The star of the show: Howard;

For 12-year-old, first-time actor Jordan Prentice, any dreams of doing a huge, Hollywood movie must have turned into a nightmare around the time his head caught on fire.

Executive-produced by George Lucas, greenlit by Universal Pictures and featuring a hero from the pages of Marvel Comics (the first feature, in fact, to do so), the movie was a massive, $37 million production — around the same as Return Of The Jedi — and Prentice was chosen from hundreds who auditioned for the title role. During the winter of 1985, the shoot moved to Hunters Point Naval Shipyard in San Francisco, where a cavernous laboratory containing a giant “laser spectroscope” was constructed for the film’s grand finale. Here, Prentice’s character, Howard, would stage his final showdown with the villain: a monstrous, scorpion-like creature-from-another-dimension known as ‘the Dark Overlord’.

Being a three-foot-tall talking duck, Howard was tooled up with some heavy-duty weaponry —a laser cannon mounted on an electric cart. So the scene required Prentice, clad head-to-toe in a white-feathered, animatronic costume created by celebrated effects house ILM, to speed along in the cart towards the Dark Overlord (later to be added via stop-motion), swerving around explosions, while the young performer’s mother anxiously watched from behind the camera.

Director and co-writer Willard Huyck remembers the moment well. “The cart is racing toward camera and somebody says, ‘Oh my God, his head’s on fire!’” he tells Empire with a dry chuckle.

“It was some of the sparks from the special effects. His mother was screaming, ‘He’s on fire! He’s on fire!’ So we had this flaming Howard The Duck racing on a little cart. It was awful.”

For Prentice (who, many years later, would star in In Bruges), this was as bad as things got. After this incident, it was wisely decided that the bulk of Howard’s performance should be handled by the 22-year-old Ed Gale who, despite initially being told he was “too tall” for the part (he’s 3’ 4”), had been called back to do some stunt work and night-time understudying for Prentice.

Things didn’t get any easier for Huyck, though. Or pretty much anybody else involved in the creation of Howard The Duck. For them, the nightmare was far from over.