SyFy Superhero Series Destroyed A 70 Year Old Franchise Now Can’t Be Streamed Anywhere
For some unexplained reason, the success of Batman in 1989 kicked off a wave of retro superhero movies with The Rocketeer, The Shadow, Dick Tracy, and finally, The Phantom. Starring Billy Zane as The Ghost Who Walks, it was a complete flop that has since become a cult classic. In 2009, SyFy decided that the tiniest amount of critical revaluation was enough to greenlight a backdoor pilot for an ongoing The Phantom series. Instead of embracing the classic 1930s design as the Zane film did, this new series updated The Phantom for the modern era by embracing, what else in 2009, parkour.
A New EXTREME Phantom
General Hospital star Ryan Carnes put on the new EXTREME crimefighting suit as Kit Walker, the 22nd Phantom, recruited by Bpaa Thap in the island nation of Bangalla to slam evil. You might have noticed already why The Phantom didn’t catch on. SInce it was a backdoor pilot disguised as a miniseries it spends most of the runtime on world-building, including the Singh Brotherhood, which is The Phantom’s traditional villain, and their evil plan to brainwash people using cable tv set boxes.
The villain’s master plan has aged worse than Dominic Toretto stealing TVs in the original The Fast and The Furious. And yet, even that has aged better than the EXTREME parkour and motorcycling stunts of Kit Walker’s Phantom. It was a good attempt to update the old skintight purple suit, but switching to a design with a short shelf life means by the time the miniseries aired, it already looked ridiculous.
No One Liked The Redesign
The Phantom revival series crashed and burned when it aired and was never picked up to be a full series. Despite the parkour and EXTREME style, the miniseries attempt to update the classic hero and at least tried to do something different. Sure, they left behind everything that fans loved about the 1996 film and fans of the classic hero were incredibly disappointed by the “<a href="https://comicvibe.com/marvel-studios-releases-its-first-post/” title=”Marvel Studios Releases Its First Post”>Marvel 2099” redesign, but they tried. And that counts, right?
The backdoor pilot tells a complete story from start to finish and sets up future conflicts between The Phantom and The Singh Brotherhood that almost 20 years later, we’ll never get to see. To say that the reaction to The Phantom’s 2009 tv movie was disastrous would imply anyone watched it in the first place. By then, superhero fans had experienced Iron Manand the era of cheap superhero television was over.
Syfy Has Buried The Phantom 2009
Even today, fans of The Phantom will gush over the Billy Zane box office flop while warning newcomers to the Ghost Who Walks fandom that the SyFy series pilot can easily be missed. Marvel and DC are struggling to get their B-list stars noticed in theaters, nevermind a pulp comic hero from the 1930s who never broke into mainstream pop culture. The purple bodysuit is a tough sell.
The 2009 SyFy television movie/backdoor series pilot has been lost to the digital ether. It’s not streaming on any platform, but it did receive a DVD/Blu-Ray release that can be found dirt cheap from second-hand retailers.
The far superior 1996 Billy Zane movie The Phantomis streaming free on Tubi
