The Far Side Almost Got a Live-Action Film, and the First Photos Will Haunt You

The Far Side is one of the most beloved newspaper comics in American history, but it does not [...]

By Russ Burlingame

The Far Side is one of the most beloved newspaper comics in American history, but it does not immediately seem like something that would be suited to a feature film adaptation. With exaggerated art and absurd humor contrasting with everyday situations and settings, The Far Side had little continuity to speak of, and few characters with more than one or two identifying characteristics. Nevertheless, apparently somebody tried to adapt it into live action at one point -- and thanks to one of the cast members, you can now see some set photos from the aborted movie...which may haunt your dreams for quite some time to come.

The strip, which originally ran from 1980 to 1995, was not only a huge hit in the world of newspaper strips but became a cottage industry unto itself, with t-shirts, coffee mugs, greeting cards, and more. The New York Times reports that Larson's comic likely generated about $500 million in revenue -- and that's in '80s and '90s money. Cartoonist Gary Larson relaunched an updated TheFarSide.com last year, with some new content for the first time in years.

The comic had an absurdist bent and a single-panel format that served as the template for similar, later comics that continue to appear in the comics pages to this day. In an odd twist of fate, Larson ended his strip in 1995, the same year that Bill Watterson decided to close up shop on Calvin & Hobbes. While Watterson never merchandised his characters and has shown no real interest in returning to the comics form, Larson may be taking a page from another '80s comics-page luminary, Berkeley Breathed, whose Bloom County had spinoffs and then, eventually, a revival that was announced and first published on the internet (through Breathed's Facebook).

You can see the tweet, and the bizarre and haunting images of what might have been, below.

The extremely literal translation of the characters to live action, with prosthetics to create exaggerated body proportions and backdrops and sets that are made up of solid colors and hard shadows, a la Larson's art, are of a piece with movies like Robin Williams's Popeye and, to a certain extent, movies like The Flintstones and Tank Girl. For the most part, those movies are a big financial gamble, since it's time consuming to get all that makeup and prosthetics on every day and since it's expensive to create whole worlds. For instance, in 1980, Popeye built an entire village, which is still standing and has been transformed into a tourist site:

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