Now I'm Prune Tracy!

Dick Tracy (1990) – This is the film with Warren Beatty as the police detective who prefers violent methods for fighting crime. The movie itself was okay, with not a lot to really talk about. It seemed kind of slow most of the time. There were some elements I liked, however, especially the look of the whole thing. They used a lot of bright colors, making it true in form to the comic strip. An interesting bit of trivia is that Beth’s mom and uncles made the yellow raincoats that Tracy wears in the movie. And we got to see quite a few of the members of the rogues’ gallery, most with nicknames based on their deformities, like Flattop, Pruneface, and Mumbles.

I’ve never really followed the Dick Tracy comic strip, but it certainly has an interesting history. It was created by one Chester Gould, who started the strip in 1931, and it’s been running ever since then. It’s generally pretty consistent in its subject matter, but I understand there were occasionally some weird tangents. One of the strangest was in the sixties when Tracy hung out on the Moon, which started when Moon Maid, the daughter of the Governor of the Moon, landed on Earth.

The alien girl had the power to change her body temperature and to fire explosive blasts from her hands. Eventually, she and Dick’s adopted son fell in love, got married, and had a daughter named Honey Moon Tracy. After Gould’s death, the new writers got rid of Mood Maid in a rather disturbing way, by having her die from a car bomb. Junior later married Sparkle Plenty, the glamorous daughter of reformed criminal B.O. Plenty. Honey apparently remained in the strip but became fully human, losing her power of magnetism.

Maybe they should make a sequel to the movie with Moon Maid in it. Then again, maybe not.

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