Week in Review - The Stand (1994)

If you liked this article, please like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter and please consider joining my Patreon.

And so we come to the end of my dive into the Stephen King films of the ‘90s.  Some were a delight, some were bizarre and dated, some were Apt Pupil, but I’ve elected to end this look back with another longtime favorite I had before even embarking on this endeavor: 1994’s The Stand.  Though not technically a movie, The Stand was part of the other wave of King adaptations at the time that arose from the world of TV.  It was a mini-series consisting of 4 episodes released over 5 days in May of 1994.  

It’s a mammoth of a mini-series and one of the four released at the time alongside the original IT, the comedically bad and often maligned Langoliers, and the mostly forgotten Tommyknockers.  As that description probably suggested The Stand is easily the best of the four and definitely deserves a spot as one of the better King adaptations of the ‘90s thanks to its well-composed focus and cast of solid TV mainstays turning in great performances.

Week of Review - Generation X

If you liked this article, please like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter and please consider Donating to keep the blog going

In 1991 ­X-Men volume 2 #1 came out and became the highest selling single issue of all time.  It was a huge milestone for Marvel comics as well as the entire decade, cementing the ‘90s as a time for comic book opulence and speculator driven sales.  More pertinently, it was the comic that launched the X-Men from a popular franchise into a moneymaking juggernaut that would dominate the next half of the decade.  Within a year Marvel had partnered with Fox to produce X-Men the animated series and its toy line, one of the most successful brand exercises in the entire superhero genre. 

Of course, this kind of success can’t last forever and by 1996 the X-Men were a lot less stable a franchise.  They were still producing hits, like that year’s Age of Apocalypse story, but the writing was very much on the wall for them and for Marvel, with bankruptcy right around the corner.  Still, they managed to produce one last hurrah for the X-Men franchise in 1996 with a live-action pilot film for a proposed X-Men TV show: Generation X.