I was 9 years old when Heavy Metal came out, although it would be a few years later when I would see it at my friend’s via VHS. I loved (and still love) the soundtrack.
I suppose I’m hit or miss on the actual stories. To a certain extent, I feel like they are less about creating cohesive stories as they are about animating a bunch of stuff that was cool in the 80s.
Me too, although I expected it to be disjointed and varying in quality… because I’d read the magazine. But I thought there’d be one sequence I’d really like…
…that was Harry Canyon. Cool line art (looks like early 2000’s indie comic book art, so it was ahead of it’s time) and a fun character.
I’ve pretty much always watched it sober, but your second sentence captures my feeling perfectly: it’s missing something. I don’t know what, but I’ve always come away from it asking, “That’s it? Shouldn’t there be more?”
Wizards for me.
Ditto on Wizards
I recently rewatched it for the first time since it was in theater. My sixty year old self was far less impressed than my fifteen year old self.
The South Park Major Boobage episode does a pretty good job of spoofing Heavy Metal, if you have the means to watch South Park episodes.
Did anyone watch the sequel? I never have, just wondering what it is like.
Not good. 
Saw Fire & Ice in the theatres. Couldn’t tell you the plot or the name of one character, which tells you how much it held my interest.
Wizards, OTOH, if you can overlook it as a rip-off of Vaughn Bode’s work, is quite good.
Wizards. It was doing great for a while, then went downhill about the time Necron 99 spoke, His voice was all wrong. And I’m not the biggest fan of rotoscoping. The ending of the film seemed a bit simplistic, a bit hippie. Also, I’m on the side of technology (but not fascism.)
Wasn’t Wizards just supposed to be a test bed for how to make The Lord of the Rings?
I loved Wizards when I saw it in the early-'80s. I loved (and still love) the Junkwaffel comics. But yeah, Wizards is very hippie-dippie – especially the names. I do love the climax though, and paraphrase it.
spoiler: The climax.
It didn’t really have any redeeming qualities from what I can remember. In fact, I can’t even remember what the basic plot was. The only thing I remember about the movie is that the main character was played by and modeled on Julie Strain.
I don’t think I’ve ever recommended that someone go watch Heavy Metal. I enjoyed it, but it’s not a great movie. If someone hasn’t seen it, well, I can’t say they’re missing out on a lot. But if someone is really into animation, the magazine, or 70s/80s groups like Devo and Blue Oyster Cult, then I’d recommend it to them.
I don’t recall any of those films being particularly “good”. But they were kind of cool and interesting in that it was relatively rare to find that sort of hyper-violent oversexualized style of animation and fantasy storytelling. Kind of like a Boris Vallejo fantasy painting that harkens back to a simpler time. When people were super-fit and rode across the wasteland on mutant chickens fighting cyborgs and mutants and whatnot in their bikinis.
Clearly an influence for Iron Maiden’s recent video for Writing on the Wall.. Like it’s less of a cohesive “story” as it is a mishmash of Iron Maiden Easter eggs, biblical references, and post-apocalyptic imagery.
(bolding mine)
I hadn’t fully considered that. My husband loves this movie. Adores it. Worships it. He was definitely a male teenager when he saw it, so… much is clearer to me now.
This parallels my reaction. I had bought the magazine a few times and found that it was more about weird, surreal art than coherent storytelling, so I didn’t expect a compelling plot from the movie. And I liked the “Harry Canyon” segment the best, too. I saw the film with a few friends, one of whom shared my enthusiasm for Taxi Driver—when Harry appeared on screen, we looked at each other and said, “It’s Travis Bickle!”
Although I enjoyed the film, I’ve never had any desire to rewatch it; I have the feeling that it wouldn’t hold up well.
I bought the soundtrack album. No, not the one you’re thinking of—I bought the other album, the one with Elmer Bernstein’s score. I remember that had to put in a “special order” at the classical record store near campus.
So did the Taxi episode and Den.
The aliens and B17 mostly didn’t, So most of the sequences did but some did not.
Thanks! Fun, but gross, episode.
My dad showed me Heavy Metal on VHS when I was about 7 or 8, as he liked showing me his favorite sci-fi and he’d decided that I was old enough to handle R-rated stuff. (He also showed me Alien and The Terminator around this same time.) I didn’t really get all of it, and the scantily clad women didn’t do a thing whatsoever for my preadolescent self, but I enjoyed it. The stuff with the Loc-Nar, the taxi segment, the Captain Stern segment, and the bomber segment really stuck with me even though I didn’t remember where I’d seen them and didn’t figure it out for another 10 years.