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ivyficMy friends and I watched The Crow (1994) this weekend. There is the horrible tragedy of it all, but—that movie. Is the most nineties. Dear lord. It’s so nineties. I also just want to roll around in the aesthetic of it.
Lucky (?) for me—there are three sequels and a TV show. The show, The Crow: Stairway to Heaven, is currently available to stream on NBC.com, so guess what I’ve been watching.
The show aired for one season from 1998-99, with Mark Dacascos as Eric Draven, the character Brandon Lee played in the original. And basically, they turned it into a bog standard nineties superhero show. The episodes could have been written for Sentinel or Pretender or Highlander—they barely are altered by being about The Crow. This means they made a series of absolutely baffling choices:
1. The movie is a hard R, and so is the source material. This was obviously softened for the show. Rather than Shelly being raped and beaten to death, rape isn’t mentioned and aside from showing it as an attack, they don’t really go into the specifics of it. Eric’s death is also altered. In the movie, he’s shot and then thrown out a window. Now—specifically that scene has a lot of emotional baggage to anyone familiar with the franchise. So in this, he is not shot, he’s just thrown out the window. That, though, leads to the flashbacks showing one of the attackers picking him up and bridal carrying him to the window. Mark Dacascos is a big, muscular guy, and nothing in the mythology implies that when he came back he gained more muscles, so it’s just kind of an odd thing to show a smaller guy bridal carrying him to a window.
2. He doesn’t dig himself out of his own grave. Instead, he drops out of a magic portal in the sky into a Dia de los Muertos festival where a guy in the Crow makeup says, “he’s been to the other side,” and then we never see that character or anyone from this festival ever again. Also, this doesn’t even inspire the makeup choice. It’s just there.
3. The first episode is basically a recapitulation of the movie, but with no killing of anyone. The movie is an explosion of cathartic revenge. The pilot of this show, he gets to the moment of having Top Dollar at his mercy and Sarah says Shelly wouldn’t have wanted you to kill him, and so he has that veeeeery cliché moment where he chooses not to pull the trigger. We also find out that Top Dollar has a vault of souvenirs from his other murders, and I thought—oh, that’s what they’re going to do to make this a series. He’s going to have a bigger revenge quest because he has to avenge all these other murders before he can rest, but no. That absolutely never comes up again.
4. The mythology…doesn’t make sense. I mean, for the most part they ignore it. This is a show that’s about having a hot guy go around in leather and solve 90s TV plots (…hello Pretender), so most of the time they are not paying any attention to world building. But in the second episode, Eric Draven finds out that the attack was ordered against him by his record label, and Shelly was collateral. Rather than in the movie where it’s Shelly’s tenant advocacy that is the target and Eric is the collateral. No, this time it’s all about Eric. And the big bad is THE CEO OF THE RECORD COMPANY. Who did this…to make Eric a Crow? For reasons? Even though Top Dollar said in the pilot that the double murder was a botch job. No, the record producer wanted Eric and Shelly to die so Eric would come back as a Crow and he could something something snake something now he’s not a paraplegic anymore nope wait he’s dead. This really made no sense, other than hinting that Crows are a more general thing, and that there are…people who have snakes as their power center that are against crows. (Also turns out that that face make-up does not look good on everyone.)
They also say something in an early episode about Eric being stuck on the mortal plane to do enough good to balance his ledger but—there is LITERALLY no indication that he EVER did anything he needs to balance for. Like, the only flashbacks we get of him before death are him dating Shelly and going to carnivals and stuff. What is he supposed to be atoning for? Like, what? He didn’t even murder his killers when he came back. WHAT IS HE ATONING FOR.
4. The series starts with Erik and Shelly on a bridge with that hazy, smeary nineties-style camera work that was used for everything even slightly supernatural. We learn that this is limbo, and once Eric has left it by jumping off the bridge (I’m not sure the exact reason because the episodes as uploaded on NBC.com always jump over about 30 seconds in the prologue), Shelly is then stuck in limbo until Eric returns to her. This leads to a lot of cameos by Shelly in later episodes as sort of a glowy figure that Eric screams, “Shelly!” at before she disappears.
5. The face make up isn’t make up. It just appears on his face when he’s, I don’t know, angry? Like, he hulks out and all it does is put white face paint on him and turn his fingernails black. The first episode, it comes over him each time he’s confronting one of the people that murdered him, so I was like, cool, he gets his vengeance on and becomes the Crow. Then in the second episode, we see him lying in the middle of a crow outlined in candles and meditating and the transformation coming over him. And—it’s a cool shot. But I was like, okay, so he has to get himself in a Crow mood for the change to happen? That could be an interesting story point. Especially if they made it that he only has the immortality as the Crow or something and he has to be on a righteous quest to transform. But no, nope, that is not how it works at any other time. At some point in the third act of the show, he will transform and beat up some guys and there is no rhyme or reason to it.
Also, he becomes a wise ass as the Crow—this is consistent with the film. But in the movie, we have no baseline for Eric Draven, so it’s not clear if that is who he always was or this is a result of the undead thing or what. In the show, when he is “Eric Draven,” he is a normal dude. When he is the Crow, he starts making jokes—and a lot of them are very bad. Like, I just watched an episode where someone is pointing a gun at him and his cop friend and going “Eenie, Meenie, Miney, Moe,” and the Crow says, “You didn’t finish it! If he hollers, make him pay—” And I was like, if he hollers make him pay? MAKE HIM PAY? That is not how that goes! (Wikipedia tells me this is an early 20th century variant, but still, this is a bad line.)
6. They had to depower him somewhat for a series to work. In the movie, bullets seem to knock him over, but he doesn’t really have recovery time. We see him both miming that he’s hurt for the benefit of the person who shot him, and going “ow” and otherwise being unaffected. (Until the end when they depower him.) But basically, walking into bullets is like walking into a strong wind. In the show, he’s more like an Immortal in Highlander, where if he takes a lot of damage he has a recovery time.
He doesn’t eat or sleep, but this is treated as like a weird annoying thing. Like, he stays up all night doing pull ups cause he’s bored. He’s not even playing guitar on rooftops.
Also, they’ve given him Dead Zone-like powers to psychically pick up vibes when touching objects (but only when it gives plot information—he has none of the stuff in the Dead Zone TV show where this can be an inconvenient or debilitating power to have). The crow also functions kind of like Munin—it flies around and he can see what it’s seeing. This gives him a way to find out about the plot of the episodes. But despite having that, most of the time he gets involved because they’re doing the very nineties thing of having a main character who has someone who is “like a brother to me” that is involved in the plot and then we never see again. Like, you could have just had Munin tell him what he needed to superpower, but instead it’s always like friends of friends who are getting into trouble.
7. The characterization in general. The movie doesn’t give us much to go on—it is basically an excuse for a lot of violent fight scenes—but he is basically a vengeance spirit that sometimes remembers he was once a man. He seems genuinely, genuinely traumatized by his murder and witnessing the rape and murder of his girlfriend. And I like the theory my friends came up watching it—if you see him, you lose a sanity point. Even for Sarah and Sgt. Albrecht, seeing him kind of fucks them up a bit. I keep going back to the scene where he kills Funboy. In that scene, from Darla’s perspective, a crackhead just walked in, shot her boyfriend, and then broke down the door of the bathroom she’s hiding in. He is TERRIFYING. We metatextually know he’s a “good” guy (or at least a guy whose violence is directed only at specific people), but no one else in the film has any reason to think that and they all react accordingly.
In the show? He is a dude. Like, he comes back and just IS Eric Draven and sometimes he has facepaint. He definitely wants to be reunited with Shelly, but he doesn’t seem particularly traumatized by the whole murder thing, and he doesn’t seem to know why he came back, what his set of powers are, or what he’s supposed to be doing. He mostly just wants to go back to his regular life. There’s an episode where Sgt. Albrecht sees him come back to life, and he says, “Hey, it’s weird for me too.” That’s…holy shit is that just a totally different thing than the origination of this character. It’s a jarring juxtaposition to have this ultra-goth emo boy character be like, hey, this is weird!
8. For someone who came back from the dead, Eric Draven doesn’t seem to have any problem going back to his regular life. In the first episode, Sgt. Albrecht is like hey! You’re Eric Draven! Somebody else must have been murdered last year, and you’re my prime suspect! And then arrests him. Which seems like a totally legit interpretation. But then they find video of the murder, so that gets dropped, and then Albrecht doesn’t seem too hung up on who this guy is?
Draven also just keeps going up to people who used to know him and being like, hi! I’m Eric Draven! I came back from the dead! Like, he goes up to his former band and tells them to stop playing one of the songs he wrote, and they’re like, you are a sick fuck who is pretending to be our murdered friend and you should stop. And he’s just like, no, I’m Eric Draven back from the dead! And then he gets a job as a bouncer at that club and we never hear from the band ever again.
Or, he starts squatting in his former apartment and the landlord comes in and is like who the fuck are you, and he says that he was in witness protection and so was Shelly and the whole murder was faked. And the landlord’s like, why are you back then, and he says he got homesick. Then the landlord’s like, yeah, whatever, just pay your rent.
My favorite, my FAVORITE, is that he goes to his record company and tells them to pull the song he didn’t want his band performing, and says, yes, I wrote it, I am dead guy Eric Draven. And the record producer is like HOLY SHIT THIS IS AWESOME. Your band is called Hangman’s Joke! Here’s what we’re going to do—we’re going to put you on tour as this murder victim who came back from the dead and you should stay in character all the time and we will make so much money. And then we never see that guy again.
Like, they have all these moments of people being like, it is impossible for you to be here, but then they just…drop all of it? Like, it could be a source of some really interesting plot lines. What I find baffling is that it would be so easy for him to pretend to be someone else and hide that he’s the Crow, and instead he’s like Hi I’m Eric Draven dead guy and I can morph into this superhero—and nobody seems to care? Like, there’s an episode where the police station gets reports that this crazy guy stood in front of a prisoner transport and got hit then after being run over got up and beat up the police officers, and Sgt. Albrecht is like—dammit Eric!
Like, the fact that he’s the Crow has so little impact on the storyline of most episodes that there’s one where Albrecht is kidnapped and taken to an abandoned island for a little Most Dangerous Game. And Eric shows up, and at one point is like, you know, I could just walk towards those guys with guns and take them out, and Albrecht is like, no, don’t do that, and then they don’t do that. For another half hour, til that is in fact how they defeat the bad guys, but we had to play out the rest of the episode as if they didn’t have AN IMMORTAL CHARACTER cause there wouldn’t be an episode otherwise.
I’m only 6 episodes in, and I know that this series ends on a cliffhanger, but oh man, it is such peak nineties television. The sad thing is I know that The Crow has had a huge and obsessive fandom over the years, but not anywhere I can find, and certainly not on AO3.
Lucky (?) for me—there are three sequels and a TV show. The show, The Crow: Stairway to Heaven, is currently available to stream on NBC.com, so guess what I’ve been watching.
The show aired for one season from 1998-99, with Mark Dacascos as Eric Draven, the character Brandon Lee played in the original. And basically, they turned it into a bog standard nineties superhero show. The episodes could have been written for Sentinel or Pretender or Highlander—they barely are altered by being about The Crow. This means they made a series of absolutely baffling choices:
1. The movie is a hard R, and so is the source material. This was obviously softened for the show. Rather than Shelly being raped and beaten to death, rape isn’t mentioned and aside from showing it as an attack, they don’t really go into the specifics of it. Eric’s death is also altered. In the movie, he’s shot and then thrown out a window. Now—specifically that scene has a lot of emotional baggage to anyone familiar with the franchise. So in this, he is not shot, he’s just thrown out the window. That, though, leads to the flashbacks showing one of the attackers picking him up and bridal carrying him to the window. Mark Dacascos is a big, muscular guy, and nothing in the mythology implies that when he came back he gained more muscles, so it’s just kind of an odd thing to show a smaller guy bridal carrying him to a window.
2. He doesn’t dig himself out of his own grave. Instead, he drops out of a magic portal in the sky into a Dia de los Muertos festival where a guy in the Crow makeup says, “he’s been to the other side,” and then we never see that character or anyone from this festival ever again. Also, this doesn’t even inspire the makeup choice. It’s just there.
3. The first episode is basically a recapitulation of the movie, but with no killing of anyone. The movie is an explosion of cathartic revenge. The pilot of this show, he gets to the moment of having Top Dollar at his mercy and Sarah says Shelly wouldn’t have wanted you to kill him, and so he has that veeeeery cliché moment where he chooses not to pull the trigger. We also find out that Top Dollar has a vault of souvenirs from his other murders, and I thought—oh, that’s what they’re going to do to make this a series. He’s going to have a bigger revenge quest because he has to avenge all these other murders before he can rest, but no. That absolutely never comes up again.
4. The mythology…doesn’t make sense. I mean, for the most part they ignore it. This is a show that’s about having a hot guy go around in leather and solve 90s TV plots (…hello Pretender), so most of the time they are not paying any attention to world building. But in the second episode, Eric Draven finds out that the attack was ordered against him by his record label, and Shelly was collateral. Rather than in the movie where it’s Shelly’s tenant advocacy that is the target and Eric is the collateral. No, this time it’s all about Eric. And the big bad is THE CEO OF THE RECORD COMPANY. Who did this…to make Eric a Crow? For reasons? Even though Top Dollar said in the pilot that the double murder was a botch job. No, the record producer wanted Eric and Shelly to die so Eric would come back as a Crow and he could something something snake something now he’s not a paraplegic anymore nope wait he’s dead. This really made no sense, other than hinting that Crows are a more general thing, and that there are…people who have snakes as their power center that are against crows. (Also turns out that that face make-up does not look good on everyone.)
They also say something in an early episode about Eric being stuck on the mortal plane to do enough good to balance his ledger but—there is LITERALLY no indication that he EVER did anything he needs to balance for. Like, the only flashbacks we get of him before death are him dating Shelly and going to carnivals and stuff. What is he supposed to be atoning for? Like, what? He didn’t even murder his killers when he came back. WHAT IS HE ATONING FOR.
4. The series starts with Erik and Shelly on a bridge with that hazy, smeary nineties-style camera work that was used for everything even slightly supernatural. We learn that this is limbo, and once Eric has left it by jumping off the bridge (I’m not sure the exact reason because the episodes as uploaded on NBC.com always jump over about 30 seconds in the prologue), Shelly is then stuck in limbo until Eric returns to her. This leads to a lot of cameos by Shelly in later episodes as sort of a glowy figure that Eric screams, “Shelly!” at before she disappears.
5. The face make up isn’t make up. It just appears on his face when he’s, I don’t know, angry? Like, he hulks out and all it does is put white face paint on him and turn his fingernails black. The first episode, it comes over him each time he’s confronting one of the people that murdered him, so I was like, cool, he gets his vengeance on and becomes the Crow. Then in the second episode, we see him lying in the middle of a crow outlined in candles and meditating and the transformation coming over him. And—it’s a cool shot. But I was like, okay, so he has to get himself in a Crow mood for the change to happen? That could be an interesting story point. Especially if they made it that he only has the immortality as the Crow or something and he has to be on a righteous quest to transform. But no, nope, that is not how it works at any other time. At some point in the third act of the show, he will transform and beat up some guys and there is no rhyme or reason to it.
Also, he becomes a wise ass as the Crow—this is consistent with the film. But in the movie, we have no baseline for Eric Draven, so it’s not clear if that is who he always was or this is a result of the undead thing or what. In the show, when he is “Eric Draven,” he is a normal dude. When he is the Crow, he starts making jokes—and a lot of them are very bad. Like, I just watched an episode where someone is pointing a gun at him and his cop friend and going “Eenie, Meenie, Miney, Moe,” and the Crow says, “You didn’t finish it! If he hollers, make him pay—” And I was like, if he hollers make him pay? MAKE HIM PAY? That is not how that goes! (Wikipedia tells me this is an early 20th century variant, but still, this is a bad line.)
6. They had to depower him somewhat for a series to work. In the movie, bullets seem to knock him over, but he doesn’t really have recovery time. We see him both miming that he’s hurt for the benefit of the person who shot him, and going “ow” and otherwise being unaffected. (Until the end when they depower him.) But basically, walking into bullets is like walking into a strong wind. In the show, he’s more like an Immortal in Highlander, where if he takes a lot of damage he has a recovery time.
He doesn’t eat or sleep, but this is treated as like a weird annoying thing. Like, he stays up all night doing pull ups cause he’s bored. He’s not even playing guitar on rooftops.
Also, they’ve given him Dead Zone-like powers to psychically pick up vibes when touching objects (but only when it gives plot information—he has none of the stuff in the Dead Zone TV show where this can be an inconvenient or debilitating power to have). The crow also functions kind of like Munin—it flies around and he can see what it’s seeing. This gives him a way to find out about the plot of the episodes. But despite having that, most of the time he gets involved because they’re doing the very nineties thing of having a main character who has someone who is “like a brother to me” that is involved in the plot and then we never see again. Like, you could have just had Munin tell him what he needed to superpower, but instead it’s always like friends of friends who are getting into trouble.
7. The characterization in general. The movie doesn’t give us much to go on—it is basically an excuse for a lot of violent fight scenes—but he is basically a vengeance spirit that sometimes remembers he was once a man. He seems genuinely, genuinely traumatized by his murder and witnessing the rape and murder of his girlfriend. And I like the theory my friends came up watching it—if you see him, you lose a sanity point. Even for Sarah and Sgt. Albrecht, seeing him kind of fucks them up a bit. I keep going back to the scene where he kills Funboy. In that scene, from Darla’s perspective, a crackhead just walked in, shot her boyfriend, and then broke down the door of the bathroom she’s hiding in. He is TERRIFYING. We metatextually know he’s a “good” guy (or at least a guy whose violence is directed only at specific people), but no one else in the film has any reason to think that and they all react accordingly.
In the show? He is a dude. Like, he comes back and just IS Eric Draven and sometimes he has facepaint. He definitely wants to be reunited with Shelly, but he doesn’t seem particularly traumatized by the whole murder thing, and he doesn’t seem to know why he came back, what his set of powers are, or what he’s supposed to be doing. He mostly just wants to go back to his regular life. There’s an episode where Sgt. Albrecht sees him come back to life, and he says, “Hey, it’s weird for me too.” That’s…holy shit is that just a totally different thing than the origination of this character. It’s a jarring juxtaposition to have this ultra-goth emo boy character be like, hey, this is weird!
8. For someone who came back from the dead, Eric Draven doesn’t seem to have any problem going back to his regular life. In the first episode, Sgt. Albrecht is like hey! You’re Eric Draven! Somebody else must have been murdered last year, and you’re my prime suspect! And then arrests him. Which seems like a totally legit interpretation. But then they find video of the murder, so that gets dropped, and then Albrecht doesn’t seem too hung up on who this guy is?
Draven also just keeps going up to people who used to know him and being like, hi! I’m Eric Draven! I came back from the dead! Like, he goes up to his former band and tells them to stop playing one of the songs he wrote, and they’re like, you are a sick fuck who is pretending to be our murdered friend and you should stop. And he’s just like, no, I’m Eric Draven back from the dead! And then he gets a job as a bouncer at that club and we never hear from the band ever again.
Or, he starts squatting in his former apartment and the landlord comes in and is like who the fuck are you, and he says that he was in witness protection and so was Shelly and the whole murder was faked. And the landlord’s like, why are you back then, and he says he got homesick. Then the landlord’s like, yeah, whatever, just pay your rent.
My favorite, my FAVORITE, is that he goes to his record company and tells them to pull the song he didn’t want his band performing, and says, yes, I wrote it, I am dead guy Eric Draven. And the record producer is like HOLY SHIT THIS IS AWESOME. Your band is called Hangman’s Joke! Here’s what we’re going to do—we’re going to put you on tour as this murder victim who came back from the dead and you should stay in character all the time and we will make so much money. And then we never see that guy again.
Like, they have all these moments of people being like, it is impossible for you to be here, but then they just…drop all of it? Like, it could be a source of some really interesting plot lines. What I find baffling is that it would be so easy for him to pretend to be someone else and hide that he’s the Crow, and instead he’s like Hi I’m Eric Draven dead guy and I can morph into this superhero—and nobody seems to care? Like, there’s an episode where the police station gets reports that this crazy guy stood in front of a prisoner transport and got hit then after being run over got up and beat up the police officers, and Sgt. Albrecht is like—dammit Eric!
Like, the fact that he’s the Crow has so little impact on the storyline of most episodes that there’s one where Albrecht is kidnapped and taken to an abandoned island for a little Most Dangerous Game. And Eric shows up, and at one point is like, you know, I could just walk towards those guys with guns and take them out, and Albrecht is like, no, don’t do that, and then they don’t do that. For another half hour, til that is in fact how they defeat the bad guys, but we had to play out the rest of the episode as if they didn’t have AN IMMORTAL CHARACTER cause there wouldn’t be an episode otherwise.
I’m only 6 episodes in, and I know that this series ends on a cliffhanger, but oh man, it is such peak nineties television. The sad thing is I know that The Crow has had a huge and obsessive fandom over the years, but not anywhere I can find, and certainly not on AO3.