THE SPIRIT (1987)

“I thought you were a pervert” -- “No ma'am, I’m a crimefighter” 

In 1987, the ABC television network succumbed to a powerful wave of popular pressure from the nerd community. Comic fans had gotten wind of the existence of a live-action adaptation of Will Eisner’s The Spirit, filmed as a pilot for a possible series and subsequently shelved. The finished project was reportedly a dud, but fan-sponsored petitions and letter-writing campaigns nonetheless begged for a taste.

In response to the pleas of countless fervid aficionados, ABC replied, in their way: “Be careful what you wish for.”

The Spirit, shirtless, in a big cake.

Shown once on July 31, 1987, and then returned to its resting place, the actual pilot is a mixed bag. Sporting a script from celebrated action film scribe Stephen E. DeSouza, and relying heavily on the Kitchen Sink Spirit collections for its aesthetic and atmosphere, the finished product is surprisingly well-informed not only about the Spirit himself, but about Eisner’s narrative techniques and tropes of the strip. 

There’s plenty of pouring rain, there’s mounds of moody shadows, and in his first depicted fight, police officer Denny Colt – played by former “Flash Gordon” Sam Jones – gets up with the Spirit’s trademark fat lip and a puffed-up cheek. A torture sequence near the end of the film could have been clipped directly from Eisner’s most lurid compositions. 

To wit.

At the same time, while the Eighties were infamous for the preponderance of cocaine in the film and television industries, the set drug of choice on this project may have been prozac. The production stumbles with uneven pacing, the beats fizzle, there are laughs but they tend to hang in the air, and it just can’t seem to wake up. 

Streaming services (and a limited DVD release) have given the notorious adaptation a second life, making it available for viewers for the first time since its singular broadcast. Here’s what you can expect: 

The Spirit begins, like many things in life, with a killing in rural Oregon. Police officer Denny Colt (Sam Jones) arrives in Central City to investigate the murder of his mentor, veteran cop turned true crime author William Sevrin (Phillip Baker Hall). 

There, he’s ferociously flirted with by a scintillating Ellen Dolan (Nana Visitor), lectured by the blustering Commissioner (Garry Walberg), and nearly-murdered by a henchman secretly in the employ of the notorious P’Gell, played by Laura Robinson who, according to her biography on IMDB anyway, invented the board game Balderdash. 

Ebony White is replaced on the original cast by a character named “Eubie,” played as a good-hearted and quick-witted street kid by Boomer Robinson, so you can relax. 

Eubie razzes the commish.

Although, while the more egregious elements of Ebony White’s notorious caricature are thankfully set aside, it is worth mentioning that Eubie is portrayed as a cheap hustler, and also on two different occasions he gets racially profiled – by the good guys no less. 

Still, it’s Eubie who happens to be in Wildwood Cemetery when Denny Colt – shot, drowned, and believed dead after crossing one of P’Gell’s flunkies – stumbles ashore, alive! 

Eubie helps the healing hero set up shop in a surprisingly spacious tomb on site, which they promptly decorate like a TGIFridays. From this vantage point, they plot a war against crime, and even get to witness Denny’s own funeral. Ellen Dolan delivers a strangely horny eulogy.

In fact. everything Ellen Dolan does is strangely horny.

Strategizing, Denny decides to pursue justice against his would-be killers in disguise as The Spirit! This is celebrated with an energetic montage! 

Denny Colt’s tombstone explodes! The Spirit is in silhouette! He’s knocking dudes left and right! There are newspapers everywhere, they come spinning right atcha, and all the headlines are like “The Spirit Fucks, He’s Rad, YEAH!” 

It’s frenetic, it’s visually dynamic, and the theme song is playing the whole time, and it should have been great but now is when I mention that the theme song could lullaby the fussiest baby in history headfirst into slumberland. It could have a little more “oomph,” is how I mean. Picture the theme for Entertainment Magazine, on quaaludes. 

They had to print so many fake newspapers for this scene.

The Spirit quickly becomes the hero of Central City and the bane of P’Gell and her partner (played by Niles from the Nanny) in an art forgery scheme of enormous proportions. 

The climax comes when P’Gell and her hunky henchmen set in motion a plan to destroy the evidence of their extensive forgeries by blowing up the whole Central City Museum – with an all-ages charity event going on inside!

So that’s the Spirit – now, what exactly was wrong with it? 

The show's propensity for bruises and blood was allegedly a turnoff for ABC

Much of the blame is typically laid at the feet of Sam Jones, a serviceable-but-stiff leading man who was reportedly forced on the production. It’s true that the role would’ve truly sung under someone like Bruce Willis, or Bruce Campbell – hell, why not Bruce Vilanch! – but they still coulda done a lot worse. Jones comes alive in the action sequences, he’s not unfunny, and he seems perfectly happy to get his shirt off now and again, which is important for the whole Moonlighting-esque quality of the production.

Also, Jones sports a kind of physique you simply don’t see on television much anymore. He’s got a reasonable amount of body hair and he’s pretty well defined, but not in the fashion of modern male action heroes, where they're so loaded with roids and water pills that they look like a fire hydrant. 

Conversely, there’s nothing wrong with Nana Visitor in the role of Ellen Dolan. 

Ellen Dolan, imagining all of the coitus interruptus that awaits her.

As the Spirit’s love interest, she’s flirty, funny, charismatic, and has her engine running for the show’s entire one hundred and nine minutes. 

Someone has to provide the will-they-won’t-they intrigue of your average romantic comedy, after all, and it’s Ellen Dolan’s hot tub hangouts, scandalously ripped skirts, and platter-sized bedroom eyes that do most of the heavy lifting. It’s only a shame she’s largely doing it all in an empty room to a brick wall.

In The Spirit's defense, sex in this era of television was a minefield. 

Smack in the middle of the Reagan Years, in the full flush of the AIDS epidemic, perfectly normal levels of televised spice were handled with a chaste and almost apologetic approach. Visitor’s flawless “I’m tryna FUCK here” expression, repeatedly employed during assorted interrupted entanglements with the show’s pulchritudinous protagonist, is a sexual revolution of its own.

Plus, whatever this is.

The real problem with ABC’s The Spirit might be that network television in the late eighties was simply inimical to Will Eisner’s world of bathos, bondage, bruises and black ink. 

Whenever the show wasn’t intentionally evoking Eisnerian tableaus, it defaulted to unremarkable broadcast television. When there weren’t shadows, there was only washed-out set lighting. Step out of the show’s imaginatively recreated Wildwood Cemetery and find yourself at any number of bland, generic shooting locations around Los Angeles. 

Basically, whenever the show wasn’t trying very hard to emulate The Spirit’s source material, it became nothing. It was like getting off a ride at Disneyland and suddenly finding yourself in an empty conference room at the airport Radisson. That’s no way to get a series off the ground.

"Forget it, Ellen -- it's Wildwood."

Footnote:

It is worth giving The Spirit one last accolade – it certainly preceded some other things. Specifically, the show predates Batman (1989) by a few years, but captures that same ambiguous sense of era, seeming to be both contemporary and set in the 1940s at the same time. Even more specifically, DeSouza’s script had the main baddie escape via ambulance, which he later repurposed in Die Hard!