10 Most Horrifying Changes Of Animated Characters To Live-Action

For comic book readers in the 1970s, there was no Marvel title more exuberantly odd than Howard the Duck. First introduced as a side-kick to Man-Thing and graduating to his own title run shortly thereafter, Howard the Duck's comics featured some of the wackiest and goofiest narratives in all of the Marvel universe.

Which made him a strange choice for a 1986 film adaptation. But alas, it happened and man, oh man, was it haunting to witness.

In the comics, Howard the Duck was typically drawn with aggressively strong lines and despite the frequent ludicrousy of the stories he was at the center of and the fact that he was a talking Duck who smoked cigars, he always served as the grounding element of his comics. As writer Steve Gerber put it;

"If Wile E. Coyote gets run over by a steamroller, the result is a pancake-flat coyote who can be expected to snap back to three dimensions within moments; if Howard gets run over by a steamroller, the result is blood on asphalt."

In his live-action version, Howard is a far cry from his comic counterpart, both in spirit and appearance. Instead of a wisecracking, foul-mouthed character, the film neuters him into an E.T. stand-in. In keeping with this, visually, they soften everything about him, resulting in a horrifying animatronic creation with dead eyes.