Disclaimer: If you’re a fan of either the character or the movie Doctor Strange (2016), you definitely shouldn’t read this post. We don’t like him and we didn’t like the movie. If you do, then have fun. This isn’t a criticism of your preferences, it’s just a (hopefully) intelligent discussion of ours.
So cinema goddess Jessica Walter passed away at the end of March, and of course we were all very sad about it, but in one of the many Twitter threads about her that drift partner consumed, someone pointed out that she had played Morgan Le Fay in the 1978 Dr. Strange TV movie. (The 1978 one formats it as Dr., while the 2016 formats as Doctor.) Now, we remember Morgan Le Fay from not only Arthurian mythology but her appearance in season three of Runaways, which earned her the crude nickname “titty witch” because, well… she was a witch and liked to prominently display her titties, and since she was evil and bad (#justiceforhotdadakarobertminoru) we felt okay about being blunt in our description of her. We were intrigued by the notion of Jessica Walter in the role: would she, too, be humorously awful and bodaciously tit-y? We watched the trailer and then immediately set out to find where we could watch this piece of cinema. (Dailymotion, it turns out.)
Before we get any farther, let me clarify: prior to last night, we had not actually seen the 2016 Doctor Strange, largely because it is egregiously racist and also because Benedict Cumberbatch has said some truly awful things about autistic people and how they can’t be superheroes so stop saying his heroic characters are autistic. We’ve encountered him in other Marvel films by now — our first impression of him in Thor: Ragnarok was “yikes, this man’s American accent is horrible,” and our consistent impression of him in Infinity War was “you’re an even worse version of Tony Stark and your cloak has more personality than you” — and we’re grudgingly resigned to seeing his second film because it co-stars our girl Wanda (Elizabeth Olsen) and also will feature America Chavez (played by Xochitl Gomez of The Baby-Sitters’ Club!) but we never planned to watch Doctor Strange. We didn’t find it necessary. We could read Wikipedia summaries (or rely on explanations from friends) if we got curious.
But then we were watching Dr. Strange and drift partner suggested that maybe we could watch Doctor Strange to compare. While getting ourselves quite toasted. (I feel like you might have a mistaken impression of how much we drink based on frequent references to drunkwatching things. With the exception of special social occasions — the likes of which we haven’t had in, y’know, more than a year — we really only drink while watching stuff, and we really only do that once or twice a month if that. This is not to shame people who drink more than that, but rather to clarify that it’s not actually that regular for us, so when we do it’s something of an event and often leads to essays such as this one.) We spent the entire week psyching ourselves up for this event — asking ourselves, more than once, if it was really going to be worth it — but we did end up going through with it.
The following is a point-by-point analysis of the 1978 and 2016 films, compared to each other and also compared to what makes movies better than the 1978 and 2016 films.
Full story here.