Learning Day: Into the Silververse

Cinematic universes may seem like a recent invention, but they’ve been all the rage since the dawn of movies. Ever since Walt Disney crawled from the primordial ooze to club independent film to death with Spider-Man’s femur in front of a giant mouse-eared monolith, as depicted in the video they play for you while you’re waiting in line at Epcot.

Back in the 1940s, Universal threw a bunch of their monsters together in a series of crossover films to dazzle the Greatest Generation with the thrilling promise of limitless possibilities offered by titles like “Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man,” which implies that the two ghouls either bumped into each other at a Vons or are participating in a scheduled public appearance as dictated by the terms of their parole. The comedy duo of Abbott and Costello eventually got involved, because it was the 1940s and every entertainment decision was being made by men so drunk they were considered rolling medical emergencies.

The fact that the very first cinematic universe was a crossover between gothic horror and vaudevillian comedy makes me wonder why we even bothered to continue making movies. But then I remember the Jean Claude Van Damme film Double Impact, and I immediately withdraw the question.

Scooby-Doo and his gang of 30-year-old teenagers had crossovers with countless celebrities both real and fictional throughout their many decades of crime-solving. One week, they’d be helping Batman and Robin chase the Joker through the bayou; the next, they’d be stuck with Don Knotts. Not a character played by Don Knotts, mind you – the actor Don Knotts.

Speaking of television, a staggering number of guest stars from across TV, movies, music, and sports managed to get stranded on Gilligan’s Island. Including the Harlem Globetrotters, who also appeared on Scooby-Doo, and yet failed to inform the mystery team of Gilligan’s plight. We were all robbed of the scene in which a towering professional athlete desperately reports a shipwreck to the Coast Guard while “Sweet Georgia Brown” plays softly in the background.

Countless other sitcoms regularly got smashed together as well. Characters from ABC’s TGIF, CBS’s Block Party, and NBC’s Must-See TV would routinely appear in each other’s shows as ratings stunts. Family Matters and Full House were in the same universe as Perfect Strangers, Boy Meets World, and Step by Step, because network executives believed this would be an irresistible draw for undecided viewers. And I genuinely want to speak to the person who planned their entire week around each crossover episode of Everybody Loves Raymond and The King of Queens. I want to know what it’s like to experience joy that pure.

But the shared universes on television typically went no further than “these shows all air on the same night.”  It was like the Avengers for children of divorce. According to the Must-See TV definition, Sliders took place in the same universe as Wheel of Fortune and my local news. This not only proves that God is real, but also that he is dead.

The point is, shared universes are no big shits. They’re as old as videotaped entertainment itself, and probably even older. I’m sure Shakespeare double-dipped a few characters. Maybe Puck shows up in a vinyl cape at the end of Hamlet to recruit the Danish prince into the Justice League. It’s impossible to know, because no one has ever read Hamlet.

For example, virtually every popular movie in the 1980s was part of one big shared universe. That was just the movies back then. The shared universe was Hollywood. That’s why Arnold Schwarzenegger says “I’ll be back” in every film from this period, even though the idea of a narrative connection between all his characters is as inexplicable as it is frightening. What is the conceit of that shared universe? Every Schwarzenegger character is a multiverse variant of the same guy, sharing one soul, like Cloud Atlas? If you think of Arnold’s career as one big Cloud Atlas, it makes every one of his movies better and worse simultaneously. Like seeing an OJ Simpson Hertz commercial in July of 1994.

The villainous Duke brothers from Trading Places make an appearance in Coming to America, even though the only narrative connection is that both films star Eddie Murphy and were directed by a man who killed several people with a helicopter. However, that crime is never referenced. And I don’t believe a helicopter appears in either film.

This practice of haphazardly creating shared universes by including little easter eggs for audiences who get excited when movies remind them of other movies continued into the 1990s. Ray Stanz, Dan Aykroyd’s character from 1984’s Ghostbusters, makes an appearance in 1995’s Casper, which recontextualizes the events of Ghostbusters in a powerfully disturbing way. (How many ghosts entombed within the Ghostbusters’ technological soul prison are lonely orphans looking to reclaim the life that was stolen from them? How many of them are infants?)

Mel Gibson and Danny Glover recognize each other as their respective characters from the Lethal Weapon series in 1994’s Maverick, a western set at the turn of the century. Which means Maverick is a Cloud Atlas of Lethal Weapon. Specifically, it’s a shared universe in which Danny Glover is destined to be friends with one of history’s most famous racists.

That brings me to my favorite shared universe, one that should have dominated 1980s cinema like the MCU, strangling every other movie out of the multiplex like an overweight bouncer. I am of course referring to the shared universe of action films produced by gargantuan human cartoon Joel Silver.

Joel Silver is responsible for some of the greatest action movies of the '80s, including Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, Predator, Road House, Commando, 48 Hrs., and The Adventures of Ford Fairlane. He had some less reliable hits in the '90s, but he finished out the century by producing The Matrix, back when you could still add that to your resume without explicitly specifying “the first one.” Joel Silver is also the reason the sketch comedy version of a Hollywood producer exists. He’s the inspiration behind Tom Cruise’s character in Tropic Thunder. Joel Silver walked so that he could force other people to run for him, are you fucking kidding me, Joel Silver isn’t fucking running anywhere. To summarize the entirety of Joel Silver in a single sentence, he was recently acquitted in a wrongful death lawsuit over the death of his former assistant, who drowned in a swimming pool after Silver gave her entirely too much cocaine during Jennifer Anniston and Justin Theroux’s honeymoon.

The films of the Silververse, as I have officially dubbed it with the authority granted me as an ordained minister of the Church of California, are tied together by the fictional South American country of Val Verde. Val Verde was created by Commando screenwriter Steven de Souza, whom you may recognize as the creator of 1994’s Street Fighter: The Movie, starring Jean Claude Van Damme as a fully aroused haircut. In Commando, young Jenny Matrix is abducted to Val Verde by the evil Shapeless Australian, who holds her hostage to force Special Forces veteran John Matrix into helping him stage a coup. Rather than do any of these things, Matrix relentlessly murders his way through all of the bad guys like a shark eating itself to death.

Every single one of White America’s fears about Spanish-speaking brown people in the 1980s were personified by Val Verde. It’s a war-torn country run by drug dealing generals and violent left-wing revolutionaries. It is Tony Montana if he were a sovereign nation. It’s a racist t-shirt you buy at K-Mart. It’s a straw man invented by Reagan-era Hollywood to allow John Matrix to engage in violent propaganda without starting an international incident. I’m frankly amazed there wasn’t a subplot about Val Verdians stealing American jobs.

For some inexplicable reason, Val Verde makes several more appearances in Joel Silver’s films. It’s the setting of 1987’s Predator. The titular alien hunter is stalking a herd of insane bodybuilders through Val Verde’s mountainous jungles. And like Commando, an entire subplot is devoted to a regime-toppling operation to thwart Communism. So even in this fantastical piece of pulp science fiction about a terrifying visitor from beyond the stars, we must have some wish fulfillment about Cuba. It’s a requirement of the Silververse. Apparently, the knowledge that Cuba was out there continuing to exist was more than Joel Silver could bear.

Joel Silver wasn’t done with Val Verde, not yet. It shows up again in Die Hard 2: Die Harder, which rivals RoboCop as the single greatest film title in motion picture history. One of the villains in Die Hard 2: Die Harder is a Val Verdian general, portrayed by an Italian actor dressed like Fidel Castro. (See “Dan Hedaya plays a South American dictator in Commando,” above.) The villainous William Sadler holds Dulles International Airport hostage to break Italian Castro out of military custody and fly him out of the country to celebrate their hatred of capitalism. Presumably their airplane would’ve made a stopover in Val Verde to pick up some things had hero cop John McClane not exploded it with a zippo doused in jet fuel and hangover sweat in the finale. No journey into the Silververse would be complete without the kaleidoscopic onscreen death of a man in a Cuba costume.

It's truly a shame we never got to see these characters united in The Silververse Avengers. There’s no telling what kind of hijinks these guys would get up to, except that it would almost certainly involve a level of anti-Cuban rhetoric to qualify as a war crime.

Imagine John McClane teaming up with John Matrix and all the glorious bulging freaks of Predator to take down Shapeless Australian and William Sadler, who have been sheltering Italian Castro in Val Verde. Then a Predator shows up dressed like Neo from The Matrix, because The Matrix is named after John Matrix, probably. Plus, The Matrix is just a bunch of computers, and you can’t convince me Val Verde isn’t mentioned somewhere in all those computers. Look, it makes as much sense as including an explicit reference to the events of Predator in Die Hard 2. My point is, there is no excuse for The Silververse Avengers to not exist.

In addition to being an historic box office triumph, The Silververse Avengers would be loaded with unforgettable team-up moments that would embarrass Frankenstein and the Wolf Man into self-imposed exile. John Matrix and Dutch from Predator would be immediate best friends for life, and not just because they look exactly alike and could have the kind of threesome nightmares dream about. They would bond over a shared love of cigars and the sound a human soul makes when it departs the body. They’d give each other facepainting tips. Dutch would try to force Matrix to wear a shirt like a father wrestling with an unruly toddler. Matrix is exactly like every single member of Dutch’s team, combined. Consequently, he would have to be kept separate from Billy. That would be like a parrot seeing its reflection. You’d have to sedate them in individual cubes for their own well-being, like fighting fish.

And that’s to say nothing of the possibilities of throwing Moonlighting-era Bruce Willis into the mix. I have quite literally been waiting my entire life to see John McClane topple a Predator with a flurry of ex-husband headbutts. The Silververse Avenges is the greatest film never made, and it plays every night, behind my eyelids.

The most fascinating detail about the Silververse is that there is no other connective tissue outside of general Reagan-era propaganda and Joel Silver himself. There’s no overlapping narrative or characters, unlike every other example I rattled off at the beginning of whatever this column is. There was no Avengers-style payoff. No, the sole inspiration behind the Silververse is that every film was part of the same man’s investment portfolio. It’s the shared universe of the water drained from Joel Silver’s jacuzzi after the jets got clogged with cocaine and body hair with the same chemical composition as cocaine. I have absolutely no idea why it exists. There’s no logical reason it should. It’s the cinematic universe of a millionaire high-fiving himself, which is technically every cinematic universe. But this is the only one with twin Arnolds.

Tom Reimann is the co-founder of the podcast and streaming network Gamefully Unemployed, where he is producing a reboot of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Twins starring Dutch and John Matrix, which is just Jean Claude Van Damme’s Double Impact with a crudely photoshopped poster.

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