For today’s super Sunday film, I wanted to throw a curve ball at what you guys may think I was going to choose for today’s film. I chose the 1993 film The Meteor Man which stars Robert Townsend as Jefferson Reed, a school teacher in an inner city that has been plagued by violence and street gangs for way too long. Some of the local residents want to make a difference, but they just don’t know how their going to do it until one faithful day that will give the steam they need to move ahead. Jefferson will have a chance encounter with a meteor that changes his life forever because it gives him super powers. At first, he wants to keep it a secret, but his family feels that they can use his newly gained powers to finally clean up the streets of Washington DC from one of the most ruthless gangs in The Golden Lords which is headed by it’s ruthless leader Simon Caine (Roy Fegan). Now it’s up to him to save the streets and clean them up for good from the Golden Lords before they figure out his secrets and use it against him. The movie also stars James Earl Jones (The Sandlot) as Earnest Moses, Robert Guillaume (Lean On Me) as Ted Reed, Maria Gibbs (The Jeffersons) as Mrs. Reed, Eddie Griffin (Undercover Brother) as Michael, Don Cheadle (Iron Man) as Goldilocks, Bill Cosby (The Cosby Show) as Marvin, Big Daddy Kane as Pirate, Naughty By Nature as The Bloods, Cypress Hill as The Cripps, Sinbad (Jingle All The Way) as Malik, Frank Gorshin (Twelve Monkeys) as Byers The Monster, Cynthia Belgrave (The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three) as Mrs. Harris, Bobby McGee (Harlem Nights) as Uzi, and the film was written and directed by Robert Townsend as well.
One thing I have to say is that I know it received a poor rating on Rotten Tomatoes because it is a little bit cheesy, but this movie must of had a little impact in it’s in hey day. You have to think about how many superhero films back in the day had an African-American male as the lead superhero? Not very many, but the ones I can think of is the 1997 antihero/superhero Spawn and the comedy parody film Blankman that came out in 1994. This film definitely predates the amazing melodramas that we got starting with The X-Men and all the way up through today because the film was campy at times and some of the scenes were cheesy. I definitely think it has a classic story to it of a man getting super powers in order to rise up against the oppression faced in his neighborhood. The casting in this film is actually where it’s at for me because it features a mix of old and the new in African American cinema as a lot of stars of yesteryear (Jones, Cosby, Guillaume, Gibbs, Belgrave) mixed with the new (Cheadle, Griffin, Sinbad, McGee). It was almost like the old were passing the torch to the young bucks to take over Hollywood. I also like the fact that they had rappers Big Daddy Kane, Cypress Hill, and Naughty By Nature included in the film as gang members. Marvel Comics later on would come out with a small miniseries of The Meteor Man, but nothing after that. I am going to give the film a B- for a final grade.
Moshpits And Movies 