Watch the Cast of the Unreleased ‘Fantastic Four’ Movie Take Their Place in Marvel History

The Roger Corman-produced Fantastic Four may have become a bit of a Hollywood punch line, but the unreleased feature was also a labor of love from the cast and creatives tasked with bringing the Marvel Comics-inspired film to life. As part of Marvel‘s efforts to pay homage to the history of its first family, the cast of the 1994 feature had cameos in this year’s The Fantastic Four: First Steps.

In a new featurette, the original cast looked back on their experiences working on the Corman film.

Jay Underwood, who played Johnny Storm, was aware of the pressure that producer Bert Eichinger was under. “He was going to lose the rights unless he went into production by a certain date. So he goes to Roger Corman and says, ‘Can you make this movie and make it right now and make it cheap?’ … We put together this million-dollar movie, which for Corman was actually probably a very big budget at the time. But certainly not a budget that you need for a movie like the Fantastic Four.“

Grant Curtis, MCU producer on First Steps, added, “[Corman] did a lot of things right in that movie … One of the things I think they did extremely well was the character relationships. It holds up. And not every special effect on any movie holds up over time. But those were very real relationships that, when we did our homework and we looked at the movie early on, we took note [of].â€

Alex Hyde-White, who played Reed Richards, shared how the production meant so much to the actors involved: “The phrase ‘happy accident’ can come to mind to answer the question of ‘Why was the casting so good?,’ especially under the gun in a situation that sort of needed to fit right away. The fact that we were given these roles relatively easily because they were under the gun allowed us to either trust ourselves or not. And part of the reluctant superhero dynamic of the dysfunctional Fantastic Four [is] embodied in the way the four of us worked with each other.â€

Michael Bailey Smith, who played Ben Grimm in the flesh while a stunt guy played Thing, also had a memorable experience. “Everybody was so close to those characters. I’m the big, strong, protecting guy, right? Kind of innocent and kind of humble. And that’s how Ben Grimm is. But Reed Richards, Alex is a natural leader. Johnny Storm, as you know, is just a bubbly, fiery dude. And Rebecca [Staab, who played Sue Storn] has always been a little shy, reserved, and that’s the invisible woman. So we just did ourselves.â€

Underwood continued, “We all knew that we were working on the Fantastic Four, Marvel’s flagship comic book. And so we all took it very seriously. And Oley Sassone, the director, got us all together for a pep talk right before we started shooting … he said, ‘I’m going to do my best as a director. I want you all as actors to do your best. I want you to take this seriously, develop the characters.’ And he said, ‘Let’s work really hard at recreating the comic onto the screen.â€

Staab affirmed that the film ended up being worthwhile for those involved. “We were trying to be true to the comic book because we knew the audience. Like, we owed it to the audience. Because they know this better than we do. So we’d better be accurate. And so we didn’t even set out to go, ‘Oh, it’s a period piece.’ You just go, ‘Well, it looks like this because that’s what it looked like in the comic book.’ And so it gave it a little kind of timelessness, just organically … It was a real effort of love and fun.â€

Watch more from the 1994 Fantastic Four cast in the featurette from Marvel Studios below:

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