Bonus Jonas! Presenting a few choice quotes from “Howard The Duck,” as curated by Alex Kirschenbaum and ENS (click here for our ferocious shredding of George Lucas’s anti-classic):
- “No one laughs at a master of quack-fu.” Alex: Here’s the thing, though: what Howard did next was not some new water fowl-specific martial art called “quack-fu.” It was just kung-fu. Howard is doing kung-fu and calling it something else.
- “How am I going to explain a manhunt for a duck?” “It’s a duck hunt.” Emily: Wow, just wow.
- “I’m a bad duck.” Alex: An unprompted Howard aside, in response to nothing.
- “Something’s growing inside me. It’s replicating and superseding all my internal organs!” Emily: This is Jeffrey Jones frantically, awkwardly explaining the sensation of the Dark Overlord taking over his body and turning him into *stagey croak voice* “something else!”
- “Every schoolduck knows this stuff.” Alex: Replacing a word in a common phrase with “duck” is funny to absolutely no one.
- “He stuck his tongue in a cigarette lighter!” “Cigarette lighter?! That’s really disgusting!” Emily: Flat, awkward banter between Robbins and Thompson, and one of the perhaps most poorly edited scenes in the whole movie (which is saying a lot). It was just an exceptionally bad take, where both Thompson and Robbins seem to sort of implode into themselves and give up on making their acting even halfway decent. It feels more like a failed improvised scene than anything.
- “What’s a pizza?” “It’s a circular Italian food object.” Emily: Really? “Food object”? Go home, writers of “American Graffiti.” You’re drunk.
- “I bet you were born from a very hard-boiled egg, Ducky.” Alex: So fucking weird.
- “Listen to me, small visitor.” Emily: Actually a great line.
- “You think I might find happiness in the animal kingdom, Ducky?” Alex: Trust us, you don’t even want to know the context of this one.