On 5/7/2012 8:11 AM, nick wrote:
> On May 6, 7:05 pm, Bill Anderson<
billanderson...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>> And I suspect I never will get it; I'm no more likely to understand it
>> than I am to suddenly begin enjoying hip-hop music. Its record-breaking
>> popularity is as foreign to me as ... as ... The Marcels' "Blue Moon"
>> was to my parents in 1961 when they couldn't figure out why anybody
>> would ever tamper like that with a classic Rodgers and Hart tune. Bahm
>> diddy bahm.
>>
>> The Avengers are second tier, no, THIRD tier superheroes whom I
>> disdained even in childhood -- at least I disdained the ones who were
>> around in my childhood. I don't care if there's an audience for the
>> Transformers or GI Joe or Battleships or even The Avengers; it doesn't
>> upset me that, temporarily anyway, superheroes have somehow achieved
>> superpopularity, or that THE AVENGERS have broken all opening weekend
>> box office records. I'm just saying I don't understand, I'm old, I'm out
>> of it, popular culture is passing me by, and ... well ... I don't care.
>>
> But if popular culture is passing you by, it's passing you by with a
> cultural artifact of your generation.
Not really. I read Superman and Batman voraciously, and even Aquaman
and Plastic Man and Wonder Woman and Green Lantern and Captain America
and The Flash when friends with more dimes than I would let me read
their stashes. And OK, Uncle Scrooge when the Beagle Boys were
involved. But all that stopped, really, around ... the 9th grade?
10th? And that, for me, was about 1962, give or take. I really wasn't
reading comic books in high school.
So maybe that's why I don't connect with these characters:
Iron Man -- 1963
Hulk -- 1962
Thor -- 1962
Black Widow -- 1964
Hawkeye -- 1964
Loki -- 1962 (OK, technically 1949, but really that doesn't count)
Nick Fury -- 1963
Maria Hill -- 2005
and
Captain America -- 1941 and still around for me 15 years later. But
now, at age 64, I really have no interest in whether the old Captain has
finally defeated the Nazis. And for me, all the others are the "new"
comic book characters who never captured my imagination.
It's a lot like Star Wars where
> there was two audiences--the younger audience responding the whiz-bang
> spectacular and an older audience, schooled in Flash Gordon and Buck
> Rogers, who were appreciative that the things they grew up on were
> being revisited but with better production values and a seriousness of
> delivery.
I question whether that's the truth or hype or unsubstantiated guessing.
I turned 30 two weeks prior to the original Star Wars release in 1977,
and my appreciation for that movie had nothing to do with gratitude that
somebody was taking Flash Gordon seriously again. I liked the movie
because it thrilled me. It was a joy, start to finish, and there was no
nostalgia involved -- not for me, anyway. And I don't recall any of my
friends who loved it as well, several of whom were a good bit older than
I, saying they liked Star Wars because it brought back memories of Buck
Rogers. It was a good movie because it gave birth to a thrilling new
galaxy far far away.
Another difference between the popularity of Star Wars and that of the
Avengers is that Star Wars took weeks to build its audience. It opened
in only two cities that Memorial Day weekend of 1977, New York and Los
Angeles, and luckily I was in New York. When I came back home to
Tennessee I stopped by a summr camp where I'd been a counselor a few
years prior, and I discovered the kids had never heard of Star Wars. I
got to tell them the names of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader for the
first time in their lives and they just gave me dumb looks. I said,
"Just you wait a couple of weeks."
The point is, I don't doubt at all that many who are attending THE
AVENGERS are doing so because it's bringing back memories of childhood.
Hooray for them, if that's what they want. What puzzles me is that
this particular movie about these particular characters has set an
all-time box office record in its first weekend. More people know
Superman than know the Avengers, and the movie with Christopher Reeve
was very popular indeed. But it didn't do the kind of business the
Avengers is doing. It's like somehow the zeitgeist over the past few
years has been overrun by adolescent dreams of grandeur. The Great
Depression had Astaire and Rogers; maybe the age of Fox News needs the Hulk.
Like I pointed out in another post, what's interesting
> about this summer is most of the big releases, The Avengers,
> Battleship, Spider-Man, Dark Shadows, The Dark Knight Rises have their
> roots in popular culture generations that had their moment long before
> the current one. At some point thirty years or so down the road, you
> have to guess there'll be a 500 million dollar Mighty Morphin Power
> Rangers movie or something like that, once the kids who grew up on the
> Power Rangers are old enough to run Hollywood. It's funny how the
> tastes of kids is dictated by what their elders enjoyed when they were
> young.