Hand Me Down Movies: Willow

What is a Hand Me Down Movie?

The idea was something my wife and I came up with after our son was born, and we even tried our hands at a short-lived podcast in the early days of the pandemic. We’re both movie-lovers and had lists of favorites that we couldn’t wait to share with him when he was old enough. A Hand Me Down Movie is one of those movies. It’s that kind that you grow up with and can’t wait to share when you make new friends, and you can’t wait to introduce to your kids when their old enough.

Our son is currently 7, and we’ve shown him some of these favorites (The Goonies and Superman: The Movie among them), and he is even starting to introduce new family favorites to us. Until recently, I really hadn’t seen any Godzillamovies, but he is obsessed, and so now I’ve seen most of them. As much as the guy-in-a-rubber-suit gets mocked, the first Godzilla is a legitimately great movie, and most of them are great fun.

But we’ll get to my awakening to the awesomeness that is Godzilla another time. Today’s entry felt appropriate with the sad recent passing of Val Kilmer. The 1988 George Lucas-produced, Ron Howard-directed, fantasy adventure Willow.

Willow came at the tail end of a long 80’s tradition of high-fantasy movies, including Dragonslayer, Ladyhawk, and Legend, but Willow was and remains my favorite. I do have a vague memory of my dad taking me to see it when it was first released in theaters, but I mainly saw it on cable and home video. This was in the heyday of catching movies again and again on whatever cable channel was running them at the time. At some point I managed to record it on VHS, but I don’t think I got a proper store-bought tape of it until sometime in the 90’s.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Willow is the story of a nobody from a small farming village who finds a baby who happens to be the chosen one, and he takes her on an adventure where he meets a charming rogue, a banished sorceress, and a host of fantasy creatures as they battle an evil witch and her armies to save all the lands. If Star Warswas George Lucas’s take on Flash Gordon, Willow was him doing The Hobbit. I also grew up on the Rankin-Bass version of The Hobbit, which I also have a great deal of love and nostalgia for, not to mention the book, which I love. Willow might not compare to The Lord of the Rings, but I think it could give The Hobbit a run for its money.

This movie is charming to no end, and a lot of that has to do with Val Kilmer. Warwick Davis, who plays Willow, was very young at the time, and the character is very earnest, not unlike Luke Skywalker. Val Kilmer’s Madmartigan (a top five George Lucas name!) is the Han Solo-like rogue, who claims to be the greatest swordsman that ever lived and gets reluctantly swept up in Willow’s adventure, but it seems like Val Kilmer was having way more fun playing Madmartigan than Harrison Ford ever did playing Han Solo. He also suffers way more abuse. He’s locked in a cage when we first meet him, and he ends up getting locked up in several more places along the way. He’s stuck wearing half a dress and no shirt for much of the movie. He’s kicked in the face and chained by a wagon. He trades barbs with Brownies (tiny warriors the size of pixies). He’s struck by a love potion. He’s turned into a pig. And after an escape from a mountaintop, he rolls down the mountainside in a giant snowball.

When he finally gets to pick up a sword, which he doesn’t shut up about for the first half of the movie, he actually proves what a great swordsman he is, and it is awesome! He battles and defeats a two-headed, fire-breathing dragon, and in the climax, he battles the Darth Vader-like general in a particularly brutal swordfight (for a PG-rated movie at least). And he is charming throughout the entire thing. He even falls for (with the inadvertent help of the love potion), the evil queen’s daughter Sorsha, in a scene that is both hilariously cheesy and genuinely romantic. It should be noted that Sorsha is played by Joanne Whalley, who had a real-life romance with Val Kilmer. 

Also, for all the manly warrior swordplay, a good deal of this movie is about women in power. The evil queen Bavmorda fears the baby princess Elora Danan because of a prophecy that she will be the queen’s downfall, and Bavmorda sends her daughter to find Elora so she can banish her to the netherworld. And on the good side, Willow is helped by the sorceress Fin Raziel, who is the only one who can match Bavmorda’s powers. During the climactic battle, in a scene that is clearly a precursor to the fight Peter Jackson staged between Gandalf and Saruman in The Fellowship of the Ring, the two old witches have a wizards duel that culminates in them getting into a straight up dirty fistfight. 

The movie is endlessly quotable, thanks to a script by Bob Dolman which mostly dispenses with any pretense of formal language like Star Wars, outside of the dedicated reverence to spellcasting, at least. It also has a music score by James Horner that I count as one of his best. 

At one point, apparently, George Lucas intended to develop an animated series following the further adventures of Willow and his friends, to be done by the same studio as the Droids and Ewoks cartoons.

There was even a published book trilogy, “The Chronicles of the Shadow War,” which followed Willow on a quest to find and train teenage Elora Danan after a great cataclysm befell the world, but it is not an easy read, even if you can find it.

Oh, and just one more thing…

It should be noted, there was an official sequel series produced for Disney+ back in 2022, about the next generation following in their parents’ footsteps with Warwick Davis back as their guide. Joanne Whalley even returns as Queen Sorsha, and the specter of Val Kilmer hangs over the entire series in a way. Plus, the younger cast is truly delightful, and they make for some great relationships on a fun and harrowing adventure. There are connections made to the original movie while still allowing it to be its own story. One early standout episode is basically a long creepy haunted house story as the team takes shelter in Bavmorda’s old abandoned castle.

Sadly, the series, which only lasted one 8-episode season, was cancelled, despite the promise of potentially three seasons, and the entire series was removed from Disney+, so there is no legal way of watching it now. It was apparently controversial with some fans, but I thought it was a wonderful successor to the original, and it brought some new and interesting ideas and stories to the world, which has sadly not been explored enough.

Fortunately, Willow the movie is still available to stream on multiple platforms as well as still being available on DVD and Blu-ray, wherever they are still sold.

Stay tuned for more Hand Me Down Movies in the future, as well as other fun things I have coming up. 

Until next time…