, rust belt superheroes from the boondocks.”

Dark Horse Comics boss Mike Richardson saw the movie potential. Richardson had already had some success (and some failure) producing film versions of other Dark Horse titles, including The Mask, Timecop, and Barb Wire, which was infamously turned into a star vehicle for Pamela Anderson.

Burden took it upon himself to write a 10-page synopsis for what the film could be. “I gave it kind of a pathway,” Burden says, “a grasp of how this could be done.... then bing, bang, boom, Universal said, ‘OK, we’re gonna buy this.’” Ultimately, however, they didn’t use Burden’s version. Neil Cuthbert – writer of the spooky family film Hocus Pocus – was drafted in to write the screenplay, along with contributions from an uncredited Brent Forrester, a writer from Stiller’s pre-fame sketch series, The Ben Stiller Show.

In the eventual story, the crime-fighting efforts of Mr Furious, The Shoveler, and the Blue Raja are overshadowed – and ridiculed – by Captain Amazing. But when the glam supervillain Casanova Frankenstein captures the Cap’, the Mystery Men hold tryouts for new members in an effort to rescue him. Cue a parade of super-wannabes too useless even for the Mystery Men, including the Waffler, who carries a “Griddle of Justice”; Pencilhead and Son of Pencilhead; Squeegee Man; and the PMS Avenger. (The underground superhero community, it seems, is the same demographic of oddballs, eccentrics, and loners from comic book fandom.)

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While Stiller himself was in line to direct at one point – as was Danny DeVito – the job fell to Usher, who’d directed commercials for the hugely successful “Got Milk?” campaign, as well as ads for Nike, Taco Bell, and many others. The casting of Rush – then fresh from his Best Actor Oscar win for Shine – “got the ball rolling” when it came to the film’s ensemble, Usher once said. Stiller, who flirted with the idea of playing Blue Raja before gravitating towards Mr Furious, was a hot name in comedy, particularly after the success of There’s Something About Mary.

He was persuaded to join the movie as an actor by real-life pal and regular collaborator, Janeane Garofalo, who was also an on-the-pulse comedy talent. William H Macy, meanwhile, was best known as a squirrely character actor from indie-style Nineties hits such as Fargo and Boogie Nights. Azaria was most famous for his voice, having given life to characters including Chief Wiggum and Apu Nahasapeemapetilon on The Simpsons. A trickier piece of casting was Reubens, aka Pee-wee Herman. Reubens was still under the shadow of his 1991 arrest for indecent exposure in a porno cinema. “I fought tooth and nail to get him in,” said Usher in a retrospective feature. Gravel-voiced singer Tom Waits also had a cameo as Doc Heller, the barmy inventor of non-lethal weaponry.

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Of course, film cycles often end in parody (think the Scream era of slasher films culminating in Scary Movie, for instance), and, by the late Nineties, the superhero genre had invited parody with Joel Schumacher’s pretty-much-parodic Batman & Robin (1997). Mystery Men was savvy enough to poke fun at 25 years’ worth of superhero films yet to come, but, watched now, it clearly plays on the Nineties Batmans too. Mystery Men’s fictional setting, Champion City, feels just around the corner from Schumacher’s version of Gotham – muscular, skew-whiff, and neon-tinged.

One of the issues, perhaps, was timing – that the Mystery Men film was spoofing a genre that, courtesy of Schumacher, was already spoofing itself, rendering the japery as confused or surplus to superhero requirements at the time of its release. It’s interesting, though, that Mystery Men prefigures the trend for subverting or reinventing the superhero formula or mythologies – comics such as Powers, Red Son, The Ultimates, Kick-Ass, and Jupiter’s Legacy. Now it could be seen as a daft, comedy predecessor of James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad or The Boys, though occasionally lacking the provocation of its source material. The Spleen, for example, spewed acids and glues in the comics. In the film, he is covered in warts and targets enemies with his toxic farts.

Looking back at the film, Burden is pragmatic about the changes from his comics. He also has no regrets about which of his original heroes they chose to include in the film and which ones didn’t make the cut. “It was their movie, their take on it, their money on the table,” he says. That said, the film is missing the grit and grime of his blue-collar concept. “I don’t think they entirely understood what I was doing,” he says, “but they saw something there, so they did their own version of it ... that’s a choice they made.” It’s like the difference between a painting of the Empire State Building by Salvador Dali, and one by Picasso, he adds. “They’d be totally different, but both faithful to the source material.”

Usher later admitted that he respected Burden’s comics, but wanted to do his own thing with Mystery Men. “I really wanted to create a world that was mine, that was my vision,” he said. “I wanted to take all the elements that Bob had created – all the characters – and sort of dovetail them into this vision that I had for this film.”

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For Usher, Mystery Men was a difficult shoot, and he reportedly struggled to handle the logistics of the effects work, as well as the opinionated comics in his cast. All were writers in their own right – and gave constant suggestions for changes and additions. Usher recalled the script ballooning to around 170 pages, and found himself shooting scenes, at significant cost, that he knew wouldn’t even make the final edit. He ended up shooting the equivalent of two movies and, when it came time to edit it down, the first stuff to go was, regrettably, the character-driven scenes. According to Azaria, Usher had said, “You know, I didn’t enjoy this ... I’m going back to commercials when this is done. I’ve had enough.”

Chatting about it to the AV Club in 2007, Garofalo said: “It was very long hours and very little got accomplished. It was one of those alleged blockbusters that was overbudgeted and overhyped. It went from being a great script when it was sent to me, to being – in my opinion –a fairly mediocre non-event.”

As if sensing that they had a flop in the making, Universal shuffled Mystery Men around the release calendar in 1999, pushing the film out of the summer blockbuster season. There was the shadow of The Phantom Menace, too. “All these big movies got scared by Star Wars at the beginning of the summer,” says Burden. “I think if they’d have released [Mystery Men] at a different time, it would have found its marketplace.” Unfortunately, Mystery Men also opened the very same day as a smash few predicted: The Sixth Sense.

Reviews were, much like the Mystery Men themselves, a mixed bag. Roger Ebert called it a “long, shapeless, undisciplined mess”, though he admitted that “every once in a while it generates a big laugh”. The Independent agreed, though added: “There’s not quite enough gags to go around.” In the end, the film grossed just $33.5m (£25m) on a budget of $68m. Usher believed it was “a failure in marketing, not movie making”. Burden, meanwhile, thinks one problem was the budget. A smaller, indie-ish version might have fared better. “At first they wanted to make it a $10m movie,” he says. “A big budget is sometimes counterproductive.”

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While Mystery Men has the smarts and foresight to lampoon superhero cinema of both the past and future, it’s very much of its moment, too – from a time when filmmakers were trying to make superhero films look, feel and even move like comic book panels, before The Dark Knight and the Marvel Cinematic Universe found a formula to bring their heroes into some sense of reality.

A year after Mystery Men’s release, Bryan Singer’s X-Men sparked a new wave of comic book movies, films that came with an added seriousness and respect for their illustrated forebears. It would help launch a 20-plus-year cycle of superhero blockbusters. Perhaps Mystery Men was simply misunderstood.

“I think if you made it today, it would probably do fairly well,” says Burden, who confirms that rumours of a sequel “pop up now and again”. His assessment of the movie also feels fitting for a film that celebrated life’s underdogs.

“They gave it a good try,” Burden says, “and they did their best.”