MARVEL COMICS: Mort The Dead Teenager

MARVEL COMICS IN THE MEDIA

MARVEL UNIVERSE IN THE MEDIA

WHAT WE KNOW:
Of all the characters and titles Marvel have at their disposal, it’s hard to believe that this one – Mort the Dead Teenager – almost bagged himself a movie, but the fact is he very nearly did.

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If you’re not familiar with this extremely obscure and rarely used Marvel character, he was created by Larry Hama and Gary Hallgren and had his own miniseries in 1993. The premise was that Mort – a teenager – had died in a car crash, met the Grim Reaper’s son and headed back to Earth in order to win a girl. This of course had hilarious – if not somewhat morbid – consequences, usually involving Mort being typically ghostly or utilising his new-found ability to take his head off whenever he so wished.

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Although it’s certainly a minor title, the stars attached to the movie were far from being minor. It was on the verge of being produced by Quentin Tarantino and it would have starred Elijah Wood and Jessica Simpson had it been made in 2002 as expected (it’s probably for the best that it wasn’t, given that a decapitated teenager in this day and age probably isn’t the most suitable movie premise).

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Even more bizarrely than the Tarantino link, Steven Spielberg and Robert Zemeckis actually had major interest in Mort the Dead Teenager several years before 2002, but didn’t end up doing anything with it.