Drawn Or Alive

Show #7: The Super Mario Bros. Movie VS Super Mario Bros: The Movie

Your plucky podcasters speedrun a show together just in time for the arrival of a new animated entry in the Mario media multiverse, and how those times have changed! Illumination's 2023 effort seemed to deliver on all fervent fan desires, leaving 1993's somewhat maligned live-action flop flushed down the toilet of history, right? Three decades is a relative eternity in pop culture, in which attitudes can evolve and tastes can mature, beset all the while by the forces of nostalgia and franchise fatigue. Pratt & Day may be the new young hotshots in town but Hoskins & Leguizamo may yet have the edge of experience on them. Which will prevail as we plumb the depths of production hell, product placement and the year in dinosaur movies. Trust the fun-guys on this one!

Show #6: Dennis & Gnasher (1996) VS The Show (2020)

Podcast pal Brian Smith, a Drawn Or Alive OG contributor, offers his expertise on British geography and comics as two funnybook legends of wildly different calibers find unlikely common ground. For 75 years Dennis The Menace has tormented twerps and pestered parents from the pages of The Beano. Almost as old but just as mischievous stands chaos wizard and part-time comics writer Alan Moore, paying subtle tribute to the tousle-haired terror in his northern noir feature The Show. Dennis has assumed many forms and guises across the decade, though how will his quintessential first TV series outing fare against the strange denizens of Northampton's underworld? We measure the menacing merits of each, before we succumb to the soothing sounds of the greatest song ever commissioned by a Middle England regional development authority!

Show #5: Hellboy - Sword Of Storms VS Hellboy (2004)

After a brief bout of eternal damnation superhero films were being summoned back from the abyss at the turn of the millennium, still subject to the whims of cinema's dark masters before succumbing to franchise-building orthodoxy later that decade. From these fires arose Hellboy, Mike Mignola's demonic detective brought to life by Guillermo Del Toro's macabre imagination and a towering performance from Ron Perlman. But would their charms extend to the realm of animation? A brace of cartoon tie-ins accompanied the big screen efforts, exploring the layers of Hellboy's comic origins, and with the cast of the well-received movies on hand it seemed a destined surefire hit. We peruse the fine print of this devil's bargain, beset by C-suite shenanigans and first film fumbles, to conclusively separate the men from the monsters.

Show #4: Battle Angel Alita VS Alita: Battle Angel

A new year but the same old tricks, going two-in-a-row on profligate projects from cinema luminaries that took years to emerge. This also has us breaking the seal on the imposing vault of live-action adaptations of Japanese anime with one of its most storied sagas. Two decades sitting on the film rights to Yukito Kishiro's cyborg epic was enough time for mariner and part-time director James Cameron to grow weary of the prospect, enlisting Robert Rodriguez to assemble the spare parts into functional form. Amongst the dreary scrapheap of Western anime remakes how does this one compare with the perfectly enjoyable 1993 OVA from which it so liberally borrows? We steel ourselves for the task, with Niall on hand to expound on the fantastic tableaus from the manga which may grace the big screen any century now!

Show #3: The Dick Tracy Animated Canon VS Dick Tracy (1990)

Veteran of the force Joseph Wade responds to our call for backup in taking down the notorious criminal enterprise comprised of the many screen incarnations of yellow-coated copper Dick Tracy! For a newspaper comic strip Ol' Dick has quite the heinous rap sheet on the animated side outside of a Daffy Duck short. The live-action cohort exists in the shadow of Warren Beatty's hubristic effort, celebrating its 25th anniversary of biting on the style of Tim Burton's 1989 Batman film. Is there a place in this world anymore for an old-fashioned two-fisted dick and his gallery of gruesome goons? Our investigations uncover a sordid saga of death, money and the bizarre sex games of showbiz royalty, not to mention Joe solving the mystery of a cartoon cameo that's dogged him for years!