By the early 1980s, Disney were rather in doldrums – while their attempt to mimic the success of Star Wars (1977) with The Black Hole (1979) hadn’t flopped at the box office, it hadn’t brought in anywhere near the kinds of money the company had been banking on; animator Don Bluth had walked out, taking a good chunk of the animation unit with him to set up his own company; and profits were starting to slow down. In one of those Hollywood boardroom meetings that we all imagine happen but probably don’t, one can picture the then studio heads sweating out new ideas to make the company relevant again and noting the success of the Christopher Reeve starring Superman (1978) and Superman II (1980) and cartoon light bulbs going on over their heads. Deciding that they might have some success with a superhero film of their own, though the result, Condorman, had more in common with the contemporary James Bond films starring Roger Moore, even if the advertising continued to push it as a comic book caper.

Michael Crawford, roughly equidistance between his small screen success as the bumbling Frank Spencer in sitcom Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em (1973-1978) and his career revival in the hit stage musical The Phantom of the Opera, plays Woodrow “Woody” Wilkins an eccentric comic book artist based, for no particularly good reason, in Paris where he’s creating a new character, the eponymous Condorman. A stickler for realism, he creates a Condorman flying suit and leaps of the Eiffel Tower to see how it works. It doesn’t and Woody ends up in the Seine. Later, he’s approached by his CIA agent friend Harry (James Hampton) to transport vital papers to Istanbul where he immediately meets beautiful Russian agent Natalia Rambova (Barbara Carrera). Woody passes himself off as a top American agent code-named Condorman and, entirely by luck, saves her from a group of would-be assassins. On the lam from an abusive relationship with Soviet spymaster Krokov (Oliver Reed), Natalia decides to defect and asks “Condorman” to help her. What follows is a wholly predictable series of misadventures as Woody, now armed with gadgets including a souped-up Condorcar and laser-equipped Condorboat as well as a now functioning flying suit all built for him by the CIA, tries to keep Natalia safe from Krokov and his henchmen led by glass-eyed assassin Morovich (Jean-Pierre Kalfon).

Condorman is notionally based on Robert Sheckley’s spy spoof novel The Game of X, first published at the height of Bondmania in 1965, though precious little of Sheckley’s work actually remains beyond the basic idea of an unqualified man assuming the identity of a secret agent. Certainly Marc Stirdivant’s woeful script lacks any of Sheckley’s wit or invention. Instead, we get a globe-trotting (France, Yugoslavia, Switzerland, Monte Carlo, the States) comedy action film that can never quite find its groove. One minute it’s a superhero film, the next it’s a romance, the next a Bond spoof – there’s a even an animated Condorman that flits around the title sequence, emitting Goofy’s distinctive cry of fear when he falls at one point – and it’s frankly, a mess.

Director Charles Jarratt had made a couple of so-so big budget historical epics in the early 70s – Anne of the Thousand Days (1969) and Mary, Queen of Scots (1971) – before coming back down to earth with a resounding bump with the dreadful Lost Horizon (1973) and struggled to find his way back thereafter. He’d started working with Disney on the all-but-forgotten Escape from the Dark (1976) and the more fondly remembered The Last Flight of Noah’s Ark (1980) but the box office failing of Condorman (it lost the company a staggering $9.5 million just at the moment it could least afford it) bought their association to an end. He got his mojo back with the subsequent crime thriller The Amateur (1981) but Condorman proved beyond any doubt that his forte was neither superheroes nor superspies.

His direction tends towards the plodding, indulging Crawford’s instincts to pepper every action scene with pratfalls, a severe test of patience for any audience member over the age of around 8 years old. British audiences would have found it hard to take Crawford seriously as a romantic action lead, a situation not helped by his reeling off one of Frank Spencer’s catchphrases (“I’m a man…”) when Woody first meets Natalia. Jarratt seems to have indulged Crawford and left Reed to his own devices, resulting in the kind of hard-nut role that he could have done in his sleep but this stage – and it certainly looks like that’s exactly what he did. Carrera comes out of the film the best, a surprisingly sexy female lead for a Disney film – she’d get to be an actual Bond girl instead of the pretend one she plays here when she appeared in the unofficial 007 film Never Say Never Again (1983) playing SPECTRE agent Fatima Blush opposite Sean Connery. The only others to make much of an impact in this sorry affair are the stunt teams who do some good work, particularly in the chase scenes, choregraphed by Rémy Julienne, whose work could also be seen in the same year’s Bond outing For Your Eyes Only and the subsequent A View to a Kill (1985), and License to Kill (1989). Jarratt may have to take all the blame for the film’s slovenly pacing but kudos to second unit director Anthony Squire, who had previously worked on Casino Royale (1967) and On Her Majety’s Secret Service (1969) for the impressive action scenes. They may not be as spectacular as the Bond films they’re inspired by – one scene has Woody and Natalia driving the Condorcar off a pier and into the sea a la the Lotus in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977) – but they’re the few bright spots in the film.

But his good work was all for naught. Condorman is just terribly dull and predictable, and it’s surprising that it still has its army of fans given how misleadingly the film was promoted. The posters featured images of Woody in full Condorman suit front and centre leading some, perhaps, to expect something more akin to Superman than the spy comedy they actually got. Indeed apart from the opening scene at the start and a daring casino escape near the end, the actual comic book Condorman doesn’t feature at all.

Condorman tanked at the box office, only adding to Disney’s considerable woes in a 1981 that tested the mettle of everyone in the higher echelons of the company. The film’s final scene sets up a sequel, and there were indeed plans to spin the character off into his own franchise. There were comic book adaptations and sequels published by Whitman Comics but the plan to return him to the big screen was ruled out once the poor box office results started flowing in. Only his devoted army of fans – every Disney film has one it seems – will have been disappointed.