Sylvester Stallone in Rambo: First Blood Part II (Image: GETTY)

The hugely successful film ten years later launched a multi-billion dollar franchise with five blockbuster films, turning Sylvester Stallone into an international action hero.

A cultural phenomenon, Rambo has spawned a series of novels, comic books, video games and an animated television series, inspiring pro-democracy protesters in Poland and others. people of warring tribes in Papua New Guinea.

Half a century later, a prequel TV series is in the works.

Such longevity surprised his creator, author David Morrell, who revealed how Rambo changed significantly from his original vision, betraying the anti-war message he envisioned in original book.

“I am amazed by the continued success of Rambo,” said Morrell, 79, a retired American literature professor, from his mountainside home in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

“Any writer who creates a character who thinks they will still be relevant in 50 years has a distorted sense of reality.”

Sylvester Stallone on the set of Rambo: First Blood Part II (Image: GETTY)

At book signings, Morrell labels the title pages “Father of Rambo.”

But Rambo has become a runaway child, almost unrecognizable from his creation, Morrell admits. “Rambo has taken on a life of his own. In my novel, he’s a really angry, disaffected veteran who wages his own anti-war campaign. He just wants to be alone, and hates himself for being so good at killing people.

“Hollywood changed Rambo. He is another character in the second and third films, becoming the poster child for enlisting in the army.

“When Sly was planning Rambo 4, he told me he wanted to return to the original character in the spirit journey. But in the end, they threw all that away and made a movie about human trafficking: we didn’t discuss anything.

“The fifth film, Rambo – Last Blood, is even worse. In the end, the producers didn’t talk to me. I felt embarrassed that my name was attached to the fifth film,” he said of the 2019 thriller.

“I felt degraded and dehumanized after leaving the theater. He’s not the character I created who said, ‘The mind is the best weapon.’ It makes him a fool.”

Sylvester Stallone (Image: GETTY)

Morrell’s debut novel First Blood was an international bestseller, translated into 30 languages ​​and never out of print. It tells the story of a troubled Vietnam War veteran who returns to America to find solitude, but is hunted and hunted by the police until forced to retaliate with deadly mastery.

Rambo has become a cultural touchstone, embraced by both war hawks and doves.

“First Blood was written as an allegory for what was happening in America in the late 1960s, with soldiers returning from an unwanted war in Vietnam and being despised,” Morrell explains. while racial divisions deepen. “Rambo has become a test. Some people see the novel and the first film as anti-war – that’s how I see them. But others see the book and the second and third films as gung-ho pro-military.”

Teaching at Pennsylvania State University in the late ’60s, Morrell met many Vietnam veteran-turned-students, helping him shape Rambo.

“We talked about what it was like to come back: the nightmares, the drinking, relationship difficulties, the feeling of paranoia – all the things we now call PTSD. It was through these experiences that I was able to absorb what Rambo went through.”

First Blood author David Morrell (Photo: Wikipedia)

Even though Stallone had made his name in Rocky six years earlier, he was lucky to get the role of Rambo.

“Steve McQueen was scheduled to star in First Blood,” Morrell revealed. “But as the film approached, people realized that McQueen was in his 40s, while the average age of soldiers in Vietnam was 19. That wouldn’t have worked.”

But Morrell has nothing but praise for the Italian Horse: “Sly is one of the great movie actors, with a lot of Rambo’s pain and inner conflict in his eyes.”

Stallone also co-wrote all five Rambo films.

First Blood highlights the problems faced by Vietnam veterans returning to an ungrateful America, very different from today’s widespread support for those who served their country.

“I have a feeling that the film, inspired by my book, has made a big difference in the way people view veterans returning from war,” the author said. “Rambo became a role model for disturbed returning veterans.”

However, Rambo was created from Morrell’s lifelong fears, after a traumatic childhood, he revealed. He was just 13 months old when his father, British Navy pilot George Morrell, was shot down during D-Day in Nazi-occupied Normandy.

“My mother was a seamstress who struggled to raise me, and at age 4, she abandoned me at a Catholic orphanage and drove away.”

He was raised by nuns until his mother remarried more than a year later and brought Morrell back home.

“My stepfather did not like children, so he beat me several times until my lips bled. He and my mother argued a lot. There is a lot of emotional violence. I will hide under the bed and sleep there.”

Morrell’s success as an author was followed by greater personal tragedy when his son died at the age of 15 in 1987.

“Matthew has a rare bone cancer that affects only about 200 people in the US each year. He had a grapefruit-sized tumor removed from inside his ribs and received a bone marrow transplant, but died of infection.

“Television and self-help books talk about closure, but in my experience there is no closure: painful experiences become a permanent part of you and the way you see the world.

“Then our niece Natalie suffered from the same disease and died at the age of 14 in 2009. I fell into depression and suffered panic attacks, sometimes five a day, for two to three years. I was emotionally adrift. It was a very turbulent time.”

Morrell saved himself by immersing himself in his work, writing a trilogy of murder mysteries set in Victorian England. “It gave me a way out,” he said. He never served in the military, but in 2010 went on a USO tour to entertain troops during the Iraq war.

“I visited hospitals where soldiers had lost an arm, a leg, maybe even a limb, and many of them said they were inspired to join the army by Rambo 2 and 3. In some way, I feel responsible for what happened to them. But many people told me: ‘No – I would do it all again.’”

Morrell cannot escape the irony of writing 50 years ago about a divided America, only to find that the country has recently become polarized under the divisive President Trump.

“I don’t support Trump at all,” Morrell said, adding a surprising note: “People assume I’m a Republican, but I’m a registered Democrat.”

Morrell consulted on the Rambo prequel television series in development, and has written 33 novels in a variety of genres: spy novels, action-adventures, mysteries, horror-thrillers His 2005 Creepers will be released this year – and recently completed a Western epic set in the 1880s.

However, despite his many successes, Morrell remained haunted by his personal tragedies.

“I wake up every morning and ask, ‘What the hell is going to happen today?’ Contentment and happiness are not the normal way of things. As life goes on, bad things happen.

“I am fundamentally an optimist, but the main theme of my novels is to raise awareness, so that when bad things happen, you are not a victim but can triumph over adversity.”