Picture from Free Large Images
My superhero film education continued tonight with Captain America, which confusingly came out (according to some rudimentary research online) in 2011 yet according to Mandi came before last week's film Iron Man. I thought that we were watching them in the correct order and it does appear to have come out first. There are clues and little references such as Howard Stark being a character who invents weaponry and is head of Stark Industries, the company run by his son Tony Stark in Iron Man. Listen to me sounding like I know what I am talking about after two films, I'll be going to conventions next in fancy dress.
Although I do enjoy these little blasts of escapism, I do have a soft spot for the less technologically advanced films and television programmes of yore. Next on our list is (I think) The Incredible Hulk which for me will always be a low-budget starring Lou Ferrigno, in much the same way as all the CGI magic in the world can't substitute Spiderman for the old series in which our hero appears to be wearing a onesie from Primark. I always try to wind Mandi up by citing Adam West as the best Batman which inspired my elaborate worldwide hoax in 2011.
There used to be a trend that followed the release of the big summer blockbuster (usually of a film about a well established superhero or comic book character) that began with (in my memory at least) with Batman in 1989. Television capitalised on the hype by jumping aboard the bandwagon and sending a work experience kid into a dusty cupboard full of videos to see what he/she could find. During the summer of 1989 I remember the Adam West series being broadcast on Saturday mornings and possibly Channel Four showing an old cartoon series. The Adam West movie spin-off also got an airing and once the dust had settled Channel Four waited until the Christmas holiday to show a 1943 weekly cinema serial, although they showed it daily and the continuity announcer had to constantly correct the 'come back next week' fanfare at the end.
This doesn't seem to happen so much nowadays, I would have been keen to see some old Captain America cartoons for example or some of the characters that make up The Avengers. There is something quite subversive about the big film companies trying to promote a serious version of the character while we are being shown camp and colourful low budget versions that everybody knows so well. When I was a kid I wanted to buy the rights (I was ambitious as a youngster) to two particular cartoon superheroes, Inspector Gadget and Bananaman. Somebody beat me to it with Inspector Gadget so I wrote down how I was going to kick start the Bananaman character (yes, I was like this as a child too).
My plan, which I wrote down when I was about eleven and wish I still had these notes, was to mirror what happened with the 1989 Batman film. First of all I was going to make a new movie version which not only told the story about the character's origins but had a much darker tone than what the public were used to. I would buy all of the comic strips and master copies of the cartoon series and make extra money by selling them on for broadcast and releasing compilation books of the strips previously seen in The Dandy. Obviously I would have exploited the merchandise opportunity that this presented, again inspired by how batshit crazy this sideline was in 1989. How I was going to do all this I have no idea looking back but I was always writing ideas down.
When I told people about this outlandish plan they laughed at the notion of a movie incarnation of Bananaman, however I should really have done something about it because I recently found this example of my ideas being carried out before I get the chance!
Picture from Wikipedia
No podcast this week.
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May housekeeping
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