S01E01 - You Never Forget Your First

Join Professor Krebs as he takes you on a nostalgic journey through the 1983 sci-fi fantasy film 'Krull.' In this podcast, Krebs reminisces about his first encounter with the film as a child and explores its lasting impact on his life and creative endeavors. Despite being a box office flop, 'Krull' remains a beloved gem for a niche audience. Krebs delves into the film's rich mythology, unique characters, and groundbreaking special effects, while sharing fan theories and personal anecdotes. This episode features interviews with original cast and crew members and aims to reignite appreciation for this underappreciated cinematic masterpiece.

Transcript

Professor Krebs: 0:00

At the risk of sounding tropeish, I have to agree with the sentiment that you never forget your first. I still remember quite clearly the very first time I saw the film. I was about four and a half years old. It was about August or so of 1983. And my mother a single mother at that time, a divorcee, she took me, my brother and my sister to the movies quite frequently as an activity that we would do together. And on this particular day, she took us to see a double feature, two films for the price of one, or at least one discounted ticket. And what we got to see, Was a comedy film called strange brew and I remember being in the theater and strange brew comes on and it's the McKenzie brothers. And I was super into the idea of how funny they were. But in truth, looking back on it, I really didn't understand most of the comedy. I understood some of it, just not very much. And I also remember during that film. falling asleep. But I woke up toward the end of the film. I remember that there was this big hockey game at the end. And, and I remember that only because the goalie of the opposing team ended up making an allusion to Darth Vader, you know, the whole breathing in the mask and, uh, he was wearing black and, and that sort of thing. And of course the good guys win and they prevail and they save the day and, and the movie ends. In between the movies. There's often a short intermission. It allows the projectionist to change the reels over to the next film, but it also allows people to go use the restroom and grab snacks and things like that. And sure enough, we did exactly that. And then we went back into the theater and then the lights went low and then the screen opened up and there was the Columbia Pictures emblem and the Immaculate Chorus opens to James Horner's theme and there's space laid out in front of us. Now, as a kid, I loved sci fi and fantasy. I still do. And so when I saw that starscape, I was immediately interested. And then from the right side of the theater, you could hear, and there was this strange object that crossed past the camera and went into the deep field of space and then slowly came back on the left side and then it was in the back and we were watching us. What is that? What what is that thing? And then it comes Across the front and there is the title screen Krull now looking back on it I honestly can't tell you if I knew what Krull was I don't remember seeing a trailer on television. I don't remember seeing commercials. Maybe I saw the name of the movie listed in the newspaper, but I really didn't know what to expect, but there was this beautiful five bladed bejeweled weapon that had just streaked across space and time and left the title on the screen. And I remember at my incredibly enthusiastic four and a half years of age, sitting upright in my seat and thinking, Oh yeah, I'm into this. Now, those weren't my exact words. I was just excited. I stayed awake for the entire film. I did not fall asleep once. I was in it for everything. I remember the first slayer I saw killed. I remember the first headworm that entered the tiled floor of the castle. I remember the first time that I saw Colwyn dismount from his horse. I remember the first time I saw Princess Lyssa in her golden dress. I remember the first time That I saw two kings arguing. I remember the first time I saw a wedding ceremony that was completely alien to me. The first time I saw fire enter water and be retrieved back again. I remember the first time I saw a princess hold flames in her hand and offer them to her prince. I remember the first time that a wedding was interrupted by. Alien invaders, the first time I saw lasers projected from the base of swords, the first time that I saw a prince fall after the death of his father, and most everyone who was gathered at the castle that day, I remember seeing the hero tumble down the stairs and lay there still as death. And I remember the first time I saw that prince resurrected by an old man from the mountains. The first time that they embarked on a journey to find a mythical weapon, something that was only legend. The first time I saw a prince put his hand into hot magma and retrieve the weapon, and so on, and so on, and so on. Krull, for me, at that age, was a cavalcade of firsts. And it stuck with me all these years later for over four decades, this film has remained precious in my heart and in my mind. It has informed the way that I think of stories. It has shaped my imagination, the way that I play with toys as a kid, the way that I write scripts and direct independent films now, and when I was a young adult and when I was all, all of this imagination that I've used over the last four decades has been incredibly impacted by what I saw that night on that screen. Now, I loved that film as a kid and I remember getting it on VHS as soon as I could. I remember sharing it with my friends. I remember talking to my friends about it. But as is the case in life, other things become shiny and new, other things become interesting, other things become important. And so that movie just went on the shelf with all my other VHS tapes with my Ghostbusters and my Star Wars and my Star Trek and, and Dune and myriad other titles that I loved growing up. And sure, I would share it with my friends and talk with them about it. But to be honest, as I look back on it, especially in my teenage years, it wasn't a film I talked about very often, not because of any sort of sense of shame or, or forgetfulness, but because I took it for granted. I took for granted that this film had been seen by everybody almost as much as, you know, say, Star Wars or Star Trek, I took for granted that this film was largely appreciated that this film was just sort of common knowledge. And so I didn't think to talk about it because it just wasn't something that I needed to ask about or become curious about, it was just something I took for granted that everyone knew about, generally speaking. As I got older, as I got into like my late teen years and such, I started asking people about this film, or they would say,"What's one of your favorite movies?" And occasionally, I would say, Krull. I had other answers that were more common, but every once in a while I would say,"Oh, have you seen Krull? I love that movie." And what became apparent to me slowly over a period of years was that this film was not quite as common as I thought it was. You see, this film was amazing to me in my youth. And why wouldn't it have been? It was made in 1982, released in 1983. At that time, it had a budget of 30 million, which in 1980s money is not small. That was a huge budget for such an endeavor. It was directed by Peter Yates, a very successful director by that point in time. The producer was Ron Silverman, also an incredibly successful name in the industry. You had James Horner doing the music. He had just finished doing Wrath of Khan for the Star Trek series of films. You had Nick Maile, who had just come off of doing Yoda special effects for Return of the Jedi, for heaven's sake. And the cast. Oh my word. The cast was replete with classically trained and highly successful British actors. You had Freddie Jones chief among them as Ynyr. You had Alan Armstrong as Torquil, leader of the bandits. You had a very young Liam Neeson and Robbie Coltrane who would go on to be quite successful in their own distinct careers for the next few decades. You had the resplendent and effervescent Lysette Anthony, who was given the distinction of having the quintessential face of the eighties. She was the icon of the eighties in terms of actresses in her day. Then you had this young up and comer from America who had just had a very successful miniseries named Ken Marshall to play the Prince. This cast had other names that were incredibly famous, especially in England, David Battley and Bernard Bresslaw and John Welsh as the Emerald Seer. You had an incredible array of actors, both famous then and famous now, all throughout this cast. Imagine that, an incredible budget with a successful director, an up and coming golden boy composer, a crew that knew exactly what they were doing, especially in the special effects department, actors classically trained and highly successful, and then nobody watched it. The film would go on to be a box office bomb by all mathematical definitions. Now it honestly depends on what source you go to, to get these numbers, but the budget for the film was anywhere between about 30 and 40 million dollars, but it only grossed about 16. 9 million dollars worldwide. That's roughly 42 and a half percent of the budget. The film did not break even. It lost quite a bit of money for the studio and it was hailed as a flop and a failure. But when I was four and a half, I didn't know this. When I was 13, I didn't know this. When I was 20, I didn't know this. None of this came to light until I started talking to more people about the film and it was quite Eye opening to me. Over the last decade and a half, I have found myself compelled to bring this film back into the zeitgeist in some form, in some manner. I had the opportunity to be a cohost on another podcast, Dungeon Crawlers Radio. And during that time, quite organically, actually, I started developing this stick. Where every time we interviewed a new guest, one that I personally had never interviewed before, I introduced this thing called the lightning round where I would ask them a number of softball questions, but what made it a shtick was that I would always end on the question,"What is your stance on the 1983 sci-fi fantasy film, Krull?" And this was often a question out of left field for many of them. As I ask people whether they have seen the film, I end up encountering one of three groups. I either encounter people who have never heard of this film to begin with. I have encountered people who have heard of this film and despise it much to my chagrin and shock. And then, there is that precious minority who have both seen the film and love it. As someone who loved the film from the moment that I saw it, granted, I was only four and a half, but I have watched it dozens, if not over a hundred times since. And that is not an exaggeration. As someone who has seen the film that many times, I am still shocked to this day that people find it anywhere between campy and despisable, rather than enjoyable and precious. Something to be loved, something to be looked at, dissected, and appreciated in all of its glory, both perfection and flaw. As I did some digging around, historically and currently, for reviews on Krull, I found the same thread over and over and over again. I found that people regarded it as 80s sword and sorcery campiness, anywhere between sort of nostalgic fun and just downright pathetic mediocrity. Again, it hurts me to say those words. I remember coming across the initial review of the film from a major newspaper in 1983 and it was a bitter and scathing recollection of what this one moviegoer saw when she previewed the film. The glaive was incredibly minimized and diminished. all of it was insultingly reviewed as a poor and pathetic attempt at being just as relevant as Star Wars. Which is one of the number one criticisms of the film. And riding on the coattails of Star Wars in terms of what was popular in the theater at the time, it's no surprise that people often refer to it as the Star Wars clone, or at least an attempt at one. Over and over. I find the same types of reviews. It's silly. It's campy. It's a great piece of cheesy 80s nostalgia. All of those things tend to be common in the reviews. But what I have not found, or at least not very common, are those reviews that extol its virtues and its depth and its opportunity for storytelling. And to be honest with you, I myself had to come to an appreciation for the film. I always loved it, but I could not always verbalize why. Approximately eight years or so ago, when I was still a college professor, I was having lunch with my buddy, Connor, who had come into town. He is also a filmmaker and he and I love talking about the industry and we love talking about filmmaking and we have our own little fandoms that we geek out about. And one of them that we share is Krull, which actually surprised me when I discovered that he loved the film one, because at that point I had already come to grips with the reality that not everybody who saw the film loved it. And fewer people had seen the film than I expected. And two, he is significantly younger than me by more than a decade, if I remember correctly. So to have someone who is that much, my junior enjoy this film from when I was a child, was quite a surprise to me, but he and I sat down to sushi dinner and as we were eating, we were just bringing up topics organically. And I remember as we were talking about Krull and we were just, we were just quoting things at each other and just sort of talking about the film, all of a sudden we started asking questions. One of them was, wait a minute, wait a minute. In the very beginning of the film, Ynyr gave us a prophecy. Now where did that prophecy come from? He doesn't really talk about that. Yeah. He's a seer. Okay. Maybe that's where it came from, but we hear this prophecy now, hang on a second in the prophecy it says, and then we started breaking it down into its constituent parts. And lo and behold, it started giving us answers to questions we had had that we thought might be loopholes or, or sort of missing story bits. It ends up, it was in the film the whole time and we just hadn't spotted it. But then it didn't stop with just the prophecy. It continued on. He came out of the Granite Mountains, and later on, Rell, the Cyclops, would say,"When the Old One had come down from the Granite Mountains, I knew the time had come." And so that means that he had a certain amount of foreknowledge. We also discover from Titch's commentary that Rell often visited the Emerald Seer, and other than that, he was a rather quiet Cyclops. We learn from Ynyr that the Cyclops are solitary, sad creatures, and then we learn why. And then we hear the story about the Cyclops, but wait a minute. Why did the Beast make a deal with the Cyclopean people in the first place? How did, how did they ever get to that point? And then we started talking some more. Wait a minute, what about the headworms? What, they go into the ground? What's that about? How are they able to do that? And where are they going? Wait a minute, if those headworms bail out of the body of the Slayer, what's the rest of the Slayer even made of? And then we start talking about, wait a minute, the princess is the only one who can give the flame to Colwyn. How is she able to carry this flame? How is Colwyn able to put his arm into the lava? And we went on and on and on, and not in a manner of dissecting the film and tearing it down, but rather in an attitude of investigation, of discovery, of exploration of this world. From those conversations, we started forming fan theories. We started coming up with the answers to our own questions. Some of which we filled in with our best guess, and some have absolutely added value to and changed the color of this film in my mind forever. Additionally, as the years would go on, I would talk to my siblings, the ones I saw the film with first, who also loved the film. I would ask them the same questions. I would pass by them the same fan theories. I would start asking them what they thought about a particular scene or a given quote or some specific character and their backstory. At one point in time, my siblings and I were obliged to take a road trip together back to California to handle some family business. This put us in a car for several hours, but during that time we had this conversation about Krull and all three of us became enthusiastic and started spouting out all sorts of thoughts and questions and theories. And then after spending a few years as a co host on another podcast, I came up with this idea that this film deserved more time. It deserved more space. It deserved more presence in the zeitgeist. And I thought to myself, Yeah, I can make a podcast about that. And when I've pitched this idea to others that I know, often I get the challenging question,"How much material can you make out of that one film?" But over the last year alone, I have recorded over 11 hours of conversation with my siblings, discussing the world, the characters, the story, specific quotes, backstories of those characters, the actors involved, the making of the film. Within the last year, I organized a charity event that put the film back on the big screen, possibly for the first time in the last 40 years. I have slowly discovered new pieces of memorabilia that I didn't know were even out there to begin with. I have accumulated small bits of Krull history along the way. I have become connected with members of the cast and crew, and even some of their family who have given me insights as to how the film was made and what obstacles they faced. I have spoken to people who were there when it was released. I have spoken to people who weren't even born when it was released. And every time a new and exciting conversation is formed. I want to talk to everyone I can about this film, not just the people who love it. Yes, them too, but also the people who hate this film. I want to talk about what makes this film so beautiful, special, and unique, as well as why it failed at a time when arguably it should have succeeded hand over fist. And I want to share all of it with you. Why this show? Because this film is greater than the sum of its parts. It is one of the most fantastic and wonderful sci fi fantasy stories ever told. And it is completely and utterly underappreciated by the cinematic going audience at large. This podcast is my love letter to Krull and its fandom. During this show. What can you expect? Well, we have a number of interviews coming up, including with some of the cast and those involved with the making of the film. Interviews will also include intriguing individuals both in and out of the industry who have formed their own opinion of this film, and we will discuss at depth why it is that they love or hate this incredible piece of cinematic history. There will be episodes dedicated to the making of the film and its history in cinema, to the mythos and the world building, to deep dives into characters and backstory, to fan theories, to quotes and statements made by the actors and the crew involved, interviews with some of those very same individuals and the gathering of various and disparate opinions across the gamut. And as we take this journey together, I hope the experience is one that is lightyears beyond your imagination. I am your host, professor Krebs, and this. This is the ultimate podcast.