Forum: Author Hangout

I'm not real sure what your point actually is, but this seems like a very peculiar assertion when the Disney/Marvel cinematic colossus is churning out blockbuster after blockbuster featuring exactly Stan Lee's superheroes.

I would argue they are not, as the tone and stories are very different than the Stan Lee era. This can be seen when comparing even the Reeve Superman and the Bixby Hulk with what is made today.

Back during that time, almost nobody died. They were all colorful, and required a huge suspension of belief to imagine a guy in bright blue and red spandex swinging over New York. Most times the biggest issue Peter Parker had was in finding enough time to study for an exam.

Today, the "Silver Age Prohibition" of the villains being homicidal maniacs is gone, and the stories are so much more intense. By the 1980's, Stan had already retired from actual involvement in the comics, and was working out of LA in their TV and Movie division. He was actually doing narrations for the Saturday Morning cartoons in the early 1980's, and finally had his first "Cameo" in the TV movie "The Trial of the Incredible Hulk" in 1989.

The movies today actually seem little like the 1960's and 1970's stories he wrote. After all, you will not see the X-Men in blue and yellow spandex, fighting in the Danger Room instead of beating up real people.

fighting in the Danger Room

No bright spandex, but they DID have a scene with fighting in the Danger Room in one of the movies, the third one, I believe (without bothering to check), where Wolverine got tossed through the air. They did it twice in the movie, once in the Danger Room against the robots, and then later, against Magneto, when Beast surprised Magneto from behind.

No bright spandex, but they DID have a scene with fighting in the Danger Room in one of the movies

Yes, but it was a brief scene, and was of no real importance in the movies. Where as in the comics it was a major feature. The comics were as much about the school itself, where as in the movies it seems more like a place they hang out between missions.

In fact, they even mocked the spandex in the first movie.

they even mocked the spandex in the first movie.

I know they did. Although the yellow spandex Wolverine is still my favorite.

The thing that you have consider is this - there are an ungodly number of years worth of comics out there. We already know what Hollywood does to a single BOOK. Now you're taking sixty plus YEARS worth of comics and compressing them into a few hours worth of film. What to leave in, what to take out - and then to have all those continuity errors and plot holes in the movies ...

The thing that you have consider is this - there are an ungodly number of years worth of comics out there. We already know what Hollywood does to a single BOOK. Now you're taking sixty plus YEARS worth of comics and compressing them into a few hours worth of film. What to leave in, what to take out - and then to have all those continuity errors and plot holes in the movies ...

Well, it is more that they have only run with the current version, as the characters have changed greatly over the decades.

I admit, I was into comics dating from the 1950's until the early 1990's. And today, most have no idea where much of the stories originated. I got into a discussion with one who claimed to be a "Comic expert" about a decade ago, who had no idea that the black Spider-Man suit came from the original "Secret Wars", and was in use until Marvel realized that the fans did not like the black suit so created "Venom" as a way to get rid of it.

But some things were already changing, as the 1986 "Dark Knight" series predates both the Burton movies and the more recent series. The Kilmer-Clooney movies were trying to go back to the older era, but the comics had already moved past the camp phase long before.

And that was clear in 1992 when the Marvel 2099 series started. Much darker, in a dystopian setting that even made Doom basically a good guy with how bad things had gotten.

But this is just as much the expectations of modern audiences. Where the original sources are often hidden behind a ton of CGI with little of the original left as without all that many think the original would not be watchable. Like the big movie a decade or so back, as Avatar as basically "Pocahontas in Space". Or The Hunger Games was largely a retelling of an old Stephen King book about boys walking.

I really got that when my son told me how much he loved "The Italian Job". And as he had no idea it was a remake, I got my DVD of the original and played it. And he said it was boring. No explosions? Dull!

I bought a DVD copy of the 1970's animated The Hobbit and made all my friends watch it, to show them how badly Peter Jackson screwed his version up. :)

One of the greatest things in that version was they turned the poem "Fifteen Birds in Five Fir Trees" into an absolutely earie song. And like all the other songs and poems (like the one the Dwarves sung at the start) were from the original book.

I was actually looking forward to how Jackson would do it... and nothing. As that was written as a kids book, he put a lot of poems and songs into it. And almost none of it made it into the movie, even after extending it to three fucking movies!

As much as I love LOTR and own the extended cuts of all of those, I only watched The Hobbit once, and loathe it. I much prefer the cartoon version.

Or The Hunger Games was largely a retelling of an old Stephen King book about boys walking.

That's a pretty big stretch, in my opinion, unless you're going by the 'Lawnmower Man' standard for King, where preserving the tiniest plot element counts.

About the only similarities are: dystopia; children competing (albeit in extremely different ways); there's a reward (implicit in competition; the rewards aren't at all similar, either); and someone uses weapons (again, huge differences).

There are other dystopian stories that are much closer to 'The Hunger Games', but it's not a clone of any of them (nor is, say, 'Squid Game' a clone of 'The Hunger Games').

If I had to compare 'The Hunger Games' to a King story, it'd be 'The Running Man', not 'The Long Walk'.

It's much less of a stretch to claim that 'Star Wars' is a retelling of 'The Hidden Fortress' or 'The Dam Busters', but it's not, despite the parallels to both.

That's a pretty big stretch, in my opinion, unless you're going by the 'Lawnmower Man' standard for King, where preserving the tiniest plot element counts.

I was thinking of "The Long Walk".

It is set in a dystopia future US, where once a year two boys between 13 and 18 are selected at random from each state to take part in a nationally televised contest.

All are taken to the Maine-Canada border, put on a highway, and then have to walk a selected route. There are no stops, and if they fall below 4 miles per hours they get a warning. If they get three warnings, one of the soldiers following the boys shoots them.

The walk continues until only one boy is left alive. Some form walking communities to support each other, while others band together to try and discourage others so they will hopefully drop out.

The winner of the annual walk gets "The Prize". Anything they may desire and a life of leisure, and it will continue until only one is left alive. And at the end it is implied that he actually has a dark future, as he sees a figure generally considered to be yet another variant of Randall Flagg - The Walking Dude.

The first time I saw the movie, it struck me how similar the two stories are. Especially the characters of "The Major" with "President Snow". And while it is an endurance walk instead of a Battle Royale and all are male, it is strikingly similar in backstory and intent to The Hunger Games. Two from each state-district, it is televised with a lot of spectators watching, groups forming together for either support or to eliminate competition, only one will be alive at the end.

The Major also starts the race by saying "Luck to all", and as the walk progresses each boy starts to hate the man, considering him towards the end not as a leader, but as a murderer and sadist.

I specifically mentioned 'The Long Walk' in my reply, along with reasons why I don't think it's all that good a parallel to 'The Hunger Games'.

Yes, there are some similarities, but the differences greatly outweigh them, in my opinion. Again, it's like saying 'Star Wars' is a remake of 'The Hidden Fortress'. It's not, but the parallels between the two are far stronger than between 'The Long Walk' and 'The Hunger Games'.

Again, it's like saying 'Star Wars' is a remake of 'The Hidden Fortress'.

Actually, it was to be a remake of the old Buck Rogers - Flash Gordon serials. Both of which were highly influenced and inspired by WWI.

In fact, if anything the movie that more closely resembles that is the Phantom Menace. Star Wars was written, rewritten, ghost written, and changed so many times between concept and movie that it was largely removed from any source material and just a mishmash of parts that Lucas and Foster thought would work together.

I suspect that much of the 'tone and stories' are exactly because of the 'Silver Age Prohibition'. My guess is that, without the prohibition, Stan Lee likely would've written some darker villains. Not in every story - Peter Parker should have storylines about balancing school and crime-fighting - but Captain America started out fighting Nazis, who are (as a collective lot) a decent stand-in for 'homicidal maniacs'.

My feeling is that the characters themselves feel true to who they were/are/should be, which is more important (to me) than the storylines. I think people are very interested in the sort of heroes Stan Lee wrote, but they're not interested in many of the stories that featured those heroes.

Part of it is that Stan started to break the Comics Code, with the drug storyline, but it was a process of slow and tentative steps. Had he worked in a different era, most likely there would've been different results.

Not that I have any great connection to Stan Lee, but a friend of mine was actually fairly close to him for the last five years or so of his life, and said that Stan was a great fan of the movies and felt that they did a great job of bringing his creations to the screen. I've seen that echoed in other quotes.

My feeling is that the characters themselves feel true to who they were/are/should be, which is more important (to me) than the storylines. I think people are very interested in the sort of heroes Stan Lee wrote, but they're not interested in many of the stories that featured those heroes.

That is true, which was kinda seen at the end of the CCA era. In the 1980s, the comics did start to get a bit more edgy, and they started running multiple stories under different names to show that.

You had the Amazing Spider-Man (real world, this is where Venom became a thing), Spectacular Spider-Man (set more in an eternal 1960's), Spider-Man (a darker contemporary than ASM), and as the years went by they made more and more. Of course, once again by that time Lee and Kirby were long detached from the writing.

But the CCA was already on the way out. In 2001 Marvel simply stopped submitting stories, and DC stopped in 2011. A day after DC Archie Comics also pulled out and the organization basically died at that time.

In fact, the creator of Archie was also for many years the President of the CCA. Which allowed them to barely skate along the rules they had put forth, and in many ways that was actually one of the most sexploitative comics out there. But done in ways that barely passed.

Those "wholesome comics" had so much fan service in them that most manga readers would likely blush. And the Archie-Betty-Veronica triangle also only barely seemed to squeak by.

But it is not just comics, all areas of culture changed a lot over the decades. Dark Shadows was "edgy" when it premiered, today it would basically be a kid's show. And the original Twilight Zone sometimes had censorship issues, but it is nothing compared to shows that are seen today.

But superheroes as a character archetype? Not going anywhere. And we know this because this archetype has been around for over 4,000 years and is still going strong.

I would argue not quite that long, as Gilgamesh is more action than anything else.

I agree with many that the 1905 story "The Scarlet Pimpernel" is really the first in the "Superhero" genre (And was one of 17 books and stories on the character she wrote). And many of the tropes seen later were also there.

A foppish dandy who seemed rather dim and harmless, yet would put on a costume as another character and do amazing things in trying to serve their sense of justice. In this case, helping nobles escape the French Revolution.

Sir Percy Blakeney seems like a nobody, a wealthy dilettante that later was copied in characters ranging from Bruce Wayne to Zorro and the Green Hornet. However, he is a master swordsman, a master of disguise, an escape artist, and a master planner.

He is more in the lines of Batman, Zorro, and Green Hornet in that he has no super abilities, relying upon wit and wealth to do what he does. Gilgamesh does not quite qualify, as he is a deity and was religion before it became "story". No more than say Thor did, until Marvel "un-deified" him, and used the explanation that he was not a god, he was just from a powerful race of long lived space beings.

Captain Marvel - Shazam as well as Isis would both use the same "Avatar" concept. That they were normal Earth humans, that could call up and become the avatar of a more powerful being. However, over time Marvel would retcon Thor so that it really was him, and eventually just dismiss the entire "Human identity" altogether.

I would argue that to be "Superhero", it would need either a secret identity being key, exceptional abilities that are almost unhuman, or a combination of the two. James Bond comes close, but he is just a gifted person, and his identity is hardly a secret. Harry Tasker from True Lies almost qualifies. As he does indeed live a double life with a secret identity, and his abilities are played as even better than Bond's.

However, Maxwell Smart would not qualify, unless you count dumb luck as a super power (which might be like in Domino). Neither would most of Arnold's characters in action films.

Any of of the Greek demi-god heroes (Hercules et-al)

Those are deities, not "men".

Batman, Zorro, and Green Hornet in that he has no super abilities

I think you could argue that Superman isn't really a superhero. He has no abilities over and above what anyone from his planet would have under our yellow sun, other than the ability to wear his underpants over his trousers without being embarrassed ;-)

AJ

I think you could argue that Superman isn't really a superhero. He has no abilities over and above what anyone from his planet would have under our yellow sun, other than the ability to wear his underpants over his trousers without being embarrassed

Which makes him one here. As well as his cousin, Krypto, and Beppo.

And in reality, the same might be said if humans ever go to space and meet others. A being from a high gravity planet would be insanely strong on Earth, and able to jump large distances and move heavy weights. Inversely, a human going to a low gravity planet in comparison to the natives would also be super strong.

Which makes him one here.

That's anthropocentric.

I think there ought to be a Theory of Relativity applying to superheroes.

A superhero should appear super to all observers.

AJ

That might be true if they were employing large R&D departments to create their toys.

Some like Tony Stark design and build their own gear.

Exactly.

Many of the first generation had little to no powers, it was their abilities and technology that made them so. Batman, Doc Savage, The Peacemaker (the original and not the modern version), the list goes on and on. And the same with most of the villains. Most of them had few if any powers. Like Lex Luthor, Joker, Penguin, Kingpin, Prankster, etc.

Aquaman: Remind me, what's your super power?
Batman. I'm rich.

By that logic, there would be no superheroes on Earth, because there have been those who outperform Earth's superheroes after showing up on Earth.

That's an interesting question. Superman, an alien, might be able to beat up Spiderman, but would he recognise Spiderman as having a superpower?

AJ