Throughout this
week, Darren Reid has been
sharing Tweets and thoughts on
American superheroes, including this
article on gender in early Superman comics. Thanks also to Steve Sarson for connecting me to
Darren’s posts!
Virginia Clemm Poe responds to
Wednesday’s Wonder Woman post, writing, “TV folklore has it that before the
Wonder Woman show with Linda Carter aired the show was originally written and
(legend has it) that out there on the magic of youtube there's a pilot as a
comedy of a young wonder woman living with her cantankerous mother in a
retirement village in Florida. Think Golden Girls, but without the two other
chicks, and Bea Arthur's way younger... and has superpowers... not to say that
Bea Arthur doesn't have superpowers... I'm sure she did. Anyway, thanks for
writing about the female superheroes. She taught us young girls a lot about
life. Like if we want to be taken seriously, we should walk around in a
strapless bathing suit. An American theme inspired strapless bathing suit!”
I also saw
a bunch of references (on Twitter and elsewhere) to this great PBS doc on Wonder Woman and
superheroes.
Irene Martyniuk shares these
thoughts on Iron Man: “When I was working on a paper on Afghanistan at the
movies, you suggested I look at Iron Man,
and that has turned out to be a gift that has gone on giving. Iron Man, as you suggested, complicates
the already complicated Tony Stark story. I was completely ignorant of the Tony
Stark-Iron Man history and still am, for the most part, but placing him in
Afghanistan and having him selling arms to the US, right at the beginning of
the movie, immediately creates a weird situation (remember, he
demonstrates The Jericho--an
incredibly destructive mix of mortar and missile). Stark then becomes Iron Man
after being kidnapped and finally discovers that his partner is selling their
weapons to our enemy in Afghanistan. But wait--it's not the Taliban. It's the
Ten Rings. A blond, happy reporter tells us in the film that ‘they are on a
mission’ but what that mission is exactly is never explained and while Stark
eventually wipes them out--he destroys a small part of Afghanistan in doing so
and even lets the villagers become bloodthirsty vigilantes. Now skip ahead a
year or two. I brought all of this up in my Afghanistan class and we watched Iron Man together. Then, as one of their
mid-term questions, they had to imagine that Hamid Karzai was delayed in JFK
and noticed at least three of the people or characters we had read and/or
talked about that half semester and had asked his security team to bring the
people over. My students had to imagine the conversations. Not surprisingly,
nearly every student chose Tony Stark as one of their three for the exam. But
what made me real proud were the nuances of their imagined conversations. In
nearly every answer, Stark is his usual slick self, and he tries to charm
Karzai. And Karzai is a little tempted by the firepower Stark represents as
Iron Man. But Karzai then admonishes Stark, usually quite sharply, as an elder
would in Afghanistan, over the destruction he has caused. Most of the students
pointed out how the real Karzai frequently deplores the NATO/ISAF civilian
death toll, without mentioning the damage and deaths caused by the Taliban, and
they had him do the the same for Stark. By the end, Stark is flummoxed. All of
his snappy comebacks have dried up, and Karzai moves on to the next character. My
students also dealt with the issue of the Ten Rings and the Taliban. I had
posited that the scriptwriters had not wanted to name the Taliban since, within
the plot, Stark industries was selling arms to them, and this would clearly
imply that American-made weapons were being used against American soldiers.
Also, I explained, both in the paper and to the students, how films that use
American military props--being bases, materiel, etc.--must be cleared by the
military, and perhaps they objected. However, my students were much more
knowledgeable about Tony Stark/Iron Man and explained that within the comic
book series, Stark had been taken captive in Vietnam and held by a group called the
Ten Rings. I don't think it totally
destroyed my argument--they could have updated the name--but it does show the
mythology of the comic book story (and the students looked it up during class
to verify it). I miss that class.”
Next series
starts Monday,
Ben
PS. What do you
think?
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