Superhero movies part II

In our previous post slash episode we covered some childhood memories of candy company letterhead and failed comic book writing dreams in addition to the passing reference to the superhero movies. This week or month we may cover some higher level issues with the superhero movies that I’ve seen, as I have additionally and in the meantime between blog posts watched the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, all five of them, and have gained increased insight into the general trend in popular movie making in recent decades. 

Trend number one: Darker costumes, darker themes.  I call this theme the Darth Vaderization of American culture because I blame it all on the creepy sexualization slash worship of Darth Vader. Now it would be all too easy to blame George Lucas for all the wrong reasons, but I choose to blame him for more obscure and difficult and ultimately correct reasons. I noted the character’s paternal symbology almost immediately, even though I was ten when I saw the first movie. He was always lecturing people and pointing and using the dad voice when he walked in the room. And he’s walking around all these military guys and bossing them around and nobody refers to him as general or captain or admiral, and he never ducks when they’re shooting guns at each other! He’s just like a dad wandering around his kids playground while they play soldier. As you can imagine, I was not surprised by the big revelation in the second movie. I actually spoiled it for my friends, sad to say, by casually suggesting that he seemed to be letting Luke do better than he deserved in the duel.  “It’s like he’s his dad or something,” I said. They mocked me, but the big revelation hit them like a sledgehammer of comeuppance, leaving the popcorn and soda tasting like ashes in their shame silenced mouths. I would like to describe their ongoing due reverence for the wisdom of my insight, but the puncture sustained to their egos seems to have unseated their faculties, and they continue to claim that I did not predict anything. 

This darkness trend actually extends to professional sports, where the teams seem to be getting darker colored if not actually black design components, even the teams with cheerful happy mascots, birds and rodents, are doing makeovers with black pants and  redesigned, ominous, angry-looking birds and rodents. Of course the teams have changed their look this way to appeal to the American craving for darkness, for the release from fear that surrender to darkness affords. And also to scare their opponents. Does it work? Interesting possibility for a psychological study. See if the raiders have a better season wearing pastels, adjusting for injuries or key players fired for protesting. 

Enough about football. Live football is, blessedly, dying out. To be replaced by virtual sports. 

Trend number 2: Computerization of special effects, or “Sexy ghost people don’t have to explain themselves”. The pirates  movies span fifteen years of ghost zombies, and as the ghost zombies have become progressively more visually stunning and terrifyingly expensive looking, the plot elements and dialogue explaining their fantastic appearance have suffered some compensatory budget cuts.  The hokie skeletons of pirates number 1 had a whole crazy story and mechanism built up with Aztec coins of a certain quantity with clear rules that anyone could understand: take a coin and you turn into a skeleton pirate. The coins even have a skeleton on them, like a button symbol on a computer game, to show you what it does. 

Then the cool octopus and shark head guys from the next couple movies had a sort of mechanism, had rules they had to follow, with magic vital organs in fancy boxes that people could duel over.  But some of the details of those mechanisms began to get a little blurry as the story moved forward; specifically - and don’t ask me why I fixated on this because I don’t know and do not desire to illuminate that murky depth of my own personality - that the crew of the Flying Dutchman are monstrous conglomerations of undersea creatures because they are undead, so they have died and are some kind of ghost pirate, so like the other corpses of sailors lost at sea, they accumulate barnacles and little oozing weird creatures all over them. But then the main guy, or one of the main guy, gets stabbed and becomes the captain. So he’s undead, right? But then all the barnacles and sea slugs start falling off the crew, and they look normal, so they’re alive again, right?  Later on it turns out he has a kid with his wife, and it’s clear from earlier in the series that they were never physically man and wife until after he got cursed and joined the Flying Dutchman. So he’s definitely not undead. But then you see him and he has barnacles on him! He’s undead!  But no, he had a kid. 

By the last movie, the ghost pirates are so fantastic looking that they don’t bother with any coherent mechanism or explanation at all

Suphero movies part I

I’ve watched several of the Marvel Universe superhero movies now; Iron Man, Spider Man, Ant Man, the Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, and the one where the bad Hulk conquers the universe.  I shouldn’t enjoy these as much as I do (except for Spider-Man), as I am over 50 and the plots are absurd, but I do, mostly for the fantastic special effects, which 

look exactly how I used to wish super hero shows would look back when I read the Incredible Hulk comics and watched the TV show with Lou Ferrigno, and I had to watch the slow motion action scenes they always used in those shows to show superhuman speed and strength, so the actors wouldn’t look ridiculous throwing styrofoam rocks and moving their legs super fast like looney tunes people. It never really worked. 

I wanted the shows to be like the comic books, with dramatic but dignified poses lovingly captured by the artists, like heroic sculptures. Not slowly tumbling stunt men, always getting thrown by the hulk. Never punched or squished. That would have looked horrible, but young me wanted to see that, because wouldn’t that happen?  It happens with cars. 

I tried to make my own hulk comics, on candy company paper that we had reams and reams of because my older brother brought it home from his job at a candy company. Every page had a huge banner that covered half the page that was the company’s difficult to see name and logo over a colorful photo of jellybeans. It didn’t seem to work very well from a design standpoint, because the banner dominated the page and you could barely read the company name. 

I later discovered that the candy banner paper had been my brother’s project at the candy company. He’d envisioned  the candy banner paper propelling him to the company presidency, currently occupied by his scoutmaster Brother Olsen, or at least to a manager position. But Brother Olsen had not taken to the expensively inked banners and limited useable space of the paper, and I ended up with reams of scratch paper that I had the bad grace to complain about to my disappointed brother, after he’d hoped to salvage at least some gratitude, a glow of pride for his generosity to his younger sibling, from the failed endeavor. 

So I ruined it with my complaining, or at least so I surmise, as he did not say anything at the time, just patiently told me how I could draw on the blank side of the pages. But the huge banners bothered me so much that I ended up cutting them off with scissors and only using the half pages for my drawings and calculations which were merely rows and tables and pages of the recorded results of dice rolls, a strange practice which I became addicted to in my youth and early teens, as I had independently discovered what the dungeons and dragons people had already found, that the rolls of the dice afforded a pseudo realistic counterpoint of contingent events to the life of fantasy.  I didn’t see the gaming possibilities of the dice roll determinant.  I thought I was perfecting the ultimate comic book writing technique, a random event generator that would make the Orange Giant’s (my entirely original ripoff of the hulk) adventures more believable with their lifelike unpredictability. Anyone who’s written or tried to write a story will immediately understand how time consuming this technique would be in practice, and I did not devote much time to it in the end, not nearly as much time as I did sitting on my bed in my bedroom with the blue shag carpet that I imagined was the ocean with a book and a half page of scratch paper with the candy banner cut off, pencil poised in the air above the beginnings of an inept rendering of Orange Giant, fantasizing about the incredible glory I would realize with my invention. And the dice rolls that I’d conceived as determining the plot of Orange Giant’s adventures began to determine random numbers like the number of Orange Giant comic books I would sell after publishing my first issue (I had no ten sided at the time, so I used twelve six-sided with results coded as 0-5, six being zero), the scores from the Orange Giant football team’s (one of several sport franchises begun by me after the success of my comic books) first few seasons, and of course my growing personal fortune (devoted to building Orange Giant toys and robot suits).