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Imagine how perplexing 1967’s Casino Royale would be in a world where James Bond never sipped a martini. Imagine watching 1995’s The Brady Bunch Movie without ever seeing Mike, Carol and the kids on television. Consider for a moment how strange The Monkees would look if The Beatles never made it out of Liverpool. Finally, imagine Fearless Frank without the iconic comic book of the same name. What’s that, you’re not familiar with Fearless Frank? Don’t worry — nobody else is, either. Fearless Frank is that strangest of beasts, a camp parody of a character that never existed. This is Adam West’s Batman in a world without DC, Tim Burton or Chris Nolan.

The lack of a parodic or satirical target makes watching Fearless Frank a confusing experience. All of the performances are pitched towards comedy — overstatements, awkward pauses, esticulations, mugging — even when the film is trudging through a thoroughly non-comedic origin story. See, small-town yokel Frank dreams of making it big in 60’s Chicago. Immediately after arriving, he attempts to rescue a moll (the voluptuously-named Plethora) from a gangster’s clutches, and is gunned down. His body is found by The Doctor, and Frank is revived and given training in the super powers. He does battle with the gangsters to save Plethora, and the gangsters retaliate with a robotic/clone version of Frank.

And… that’s pretty much it. Watching the film is a bit like watching Rocky Horror on video by yourself; without the wild crowd participation, the parodic elements just fall flat because they’re not unlike the things they’re parodying enough to be truly hilarious on their own.

That’s not to say that the director and producers weren’t potentially reaching for more — writer/director Philip Kaufman wrote The Outlaw Josey Wales, the story behind Raiders of the Lost Ark, and later directed modern classics like The Right Stuff, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Ken Nordine, the iconic radio announcer behind the influential, hipster Word Jazz albums of quasi-beat poetry does the voiceover, and briefly appears onscreen. Jon Voight takes obvious relish in his performance as Fearless Frank, this just two years before Midnight Cowboy propelled him into the limelight. Many of the rest of the cast were from Chicago’s Second City comedy troupe, then on the cusp of hitting it big in the 70s.

So, what went wrong? I suspect that some of the story was excised from the script as it clashed with the rollicking humor of the rest of the film. In early scenes, after being revived by The Doctor, Voight plays Frank as a child with The Doctor as a controlling father. The film critiques the lengths The Doctor will go to in order to maintain control of his “child,” only to have the child rebel once he gets a taste of freedom. While Fearless Frank seems to come from an earlier era, it was filmed as the counter-culture, from the beats to the hippies, were becoming more and more mainstream. When read as a satire of youthful exuberance, naivete and confusion bucking against the constraints of the establishment — either in the home (as with The Doctor) or with the outside world (the gangsters) — a more interesting story starts to take shape. Those scenes about controlling parents and Frank’s “youthful indiscretions” resonate more than the banal superhero nonsense of the rest of the film.

Unfortunately, as interesting as that subtext may sound, it never quite fully gels on-screen. The film’s final dramatic image ends up being as empty-feeling as the rest of the film — Frank’s costume, nothing more than a cheap suit, lying in the street.