The Weasel’s going to die. This isn’t a spoiler, I just can’t imagine James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad movie killing off a slew of its huge cast of villains and the gross, ratty anthropomorphic animal not being among the dead. Still, I suddenly hope he survives as Gunn has just revealed the inspiration for the movie’s take on the DC comics character, and it’s just… (chef kiss).
Gunn dropped this little fun fact on Twitter, along with a picture of his brother Sean, who did the motion-capture performance for the Weasel (as well as Rocket Raccoon during the Guardians of the Galaxy movies). And the inspiration was… well, I’ll give you a hint: Ack!
My brother’s shirt last night (for those who don’t know, Bill the Cat was the inspiration for his character The Weasel in #TheSuicideSquad). pic.twitter.com/OGM6w0773o
— James Gunn (@JamesGunn) May 28, 2021
I was about to write the article as if everyone reading it would be as intimately familiar with the classic ‘80s comic strip Bloom County by Berkeley Breathed as I am, and then I remembered this couldn’t possibly be true. As his orange fur and black stripes imply, Bill the Cat was a parody of Garfield that was designed to be so disgusting that he would be utterly unmerchandisable. (This failed; a lot of Bill merchandise was sold, just not nearly as much as Garfield.) While he could talk, he almost exclusively said/screamed “Ack!” and “Thbbft!” because he was completely strung out after a life of alcohol abuse, drug abuse, and Tender Vittles abuse. Over the course of the comic, Bill was the frontman for the heavy metal band Deathtongue, a televangelist, a Soviet spy, occasionally dead, and a three-time presidential candidate (he was dead one of the times). He also had his brain swapped with Donald Trump’s for a while.
Honestly, about the only thing that would make this better is if Bill the Cat himself replaced the Weasel in the Suicide Squad. It’s highly unlikely, but after the movie premieres on August 5, there’ll almost certainly be a few open slots on the team roster…