I'm reasonably sure I've seen this film, though there really is a good chance that I haven't. I have vague impressions of it, though I would only have been 7 when it came out.
Maybe I haven't seen this film.
I'd really like to, though, because this was a pretty great story. While I'm concerned that the special effects may not have aged particularly well, the tale that's told is pretty solid. There's lots of cool twists, some very mythic stuff going on, especially the bits that touch on Christianity. It's a story that really feels like it could have happened in our world. Though I can't really say why without spoiling one of the coolest parts, IMHO, of the story.
Apprentice wizard Galen has to face off against the last dragon. That's all I'll say. It sounds like a pretty standard fantasy story, but, as I mentioned, there's neat twists that definitely set it apart from the usual bunch. Though I grew up on a pretty steady diet of Dragonlance in my early teens, I've never really been a huge fan of the genre. Given my penchant for Dungeons & Dragons, that's a bit odd, but I think I've always taken from superheroes the same sort of escapism that fantasy brings. We geeks, we sometimes focus on one genre to the virtual exclusion of all others. So it's worth noting, for me at least, when a fantasy story does resonate. This one did.
Denny O'Neil adapts the screenplay, and Marie Severin and John Tartaglione handle the art. One of my planned theme weeks will feature Ms. Severin and a couple of other female artists from the early days of Marvel. The likenesses to the cast of the film are well done. I can't imagine having to draw a story in which you had an actual real-life original that could be compared to your work on pretty much every page.
The back half of the magazine is given over to "making of" features. There is, of course, one that focusses on the creation of Vermithrax Perjorative ("The Worm of Thrace Which Makes Things Worse") - the titular dragon. One particular part of that article jumped out at me in the first description in the article: "...it is the last of the great dragons, a four-hundred year old androgyne, a fire-breathing monstrosity" (emphasis mine). There's no other mention of this in the entire magazine, but I find the idea that the dragon is non-binary very interesting. On the one hand, the creature is squarely conceived as an evil force outside of nature, contrary to humanity and it's perceived binary of male/female. From this perspective, the dragon represents something contrary to Christian binary worldview. On the other hand, Christianity is not well-presented in this story, particularly, and even the ending hints at a hidden way of perceiving magic within the Christian framework that comes to dominate the world. But the dragon is still (SPOILER in case you missed the title of the comic!) slain, and the magic, and androgyny, they represented is hidden. I'm perhaps making too much of this, but I'm fascinated by the appearance of gender identities that are becoming more widely recognized in older works of literature.It tells us a lot about cultural attitudes toward such things through history.
(Of course I've just realized that the main female lead in the story begins in drag, so as to avoid the lottery of maidens sacrificed to the dragon, but "comes out" partway through the story. Maybe I need to think more about this one.)
"You can't stop me. After all, I've been a man longer than you have."
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