Vandroid is insane at every level. It’s a movie that never got made. It left behind a John Carpenter-esque soundtrack (and a really good one). It’s also an onslaught of some incredible promotional materials, miraculously saved from a fire that burned down the movie studio back in 1984. Trading cards? A model kit? Even temporary tattoos.
Vandroid is the ultimate B-movie action flick from the 1980s. Or it should have been. After reading the five-issue limited series re-issued as a trade paperback today from BOOM! Studios and visiting the movie website you may even remember seeing ads for the movie back in the 1980s. Only you couldn’t have. Why? Because none of it is real.
Vandroid is a graphic novel. It’s a concept about as clever as you get in comic book publishing today. Let’s create the legend of a movie, a bad production, film footage shot but lost in a fire and subsequent legal battle. What would have accompanied the film? How about marketing for an Atari video game? Slick movie posters? Got ’em. What would the video game have looked like? They’ve mocked up that, too.
And at the center of the story a humanoid robot who drives a van. And he possesses the memories of the guy that the technology took over, a washed-up mechanic named Chuck Carducci. Chuck creates Vandroid after meeting up with his old college roommate from MIT, a guy working on artificial intelligence at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab. Introduce a plutonium-ion battery and some high-octane performance van parts and you could only have… Vandroid.
