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Do you know much about the character Kull? He was created by Robert E. Howard in 1929. Howard wrote a lot of short stories for the pulp marketplace in a short period of time during the late 1920s and early 1930s. He was a man of strong convictions and romantic ideas in many ways, and unfortunately he took his own life at the age of 30 after watching his mother slip into a fatal coma.
The characters for which Howard is best remembered are Kull, King of Valusia; Conan the Cimmerian; Solomon Kane; and Bran Mak Morn. But he wrote about many more as well, including Cormac Mac Art, Conan of the Reivers, and a host of others. The works of Robert Howard were revived in the 1950s by Gnome Press and L. Sprague de Camp was contracted to write some pastiches (stories constructed from material Howard had written). De Camp went on to help popularize Conan the Cimmerian in the 1960s, although his editorial work has not met with general acceptance among puristic Howard fans.
Still, in the late 1960s/early 1970s Marvel Comics Group realized there was potential value in the Conan and Kull characters and they started bringing out comics based on them. The earliest Conan stories were adapted from Howard's work, although it may be that only the de Camp editions were used for sources. But Howard only wrote 24 Conan stories. It's impossible to sustain a comic series, with a new issue coming out each month, on 24 stories. Soon the Marvel writers turned to Gardner F. Fox's Kothar books for inspiration, but there were only a handful of these.
I lost track of the Conan comics in the 1970s as the stories became less and less interesting to me. But as the years passed by I came across some hard-to-find paperback editions of generally unedited Howard material. Books such as TIGERS OF THE SEA (containing all four Cormac Mac Art stories), MARCHERS OF VALHALLA (containing various short stories), THE DARK MAN AND OTHERS, CONAN: THE HOUR OF THE DRAGON (the only novel-length Conan story Howard ever wrote), and KULL: THE FABULOUS WARRIOR KING.
I actually discovered a copy of KULL while staying in the hospital one summer and was immediately enthralled by it. Prior to that time I'd only found one Marvel special edition for Kull and that was not very satisfying. Reading Howard's original stories brought the character alive for me.
A few years later I found another copy of the Kull book and purchased it. I've reread the book a number of times. It contains only a few short stories and story fragments. Kull was the predecessor of Conan both as a character and in the pseudo-history that Howard created for their world. Kull was dead thousands of years before Conan was born. Even the very world of Kull, including his homeland of Atlantis, no longer existed in Conan's day. A great cataclysm destroyed civilizations and sent humanity back into an age of savagry. The civilizations of Conan's day were thus descended of the barbarians of Kull's day. But Conan's people, the Cimmerians of the north, were the last remnants of the Atlanteans, and in turn they became the ancestors of the Gaels (Cormac Mac Art's people).
Under Howard's hand Kull fled Atlantis into exile, wandering the lands until he killed King Borna of Valusia and took the crown of that ancient kingdom for his own. Borna's relatives plotted against Kull, conniving to take back the power they had seized. But Kull was a warrior and a barbarian, strange to their customs, brave, and valiant. He won the loyalty of the soldiers and slaves alike, and the friendship of Brule Spear-slayer, a Pictish chieftain who was sent to Valusia as the ambassador of his barbaric people.
The Kull of Robert E. Howard was capable of light banter, pondering the mysteries of life, and engaging in gory battles with his enemies. He wasn't fond of Valusian laws. They were constricting to him, and he clashed with his nobles over them. In "By This Axe I Rule" Kull finally destroyed the stone tablets recording the ancient laws of Valusia, declaring, "I am the law! I am king, state, and law!"
In the late 1970s and early 1980s a rumor started circulating that someone was seriously considering producing a movie about Conan the Cimmerian. Long-time Howard fans waited with great hopes and expectations. Finally Dino de Laurentiis' studio announced they were producing the movie (it was distributed by Universal Pictures).
"Conan the Barbarian" was a bit of a disappointment to the knowledgeable Howard community. As action/fantasy movies go it was considered to be pretty good. But it wasn't really Conan. For one thing, the villain of the movie was Thulsa Doom, a wizard who had been encountered in only one Kull story. And the history of Conan's people was bastardized terribly. There is very little of Robert E. Howard's Conan in the movie.
And yet "Conan the Barbarian" was immensely successful. A second movie followed which was not as good as the first, but it made a profit before de Laurentiis' studio went bankrupt. Like its predecessor "Conan The Destroyer" bore little resemblance to the original Howard character and stories. It was essentially a commercial venture.
The last gasp of a Conan movie came with "Red Sonja". Arnold Schwarzenegger appeared in this movie, based on a character created for Conan's world by Roy Thomas, the writer of many of the Marvel Comics Conan stories. But Schwarzenneger didn't play Conan. He played a Conan-like character (due to legal problems, they could not use Conan) named Kalidor, High Lord of Hyrkania. "Red Sonja" bombed.
However, there was a third and final Conan script which was given to Arnold Schwarzenegger. He reportedly had no interest in the project, or too little to schedule time for it. This script was based largely on THE HOUR OF THE DRAGON, the novel-length Conan story which Howard had written. The central plot revolves around the attempts of the Aquilonian nobility's efforts to unseat King Conan. They revive Xaltotun, a sorceror of Acheron who has been dead for 3,000 years, to become their ally.
THE HOUR OF THE DRAGON has been hailed by many people as the ultimate Conan story. Howard freely used elements from earlier stories to bring together an exciting and powerful adventure. The script based on this book reportedly was not as good as Howard fans would prefer, but it would have been more faithful to the original Conan than the first three movies.
Eventually the decision was made to turn the script into a Kull story. The retrofitting process is shrouded with criticism and bitter disappointment among Howard fans, but in general the effort was pretty faithful. Some key characters were dropped from the storyline, but more importantly the conversion to Kull's world was not complete. Brule Spear-slayer occurs nowhere, and Kull is given the name of another character among the pirates.
The most glaring difficulty with the whole plot, however, is that it is more faithful to Howard's Conan than it is to his Kull. Acheron rose and fell thousands of years after Kull lived and died. There is no sorceress in Kull's rogues' gallery of villains. Strangely enough, though, the plot still seems like a Kull plot -- his nobles are plotting against him, he goes off on a quest, he is in conflict with the laws of Valusia.
Kevin Sorbo has been vehemently criticized by Howard fans for his portrayal of Kull. He doesn't seem to yell loud enough, or to kill enough people for them. Part of the fault is the movie's PG-13 rating. You cannot be extremely bloody with a rating like that. And yet there is a lot of implied violence in the movie.
For a view from Charles Pogue, original author of the script, click here. Mr. Pogue sent me email in March 1998 expressing his own perspective.
The story itself falls flat but for non-Howard fans the movie is not generally bad. They are not judging it by the standards of the frustrated Howard community which has been disappointed time and time again. They pictured a different actor in Kull's shoes, although there is not much agreement on whom the actor should be.
For my part I can forgive the technical errors and inconsistencies. I've come to expect them from the people who produced the Conan and Red Sonja movies. And, yes, despite the bankruptcy, de Laurentiis' daughter Raffaella produced "Kull the Conqueror". Many of the people who had been associated with the older movies had something to do with "Kull". The movie was doomed to mediocrity from the outset. Unfortunately, the Howard fans feel the actors should have put a different spirit into their characters -- particularly Kevin.
For my part I think they are mistaken, and I will defend Kevin's work as adequate. Considering the immense negatives factored into the equation before he ever stepped before the cameras, I am amazed people had any real hope a good or great movie would come out of the process. "Conan the Barbarian" was successful in large part because it was different from previous barbarian movies. It had a larger budget, and a great deal of time and thought had gone into it. The decision to make a movie first and to be faithful to Howard second probably freed the de Laurentiis group from many of the misconceptions that have plagued their later movies, which were trying to be faithful to something -- I'm not sure what.
There can be no winning this argument, however. The actor will be unmercifully blamed for decisions that were not his, for not fulfilling unreasonable expectations, and for not delivering on promises which really were never made. Taken on its own merits "Kull the Conqueror" is entertaining. Kevin did his job. People who ask more than that are perhaps heaping the frustrations of a long oppression on the wrong person. No actor could have stepped into that role and made it a blockbuster success.
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