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by L. Wayne Hicks
The Beatles
had successfully made the transition from recording studio to silver screen,
so why couldn't Kiss similarly make its mark in a made-for-TV movie? If
there was ever a band destined for theatrics, it was Kiss, with its lineup
of four rockers determined to draw attention to themselves. Kiss
Meets the Phantom of the Park aired Oct. 28, 1978, on NBC, a two-hour
movie that proved two things:
Marvel Comics was the first to realize the superhero-like qualities of Kiss and included the band in back-to-back of issues of Howard the Duck's comic book in the summer 1977 and then gave them their own glossy comic later that year.
"When we were asked to do Kiss Meets the Phantom, it was pretty much sold to us as Hard Day's Night meets Star Wars," Stanley said during the two-hour VH1 program Kiss Behind the Makeup, which aired in 2001. "What it turned out to be was anything but that."
Hanna-Barbera Productions, best known for making Scooby-Doo, Yogi Bear and other cartoons, approached Kiss about appearing in a movie to fulfill its obligation to make movies for NBC. The idea was to make Kiss appear larger than life - the opening credits did just that, with the guys superimposed over the amusement park and appearing to loom large over the rides. But rather than play to their strengths - music - the script forced them into the unfamiliar role of actors. Only a few songs are even in the movie, including an acoustic version of “Beth." A soundtrack was never released, despite plans to do so, and the only new song to appear is “Rip and Destroy," a rewritten version of “Hotter than Hell." If Simmons was happy with the script, Frehley wasn't. Almost all of his lines were him sounding like a parrot. The scriptwriters - Jan Michael Sherman and Don Buday - had hung around with the band before going to work, to get a feel for how they spoke. But Frehley wasn't in a talkative mood those days.
The script drew its inspiration from the Marvel Comics treatment of the band as superheroes, which gave each with a unique talisman that is the source of their powers.
The first draft of the script noted that Frehley "is monosyllabic and super-friendly. Communicating largely through gestures and sounds, Ace might be best described as an other-galactic Harpo Marx."
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PART TWO: |
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