Well, I guess it was inevitable. The recent spate of super hero movies, movies which have been dominating the box office for years now, has started to receive a bit of a backlash. The most recent one I saw was an article in Entertainment Weekly where the author claimed to be a big summer blockbuster movie fan, but hated the “men in tights” thing that was going on right now. I won't give you the name of the author or the article title (mostly because I can't remember it) because I want that writer to know something: he's wrong.
Now, I guess you have to be a bit of a geek to truly love super heroes. I fall into that category and do so rather proudly. When I was a youngster, I fell in love with super heroes very early on. I blame the children's television show on PBS called “The Electric Company.” They had a segment on that show where Spider-man was featured.
This was not the Spider-man from the comic books. Well, OK, not to confuse things, but it was him, but the stories were not the same. He was not battling the Green Goblin who was busy throwing Peter Parker's girlfriend off of bridges and killing her. No, on the “Electric Company” this Spider-man would go up against an abominable snowman who was stealing ice cream cones. However, Spidey would inevitably be called in and would pin the villain against the wall with his webbing. This Spidey seemed to walk everywhere, without the customary swinging from the rooftops with his webs. When he shot his webs at the bad guys they made very cool sounds that I would imitate when I pretended to be Spider-man.
The thing was, it was live action and everyone in the skits would speak except for Spidey. When he spoke, word balloons would pop up over his head. This was to teach kids how to ready, you see, not to just provide them with a Spider-man interlude. So, I would say I started to learn how to read thanks to super heroes, so right there it's pretty cool to like them
To love super heroes you really have to have spent time as a geek or a nerd. I have friends who were crazily popular, and are still crazily popular, and they just don't seem to get the super hero thing either. For me, I love all of the movies and the television shows. I watch “Smallville” and I loved “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Angel” too. My friends cannot fathom how I can claim “Buffy” was one of the best written shows on television and keep a straight face. They just don't understand.
I was the kid who started to get fat when he was in the fourth grade. In fact, fourth grade was the time when the universe and fate decided to play most of its practical jokes on my life. Not only did I start gaining weight (for reasons never adequately explained, in my opinion) but I also started becoming near-sighted. So, yes, fourth grade was the first year I had to wear glasses. Yes, life and the universe was telling me, “buckle up for puberty kid, this is gonna be bumpy.”
I turned to comic books toward the end of junior high and then into high school. As you might imagine, as the word “teen” was added to the end of my age, things got worse for me. When you spend the entire day in seventh or eighth grade being punched repeatedly in the arm by kids bigger and stronger and with more knowledge of how to fight than you, you kind of wish you had some kind of super power to fight back. Only then can you appreciate how cool it would be to have claws, unbreakable claws no less, pop out of your hands. Only then can you appreciate how cool it would be to have superhuman strength so that a single push could send your attacker flying across the room. Imagine how cool it would be to get an angry look on your face, have your eyeballs turn greenish and then turn into a giant lumbering, impossibly strong Hulk! No one would mess with you then because no one would “like you when you were angry.”
So, it brings me back to those happier times that I spent between the pages of the comic books I loved now that they are all becoming movies. For a very long time Marvel was way behind in the comic book movie race. DC had Superman and then they started putting out the Batman movies. Finally, after years of financial issues and other wrangling, Marvel started putting out the movies. I have been there for almost all of them.
