Watching the The Rocketeer with My Inner Child in Superhero Interzone 1991

| Chris Ryba-Tures |

The Rocketeer plays at the Trylon Cinema from Sunday, August 10th, through Tuesday, August 12th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.

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As I grimly plod into my forties, movie nostalgia has…not so much become a heady escapist drug, so much as an increasingly out-of-body point of fascination. Obviously, because childhood is generally just so easy to wax nostalgic about, but moreover because the zeitgeist seems to keep pumping air into the cracked, dry lungs of my childhood period: the late 80s/early 90s. Lately, I’ve noticed my peers on Letterboxd returning to films that dominated our formative years, reporting that a flick “hasn’t aged well,” and much less often, riding waves of relief made by a treasured favorite that “still holds up.” 

Revisiting a movie by way of nostalgia, meaning, layering-in sentiment and memory associations from that period into my current position in time, introduces a special interrogative element to the viewing: what has changed more, the movie or me? More specifically, I find myself wrestling with whether my earlier experience of this movie can fold into or co-exist with my current experience of it (“still holds up”) or, has something changed so much since my original experience of it, be it myself or the world, that there’s just no place in my life for the movie anymore except, maybe, a Letterboxd list with heavy disclaimers or condemnations (“hasn’t aged well.”) By these metrics, movies like Willow and Sixteen Candles end up getting separated as easily as proverbial sheep and goats (respectively). 

Then there are nostalgic returns to movies like The Rocketeer (1991), which churn the waters of time, place, and memory in a less defined, much-more-difficult to categorize way. It’d been, what, 34 years since I’d last seen this movie? And with the diluvian overwhelm of superhero movies in the following decades, I’d all but forgotten about it. But when the opportunity to write about it arrived in the summer of 2025—to not just watch it, but go deep with it—my inner 10-year old strapped on the assignment like a jetpack and blasted off without much thought as to how things would turn out once I was up in the air. Within minutes of breaking through the clouds, I found myself navigating strange skies. 

Unlike the back-in-the-day movies that live crystalized and unblemished in the halls of memory, The Rocketeer sort of blurred on rewatch. Yes, it was very much the movie I remembered, and yet, there was so much more movie to it that I had NO recollection of. There was this very short, very compressed kid-oriented adventure movie that I remembered, and packed all around it was a hard-to-pin-down genre-bender (family, adventure, meta-historical, WWII, Sci-Fi) of a “superhero” movie from a time when superhero movies didn’t really exist. It was as if revisiting the movie extracted my inner child and sat the mulleted, gap-toothed, hyper-color clad little dork next to me on the couch and had us comparing two different movies. 

Ten-year-old “Little Chris” bounced excitedly, reminding me of the promotional helmet-shaped cups from Pizza Hut and spouted quotes from the trailers, while I was taken aback by the seamlessly woven-in appearances from Howard Hughes and W.C. Fields. Little Chris thrilled at watching our hero fumble his way toward becoming The Rocketeer, while I appreciated the complexity of Timothy Dalton’s villain and scoundrel, Neville Sinclair: Nazi agent, womanizer, Errol Flynn-esque Hollywood film star, and lurker in one of the most extravagantly ornate lairs ever put to film. As the movie progressed and the interweaving, at times convoluted, threads of a hapless stunt pilot, fraught romance with the girl next door, a millionaire inventor, a fascist spy, persistent G-Men, patriotic gangsters, and Nazi blimps wove together around a much-coveted jetpack, Little Chris’s attention flagged while mine intensified. 

Is The Rocketeer a comic book movie like Batman or is it a pulpy action-adventure flick like Raiders of the Lost Ark? Was it a loyal adaptation of the source comic for adults or just a cheapened knockoff to sell toys to kids? Was it a fanciful period piece or an alternative tinseltown world-building exercise? Was it a one-off or the beginning of a franchise? It plays in all these gray spaces, which I think worked against it during its original run. 

Make no mistake: there is SO MUCH, arguably too much, going on in this movie. How had I forgotten nearly all of it? It’s not because it’s a lousy flick. It’s not lousy at all. In fact, it’s a fucking hoot and definitely worth seeing in the theater. I think it’s because, well, a lot of us, kids and adults alike, just weren’t primed for a movie like The Rocketeer in 1991.

Superhero Interzone 1991

1991 was a strange time for superhero movies. It wasn’t exactly a wasteland, but it sure wasn’t the brightly colored, tightly brand-controlled multiverse it is today. Far from it. For decades, caped crusaders and toxic avengers had been ferreting out goons and madmen from the shadows on screens big and small, but the 80s scene was embarrassing at worst, silly at best, and just kind of sad the rest of the time. 

For most of the decade mainstream superhero movies didn’t really exist as a genre. “Comic book movies” might be more appropriate. They came off more like curiosities for nerds, stoners, and goofballs. No self-respecting moviegoer would admit to unironically seeing The Return of Swamp Thing. Superman? Sure. Maybe Superman II. Definitely not Superman IV: The Quest for Peace. 

When you lay them all out next to each other, the spread is puzzling, quality questionable, the options limited, especially considering that the entire Gold, Silver, and Bronze ages of comics had come and gone by 1985. I mean, just look at this: 

• Popeye (1980) 
• Flash Gordon (1980) 
• Conan the Barbarian (1981), the Destroyer (1984) 
• Superman II-IV (1982-1987)
• Swamp Thing (1982)
• Supergirl (1984) 
• The Toxic Avenger (1984)
• Howard the Duck (1986)
• The Incredible Hulk (1987)
• Masters of the Universe (1987) 
• Robocop (1987) 

Then 1988 arrived and everything changed. In the sky overhead blazed the Bat-Signal from Tim Burton’s Batman (1989). In the sewers below our feet skateboarded the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990). The characters, the costumes, the action, the sets, the scripts, the one-liners—it was all there, crushing the box office. And it was for us (the PG set)! Even a 10-year-old could tell this meant big heroes and villains were coming down the celluloid pike. But we’d have to wait another ten years for Bryan Singer’s X-men to arrive, twelve for Sam Raimi’s Spiderman, nearly twenty for the MCU to kick-off with John Favreau’s Iron Man. Instead, the Bat-Signal called in a strange melange of caped, masked, hooded, and hatted oddballs into a kind of early 90s Superhero Interzone:

• Darkman (1990) 
• Robocop 2 (1990) 
• Dick Tracy (1990) 
• The Rocketeer (1991) 
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: Secret of the Ooze (1991) 
• Batman Returns (1992) 

With R-ratings taking Darkman and Robocop 2 off the table for tweens, we were left with more Turtle- and Bat-people duking it out with bigger baddies, and two “new” comic book heroes from every 80s kid’s favorite decade: the 1930s. Not. So we got to pick from a yellow-clad detective with a walkie-talkie watch and a dude sporting a jetpack and the coolest helmet ever. The former, Dick Tracy, didn’t feel like a comic book movie, much less a superhero movie, even with a smart-mouthed kid sidekick, the striking bad guys like Flat Top and Prune Face, and impressive cleavage of Madonna’s Breathless Mahoney. It felt like an old movie for old people. The Rocketeer, on the other hand, felt like it was at least sorta made for kids like me: 

Daring pilot Cliff Secord (Billy Campbell) faces the greatest adventure of his life when he finds a jet-propelled rocket pack that allows him to fly through the air as the Rocketeer.¹

Add in that this was a Disney joint, driven by hotshot family-film director Joe Johnston, coming off the special effects slam dunk of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Then, file down the teeth of the source material a little, take out some of the pulp, add a little family-friendly plot padding, get some distance from smutty associations to Bettie Page by changing the love interest’s name to Jenny, and whammo: you’ve got a super-kind-of-hero on your hands. 

Now, I didn’t know any of this behind-the-scenes Hollywood stuff at the time. What I did know is that this Rocketeer guy flies—with a JETPACK. That’s the dream. That’s ALWAYS been the dream. Hell, in 2025, it’s still the dream. Plus, he’s got one of those cool square guns we saw in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Like Indy, he punches Nazis—on zeppelins—wears a cool leather jacket, and has a pretty girlfriend (Jennifer Connelly). And, I knew I could get a pretty sweet Official Rocketeer Helmet Beverage Cup at participating Pizza Huts. 

But really, only one thing made The Rocketeer an iconic hero, and it wasn’t the jet pack. It was the helmet. Holy shit, look at that helmet: the sleek art deco design; the toothy, skull-like mouthpiece; the insectile eye shields; the rudder curving backward like the dorsal fin of some galactic space shark. There’s something otherworldly about it—robotic and organic, grotesque and elegant, human and animal, out-of-the-past and into-the-future. That helmet alone—much more than the rough-and-tumble, loveable “aw shucks” manchild sporting it, or even the jetpack the helmet is designed to steer—felt like the real step The Rocketeer made for superhero movies of the future.

And it was. By 1994, Batman, the Rocketeer, and the motley crew of early 90s Interzone Heroes had done the hard, pioneering work to make room for some of the bigger names in indie comics publishing like Dark Horse Comics’ The Mask and Caliber Comics’ The Crow. They’d soon be joined by Tank Girl, Judge Dredd, and Mystery Men. Flawed, awkward, and finding their balance in their own ways, many of these superhero movies would be forgotten, much like The Rocketeer, all before the events of Marvel’s Infinity War were set in motion in the new Millenium.

When I look out into the cosmic ocean of superhero and comic book movies today, I can still see the not-so-super heroes of the past. I just have to squint a bit and let Little Chris point them out. There they are: the outliers and the weirdos who stepped into the strange, awkward, often hostile cinematic spaces where the fight was neither glorious nor memorable nor dignified. Ten-year-old Chris remembers. He remembers The Rocketeer. And I’m glad he did. I’m glad he sat down to watch it with me, even if we were having two different experiences of the same movie. Because, I’m happy to report that, whether you’re watching for the first time or accompanying your inner child to a nostalgic viewing, The Rocketeer most certainly “still holds up.”

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Footnotes

¹ Text from Pizza Hut promotional drink cup. 

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Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon

The Rocketeer