The heated internal debate which has raged for the past five minutes after I was given a vague article assignment must once and for all be settled: Which Nick Fury was a better Nick Fury: Samuel L Jackson or David Hasselholf?
Now, while this question may be in the bag for any German who lived pre-1947 or post-1985, for the rest of us this conundrum causes us many seconds, and possibly a minute or two of restlessness.
For those of you who were not as busy with societally-imposed celibacy as I was in the late 90s, let me explain a bit on what David Hasselholf has to do with Nick Fury. On May 26, 1998 a huge ‘television-event-that-wasn’t’ occurred. The made-for-TV movie “Nick Fury: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.” first aired in the homes of Americans, and was watched by extremely few of them. Col. Nick Fury was played by David Hasselholf, the second-least ‘manly man’ to drive a talking car (see Shia LaBeouf) and the second-strangest American music act to make it big in a foreign country (see Mister Mister). “The Holf” was partnered on-screen with the strangest lips in Hollywood and the most attractive ‘unattractive’ woman, Lisa Rinna.
Together they bombed their way through a script written by the man who would one day give us “The Dark Knight Trilogy” and most likely wishes we would all forget he wrote this. At the time if you missed it you were lucky, but thanks to the modern age of youth ‘hipsters’ whose life goal is to make sure everything awful appears online, this movie is now easily found on the web in all of its 4:3 visual glory.
For those of you who didn’t help shell out the 2.2 billion dollars (rough gross domestic profit) of the Marvel movies in which Samuel L Jackson played Nick Fury you’ve either started reading the wrong magazine or you’re Jack Nicholson and assume any comic book movie where you are not playing The Joker is crap. Samuel L Jackson is known as the second-greatest Jedi draped in purple (see Prince). To-date he has appeared in six movies, one television episode, one video game, and many of my dreams as Nick Fury. Thanks to the modern age of pirating you can find all of these online somewhere with Mandarin subtitles and enough Trojan Horses to bring down all of Turkey.
But which looks more like Nick Fury?
The scary and extremely geeky answer is that they both visually fit the roles. The knowledge to answer gets into the years of sexual exile I lived in as a teen and up until mid twenties (to be fair, eventually I stopped trying). In Marvel Comics there is a multiverse of realities, very similar to the string theory, which I understand almost nothing about. In this multiverse of realities, The 616th Universe is the universe set apart as the main continuity for all us really annoying geeks that the editors of Marvel Comics hate. There is also what is called “the Ultimate-verse” or the 1610th Universe, which was created in 2000 as a fresh jumping-on point for new readers, stories, and creators. So with that said, the 616 Nick Fury created by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee looks eerily similar to David Hasselholf, but the 1610 Nick Fury re-created by Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch is actually modeled after Samuel L Jackson. Thus, they both look part.
…so the answer is “yes.”
Look folks, as hard as it can be sometimes for the so-called “purists” and (ugh) “social justice” types among us nerds, at the end of the day it’s just comic books… why not just try enjoying them without all the “it has to be this or that way” crap?
Just sayin’
-Kevin McVicker
- NERD NATION MAGAZINE - 