Up in the sky! It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s . . . an ugly blue man with a giant head? The latest spin on superhero movies is “Megamind,” a 3-D animated comedy about a super villain (Will Ferrell) who finally defeats his nemesis, the caped hero Metro Man (Brad Pitt), and finds his life without purpose.
Not surprisingly, the movie makes several sly references to the greatest superhero of them all, Superman. “The writers had conceived the idea ‘What if Lex Luthor and Lois Lane fell in love?’ ” says “Megamind” director Tom McGrath of Superman’s greatest villain and his girlfriend. “And to that fact, what if Lex won? That question has never been answered.”
McGrath gives us the inside scoop on three more Man of Steel homages to look for:
1. Using a device that alters his appearance, Megamind changes into “Space Dad.” He’s a chubby, well-coifed man who’s a dead ringer for Marlon Brando, who appeared as Superman’s father in 1978’s “Superman.”
“We had a character design for Space Dad, and when we showed it to Will Ferrell he just started doing an impression of Marlon Brando with a lisp,” McGrath says. “We ended up laughing so hard in the record booth, we knew it would translate to film.”
2. The filmmakers also wanted to parody the ridiculous habit superheroes and villains have of engaging in banter before they fight. The writers originally wrote an epic five-page scene of back-and-forth chatter before one hero-villain fight, but it ultimately got pared down to three pages. “Those were the types of tropes from the old Superman serials that we liked to have fun with,” McGrath says.
3. At the beginning of the movie, the future Megamind and Metro Man rocket to Earth as babies, narrowly escaping dying planets. Superman’s ship landed in a Kansas cornfield, of course, while in a funny twist, Megamind’s lands in a prison yard. “What if a pod meant for good got knocked off course, and instead of becoming the origin of a hero it became the origin of a villain?” McGrath asks.
Things could have been worse, though. That ship could have ended up at the Jersey Shore.