Is Blu-ray Dead?

ZDNews has a column on the impending death of Blu-ray. It goes into some of the problems that Blu-ray faces but he misses a couple of vital reasons why Blu-ray will not take off like DVDs did.

Tiny Market
To play a DVD, all you need is a DVD player. To appreciate a Blu-ray you also need a fairly high-end high-def TV. Not a lot of people have these. This changes blu-ray from an impulse purchase to a major entertainment system upgrade. Conventional wisdom says that the format war between Blu-ray and HD-DVD hurt them both but this overlooks how few people had TVs that would show the better picture.

High Entry Cost
Blu-ray player prices are coming down but they are still high. The lowest are in the $150 range (according to the ZDNews column). At this point in their life-cycle, DVD players were already commodity items going for under $100. Just as important, DVD prices were around $5 less than VHS tapes. It didn't take many purchases before you saved the initial cost of the player. Blu-ray disks cost around $5 more so switching to Blu-ray will cost you beyond the initial purchase.

No New Functionality
DVDs offered several advantages over tapes. A better picture was one but the smaller size, the ability to go directly to scenes without having to fast forward or rewind, and the DVD extras made it a completely different experience than a VHS tape. Blu-ray offers a better picture but no other new features. Many people consider the DVD extras the best part of the DVD and that drove DVD acceptance as much as anything.

If Blu-ray hangs in there then it might eventually gain market share as people upgrade their TVs but this will take a decade. Does Sony have the patience to support it that long?

Heroes and Brickbats

I read two columns today complaining about Heroes. Both are complaining that the show is not living up to its initial season. Before I take that on I will point out the places I agree with them.

Time travel has been overused. I lost count of the number of alternate futures the heroes have to avert. There are at least two that involve blowing up cities, one with a plague,  and one where everyone has powers and someone blows up everything. There was one where people with powers are hunted but I think that this was also one of the exploding city ones. You get the idea.

So what about any and all other complaints? I don't think that these people remember what they were watching two years ago. The series up to the December break was slow and confusing. None of the plotlines had been resolved and new ones seemed to be launched weekly. Hiro was the only fun character.

Not that it wasn't engrossing, but as of mid-October all we knew was that they had to save the cheerleader to save the world. We had no idea how that worked. All we knew was the New York was going to blow up. When they finally did save the cheerleader, people were still upset because it happened so fast and because Sylar seemed to get away.

The second half of season one was a lot better and that is coloring people's memories.

In the meantime, the writers are having a lot of fun with the Heroes/villains concept. Most of the characters have jumped back and forth. Hiro is the consummate good guy but he killed his best friend. Except he didn't. His speedster nemesis is a thief but is repelled by her killer associates. Sylar was always a nice guy when he wasn't slicing the tops off of people's heads. Now we see this as an aspect of his power (This makes scense. He didn't start killing people until his power woke up).

The show's producers have promised to end the current arc by the mid-season break. I'm holding off judgement until then.

Looking back at Lost

First season reruns of Lost are showing on a couple of channels. Watching them reminds me why the show was originally so popular and why is seemed to decline, especially in the 3rd season.

One thing that strikes you is how much used to happen in an episode. The episode might feature the person who got the flashbacks but there were usually sub-plots going on, some of them totally unrelated to the person with the flashbacks.

The flashbacks were a lot shorter, also. Several 3rd season episodes were little more than framing scenes for the flashback. In the first season the flashback never dominated the episode. I would guess that they took 1/4-1/3 of the screen time. In later seasons I would put it more like 2/3 of the screen time.

Knowing what is coming doesn't change the experience much. I know that half the first season cast will be dead by the end of the fourth season but the episodes are interesting enough to distract you from this.

There were a lot of dropped sub-plots. A few of them like the meaning of the numbers were resolved in other media. Others might yet be resolved but it is hard to see how. Danielle's entire backstory would appear to have been dropped when she was killed. Then there is the statue and the skeletons in the cave. Some plot points have been contradicted. It was important that Claire raise her child but Kate ended up with him.

Some characters lost their edge. In the first season Kate was secretive and manipulative. At one point she wanted on the raft so she arranged for Sun to drug Michael, drawing suspicion to Sawyer. She regularly lied and tricked both Jack and Sawyer. More recently she has simply become part of a love triangle (or possibly a love pentagram).

Of course the biggest difference is that in the first season we were still meeting the characters and they were still meeting each other. Plus the island was still new. Now we are familiar with them. Introducing new characters helps a little but the core cast is still there and getting a little tiresome. Especially Jack.

The Princess Bride

I see that The Princess Bride is on AMC tonight. That gives me an excuse to write about it. This movie was a modest hit when it came out 21 years ago. According to IMDB, it cost $16 million and made nearly $31 million. At some point in the 2 decades after its release it became a cult classic.

I should mention that I have a Dread Pirate Roberts T-Shirt. (I am Dread Pirate Roberts #73249—Ask about franchise opportunities in your area).

• A few examples of the movie as a cult classic (not counting the special 20th anniversary release they did last year).
• We had a staff sleep-over on the Columbus Santa Maria in May. It was mainly volunteers in their late teens. A TV was set up for movies as part of it. The two movies shown were Princess Bride and Batman Begins. The teens knew a lot of lines from Princess Bride.
• Last week we were camping as part of a historic reenactment. Some parents asked their young daughter if she knew what our bellows was for. She remembered Miracle Max using one (and was surprised that I knew about the movie).
• In the 2nd season of the TV show Eureka!, an Australian character lifted a line from the movie, "He just made a classic mistake. Never go up against an Australian when death is on the line."

Part of the movie's appeal is its timelessness. The only part that looks dated is the video game that Fred Savage is playing in the opening sequence and that lasts less than a minute.

A bigger appeal is that it is one of the few movies that works for multiple ages. The plot is simple enough for a young child but there is quite a bit of depth to it, especially the dialog. There are all sortf of actual historic references (most of them anachonistic). During the duel, they drop the names of real fencing masters. The names of the rival countries (Florin and Guilder) are old currency. The rule about never get into a land war in Asia is a real warning.

Then there is the historic setting. Most of the movie was filmed at Haddon Hall, my favorite English Country House. Parts of it are nearly 1,000 years old including the chapel where they did the wedding. The boat that they used was so accurate that it even had medieval-style teardrop-shaped deadeyes (and I expect that few people reading this will even know what I am talking about which kind of proves my point).

The new season

The new TV season is off to a good start. All of my favorite network shows have shown at least one episode. Too bad the list of favorite shows is so short. Here's the list.

The Simpsons.
TV's longest-running sitcom, ever. Also the longest-running prime-time cartoon. The show was in a slump for years but pulled out a few seasons ago. It's impossible for it to be fresh after so many years but it still manages to be relevant. The season opener poked fun at Dog the Bounty Hunter and similar shows.

Heroes.
I didn't dislike the second season at the time but the third season feels much stronger. After an early a two-episode premier, we are now three episodes into the season. As always, we don't exactly know what is going on but we have a better idea than at this point in previous seasons. We do know that the heroes are going to save the world again but we also know that there are at least two alternate futures that the world has to be saved from - not counting the ones from the first two seasons.

Chuck
The lead-in show for Heroes is about an electronics store nerd who got involved in James Bond-style spy stuff. The first season was ok but it always seemed like the show should be better. It either should have taken itself a little more seriously or a little less. The season opener seemed stronger. They seems to have gone for taking the show a little more seriously. It is just as well. The Middleman on ABC Family sets the bar pretty high for over-the-top spy spoofs. There is still plenty of room for a classy crime-solving show with light comedy. There were several of these in the 1980s but they died off in the 90s.

Pushing Daisies.
One of the best shows from last year and one of the most original shows ever. ABC is pushing it hard which is a good thing. The show has a lot of continuity from one episode to another but it also has a narrator who tells you everything you need to know. The show features off-beat plots and stunning visuals. It picked up right where it left off. With the exception of a longer-than-usual opening naration, it felt like the next episode in season one (this is a good thing).

For those who have not seen it, it features a pie-maker who can raise the dead with a touch (they die again on the second touch), his partner, a detective who has a fondness for knitting and pop-up books, his girlfriend who he brought back to life (and can't touch), her aunts (one of them is secretly her mother), and the waitress in the pie shop who knows almost everyone's secrets.

Night of the Lepus

I'm watching Night of the Lepus on TCM. I remember seeing this when it was new in 1972. Time hasn't improved it. This movie was the tail-end of the giant animal horror movies that began with Them (1954).

Them was very good of type. The special effects were well done for the time and the script was well-written. Them was about a colony of giant ants. They were introduced slowly in the dessert. This colony wasn't difficult to take care of once the leads knew what they were fighting. The problem was that a few queens got away leading to a world-wide ant-hunt. The last of the queens turned up in LA in the sewers where the army had to go in and fight them.

Other giant-animal movies followed. The Beginning of the End had praying mantises attacking Chicago. Obviously, Tarantula featured a giant spider.

Lepus went for something completely different. Where other movies took insects which are already strange and alien, this took something harmless and cute. Lepus is Latin for Rabbit. The monsters in the movie were giant, carnivorous bunny rabbits.

The cast was first-rate with Stuart Whitman and Janet Leigh plus a post-Star Trek DeForest Kelley.

The special effects were... well, not so special. They mainly used close-up shots of rabbits to make it seem like the bunnies were large. They also had a fake rabbit that would only be seen for an instant when a rabbit was hopping on someone to bite their throat out.

I'm not sure why the rabbits turned carnivorous but it was crucial to the plot. Without the occasional bunny-slaying accompanied by bright red blood, the rabbits weren't any more menacing than a herd of buffalo. Given how slow they looked, a buffalo stampede would probably cause more damage.

The script didn't help a bit. No one seemed skeptical, or even surprised at the idea of giant rabbits. Near the end of the movie they need to lure the rabbits onto an electrified train track. Someone runs up to a drive-in theater and announces that a pack of giant rabbits in on the loose and no one questions it for a moment.

Happy Birthday Mark Hamill

The man who was Luke Skywalker turns 57 today.

Hamill got his role in Star Wars mainly because he could say the rather pretentious lines like he believed them. He describes himself as just a fanboy who got lucky.

His voice work goes back to 1973 when he did a few episodes of Scooby-Doo but it really took off after he played the Trickster on the short-lived live-action Flash. Until then people still typecast him as a hero but his version of the Trickster was so over-the-top that he was cast as the Joker for the animated Batman. He continues to be the voice of the animated Joker along with a long list of other voicework.

In 2004, Hamill and some fellow voice artists improvised a movie at the San Diego Comic Convention. It was entitled Comic Book the Movie and I swiped it for the name of this blog.

Save Superman's Birthplace

Auction raises cash for Superman's Ohio birthplace

An online auction began Tuesday to raise money to restore the inner-city house where the idea for the Superman character was conceived.

Two high school boys, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, hatched the idea of the man who could bend steel with his bare hands in 1933. Hattie and Jefferson Gray have owned the home and lived there for more than two decades, tolerating unexpected visits by Superman fans.

Auction organizers hope the sale will raise at least $50,000 to fix the roof, replace rotting wood siding and repaint the house, with anything left over going toward upkeep and future repairs.

(AP) Superman memorabilia is shown in the front windows of the boyhood home of the superhero's creator... Full Image

Among the items to be auctioned during September will be a T-shirt signed by Siegel, a walk-on role on television's "Heroes," and original art by Jim Lee, Murphy Anderson, George Perez, Tim Sale and others. Lee's drawing offer drew a $710 bid on Tuesday.

The Cleveland-based Siegel and Shuster Society and novelist Brad Meltzer's charity - Ordinary People Change the World - will run the four weeklong auctions of about 12 items at a time.

The Grays recently agreed to give the Siegel and Shuster Society first rights to buy the house at fair market value when they decide to sell it.

Richard Pace, chairman of the society, said it's important the old Siegel home be preserved.

"It's also great to see that we're finally recognizing the creativity of Siegel and Shuster and what they did to create Superman," he said. "We must save the house for future generations so people can take their kids to see it and be inspired to create something on their own."

Hattie Gray said she's excited about the start of the auction and what it will mean for her house. She also gets a big kick out of all the attention the home has received.

Meltzer's novel, "The Book of Lies," partially takes place at the Siegel house. Over the past several weeks, Tom Batiuk's "Funky Winkerbean" comic strip has been set in the house, with a "Superman" writer visiting the home for inspiration.

War Games

I was watching War Games on cable last night. It offers some interesting insights on how things have changed since 1983.

First, there is Matthew Broderick who was 21 at the time but looked convincing as a teenager. He played enough roles as a teen or young adult that it is difficult to think of him as being in his late 40s.

This was the first movie to feature hackers or home computers (the IBM PC hadn't been introduced when the movie was made). The computer that Broderick uses is an Imsai 8080. It was one of the first home computers made (I think it was the second). By the time the movie came out, the computer was obsolete. Most home computers made by 1983 were plain boxes, much like today. The script specified this computer, probably because it had lots of switches and lights.

When the Imsai 8080 came out, computers didn't have a bios to tell them how to load the operating system. The very first home computers didn't even have an operating system. In order to run a program you wrote it in assembly code on paper then hand-translated the assembly code into machine instructions. Finally, you used all of the switches on the front to enter your program, one bit at a time. This required toggling at least 8 switches per instruction.

The movie was meant as a message movie about nuclear disarmament. It begins with a sequence where a couple of soldiers log into a missile silo. They are given the order to launch (as a test) and fail. As a result the human element is wired out of the launch sequence. This sets the tone of the movie and is a plot point later when a self-aware computer decides to initiate a nuclear strike. The first time I saw the movie we got in late and missed the opening sequence. This changed the tone of the movie completely. I was quite surprised how different the tone was when I saw the whole movie.

The movie features a self-aware computer, the WOPR. From it's case it seems to have been built in the 1950s but it is still far advanced over 2000s technology. That's movies.

Here is a link describing how the technology was set up.

In 1983 the nation was convinced that we had to do something immediately about nuclear disarmament before the world ended. Compare that with today's urgency about global warming.

Where did Superman Come From?

There are two current theories about the origins of Superman. The newest one starts with the father of writer Jerry Siegel dying during a robbery. A year later he invented a bullet-proof hero who could stop any crime. Did the one lead to the other? Maybe but there was another strong influence.

Meanwhile, a character in Funky Winkerbean who writes comic books was assigned to write Superman. He is suffering from writer's block so one of the other characters took him to the house that Siegel lived in when he created Superman. The writer imagines Siegel lying in bed, bored. Beside him is a copy of Philip Wylie's book Gladiator.

Wikipedia says: The novel is widely assumed an inspiration for the character Superman,^[1] though no confirmation exists that Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel was influenced by it.

For anyone who has read the novel and the early issues of Superman, there is no question about the novel's influence. In the novel, a scientist discovers a way to give superhuman strength and speed to any organism as long as his treatment is applied in early development. After a successful test on a kitten, he tries it on his unborn son.

The experiment is a total success. The scientist's son is superhuman. He can hurl boulders like pebbles. He can run at fantastic speeds and make incredible leaps. He is nearly indestructible as he discovers in World War I the first time he is shot with a machine gun. But he has limits. He is only one man and he eventually tires. He has to hide his strength or people fear him.

During the novel he tries several things. He is a football star and a soldier. He tries cleaning up Washington DC. None of these work out. Eventually he decides to create a city of people like himself. He challenges god to stop him and is killed by lightening.

In the first couple of issues of Superman, he goes undercover as a football player. He stops a war. The cover of the first issue where Superman smashes one car into an other happened while he was cleaning up Washington.

And of course, in the beginning Superman couldn't fly. He just leaped, just like Wylie's character. Superman didn't have X-ray vision or any of his other powers, either. He was strong, fast, and indestructible.

It is clear that Siegel and Shuster used Wylie's character but they made their own changes. They gave him a costume and a secret identity. They reasoned that someone in a flashy costume wouldn't scare people. They also changes the source of his powers. Instead of a scientist working in secret, they had Superman come from a different planet. By far the biggest divergence from Wylie was that Superman was successful at everything he tried and that he devoted himself to helping people. Wylie's character never had any luck helping people.

Even though they swiped the concept for Superman from another medium, Segiel and Shuster's own spin on the character was far more important than the source material. Costumes characters had existed for a while (the Phantom, for example, was created two years before Superman), but they created the model for superheroes to come - the idea of someone with superpowers adopting a costume and secret identity continues to today.

Superman doesn't return

Wired has an article on Superman. A good bit of it is devoted to a court battle between the widow of Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel and Time Warner but it also mentions that Bryan Singer couldn't come up with a treatment for his next Superman movie that the studio would accept.

The speculation is that the next Superman movie will reboot the franchise. This is a good thing. The original Superman the Motion Picture was OK for its time but parts of it were too campy, even then, and it got dated very fast.

Superman's relationship with Lois got complicated in Superman II. She discovered his identity, he gave up his powers and the consumated their relationship only for Clark to realize that the world needed Superman. He recovered his powers and removed Lois's memory of the event. It didn't seem especially creepy at the time but what he did was similar to the use of a date rape drug.

By Superman IV he was restoring her memory so that they could talk then removing it again. It was definitely starting to get creepy by then.

Singer pretended that Superman III and IV didn't exist and picked up after Superman II. His version of Superman raised the ick-factor. Lois was engaged and living with someone and had a son. It turned out that Superman didn't use protection in Superman II so Lois had his son without no memory of how he was conceived. Did she know? Did she suspect? Is that why she wrote an award-winning essay on "Who needs Superman?"

Plus, Superman was raised to demi-god status or higher. He sees and hears everything and decides who he will save and who he will ignore.

Plus he used his powers to super-stalk Lois.

Then there was the gratuitous torture of dogs (one dog ate the other, Luthor planned to eat the survivor, Clark's dog wanted to play fetch and he threw the stick over the horizon).

It is hard to see just where Singer thought he could go after all this. He should have started from scratch... like the next director will.

Deja Vu Summer

We went to see the The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor this weekend and I flashed back to several other movies.

The opening sequence has Rick's grown son Alex (Luke Ford) opening a tomb in China. Between the traps and his leather jacket, it seemed like an Indiana Jones sequence. Parts of it were also reminiscent of National Treasure 2 (although that had more water).

Then there was Jet Li playing a powerful emperor who can only be killed if he is stabbed in the heart by one weapon. The Golden Kingdom had the same set-up (including Jet Li). Both movies also had a romance between a young westerner and an oriental girl who was dedicated to killing Li's character.

One thing it didn't feel like was a Mummy movie. It doesn't matter how many times they kept calling the characters mummies, they weren't. Clay warriors just aren't mummies.

The movie was like Indiana Jones in another way - the original cast is pretty small. Four characters were returning from the last movie. One, the female lead player by Rachael Weisz, was replaced by Maria Bello. Alex who was ten in the last movie was also replaced. That only left two characters from the original movie.

I haven't decided if it was a good or bad movie yet - two days later. Some of the action scenes seemed a bit off. It had the humor of the originals but it came and went.

Possibly the problem was Brendan Fraser - or the lack of him. To a large extent he carried the first two movies. Most of the humor came from his character. Few actors can handle an action movie with a light touch the way that he can. With his character's son given an expanded part, there was less of Fraser and Ford simply doesn't have Fraser's light touch.

The movie also lacked a suitable side-kick for the villain. In the first movie we had Beni. In the second we had the Mummy's girl friend Meela. In one of my favorite exchanges in that movie, Alex asked her why he should do what she ordered when he wouldn't for his mother. She replied in a musical voice, "Because your mother wouldn't put poisonous scorpions in your bed while you were sleeping."

There just weren't any lines like that in the Mummy 3.

Monks and sharks

For the last several years, USA's show "Monk" has been one of the best on TV. Originally passed over by the networks, it has won several awards and has even appeared on NBC.

The premise of the show is that former policeman Adrian Monk is an amazing detective but he has "problems" that keep him off of the force. Monk notices everything and can solve the most impossible crime while combating his personal demons.

At least that was the original premise. The show has drifted a lot in the last few years. It used to be about watching Monk solve the case and guessing what forgotten clue would be the murderer's undoing.

The new premise is to place Monk in new situations weekly. There are still crimes but they are secondary, more often an afterthought than the driving force behind the plot.

The current season opener is an example. Monk bought the house that had been a crime scene. The explanation for this was that Monk's psychiatrist died (as did the actor who played him) so he wanted to change everything in his life. In reality, this was just an excuse to place Monk in an uncomfortable situation.

Monk noticed that a ceiling light was off-center and had a handy-man move it. While doing this, the handy-man noticed several other problems and called in a helper. The two kept finding additional problems and tearing up the new home.

Monk's phobias include dirt, dust, and messiness so having two strangers tear up his spotless house was a nightmare for him. Eventually it turned out that they were looking for money that had been hidden in the house. Monk didn't do any actual detective work in this one.

This is either because the writers got lazy or because the management at USA wanted to stress Monk's character over the crimes. Either way, the show has jumped the shark.

Taking the law into their own hands

{warning - spoilers ahead}

At a time when we are struggling with the limits to government power, it is interesting to look at our heroes.

First there was Iron Man. When he discovered that his weapons systems were being used by terrorists he built a suit of armor and took them out personally.

Then there is Hellboy. If someone refuses to answer a question then Hellboy beats on him until the subject talks.

This question is asked again and again in Dark Knight. Batman tries to beat information out of the Joker and the police let him. District Attorney Harvey Dent puts a gun to someone's head and flips a coin to see if he should shoot (this is a bluff since it is a double-headed coin). At one point a criminal tells Batman straight out that he isn't scary enough to compete with the Joker. Eventually Batman lets the world think that he is merciless in order to uphold Dent's reputation.

Out here in the real world, none of this would be tolerated. We want results from our heroes but we also want their hands to be clean. Funny how we allow our fictional heroes more latitude than real-life law enforcement authorities.

Movie Ratings

Coming home from dinner tonight we were talking about movie ratings. We remembered 1984, the year that created PG-13. Steven Spielberg was the person responsible with two movies - Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom which he directed and Gremlins which he produced.

Later my wife stumbled on this list of movies that shouldn't have been rated PG.

Which led to this post on rating inflation.

Originally movies were suitable for all audiences. In the 1960s this changed slightly. Some movies were rated "M" for Mature Audiences Only. They weren't kidding about this rating.

The next step was a five-tiered system, "G", "PG", "R", and "X". The "G" rating was not meant to specify children's movies. It was meant to designate the type of movie that had been made for decades. PG meant some violence, blood, or possibly a flash of nudity. R meant either gory violence, nudity, or soft-core sex. X usually meant explicit sex.

During the 1970s, a movie rated PG was at least equivalent to the modern PG-13. That's how most of the movies on the list got a PG rating.

A few trends converged over time. Porn movies started using the designation "XXX" which tarred all X-rated movies as soft-core porn. The fact that several early X-rated movies had strong sexual content cemented this association. Decency groups began protesting and theaters stopped booking X-rated movies. If a movie was rated X the studio would either appeal the rating or cut enough footage to lower the rating.

At the same time, studios started requesting a PG rating for movies that should have been rated G in order to imply that they were not kid's movies. Soon, Disney was the only studio releasing G-rated movies.

By the early 1980s movies were either rated PG or R. In the two notorious releases in 1984, both needed a wider audience than an R rating would get them so Spielberg managed to get them released as PG. When the complaints came he was the first one to say that there should be a stronger rating (which shifted blame from his movies). Make no mistake though, he was to blame. He had already sold the toy rights for Gremlins. He had to appeal to kids.

Which Hulk?

Most comic book characters are fairly straightforward when moving to live action. The specific treatment may change as the various Batman movies have shown, but he has always been a masked crime-fighter.

The Hulk is a different case. I've written before about how many times Marvel has reinvented the character. During his comic's original run he was reinvented every issue or two.

Which one should be brought to the screen? And how?

The TV show followed THE FORMULA for high concept TV shows. In this the high concept appears twice. The first appearance is a teaser. The second appearance is longer and wraps up the plotline. The high concept never gets more than 15 minutes screentime, total, often much less. This formula has been applied to everything from the fights in Kung Fu to aerial combat in Airwolf. It was the rule for the Hulk TV series. That meant that Bruce Banner was the real star.

The original Hulk movie and the current reboot followed this formula but that isn't the only way they could have made the movies. They could have had Banner in Hulk mode the whole time. This would have been in keeping with the comic where Banner has gone for years without making an appearance.

The Lord of the Rings proved that a realistic CGI character can have an important part with major screentime.

Then there is the guy in a rubber suit. It worked for both the Thing in the Fantastic Four and for Hellboy. This would have been a less impressive Hulk but he would have been more believable. The quality of the CGI was one of the complaints people had about the first movie and early reviews have indicated that it still isn't as good as it needs to be.

One option that was rightly abandoned was painting a body builder green which is what the TV show did.

The Comic Book Menace

The Ten-Cent Plague is a new book about the crusade against comic books in the 1950s. I haven';t seen it yet but I've read a review of it and the author was on the Colbert Report last night. I'm not going to try to review a 448-page book that I haven't seen but I can talk about the period.

Most people forget but in the Golden Age of comics, during the 1930s through World War II, more adults than kids read comic books. Like the pulps, comic books were cheap, escapist entertainment. When America came back from war and the economy took off, adults left escapism behind for kids. This caused some important changes in the industry. The first was that some publishers dropped out of the business. DC had been suing Fawcett, the publishers of Captain Marvel over copyright violations. After dragging the case on for years Fawcett looked at their declining sales figures and folded in 1953, turning the characters over to DC.

DC's superhero line survived and grew by cutting back nearly everything but their core of Superman and Batman. Marvel (then known as Timely) tried to revive their superheroes a couple of times but failed.

The audience for comic books had changed. It was a new generation and they wanted something different than their parents' comic books. The new trends were in horror and crime comics. Other subjects included comedy, funny animals, war comics, westerns, and teenagers (Archie and friends). Still, it was the crime and horror comics that dominated lead by EC Comics.

In the early 1950s a school psychiatrist named Frank Wertham noticed that every child who was referred to him read comic books. He started looking at these comics and was horrified at the content. He became convinced that the comic books were corrupting the kids. Worse, he discovered that even kids whose parents didn't allow them to buy comic books knew all about the contents. Even young girls who said that they only read funny animal books could describe the contents of the crime comics.

Wertham wrote a book called Seduction of the Innocent that scared Americans to death. He began by listing a number of crimes with the clincher that all of them were depicted in comic books. He suggested that reading Wonder Woman made girls lesbians and got a gay male to describe his fantasies for what Batman and Robin did in their off-hours. But Wertham's main focus was on the horror and crime comics.

There were Congressional hearings and mass burnings of comic books. There was talk of outlawing them.

The comic book industry responded by creating the Comics Code which regulated the content of comic books. EC found that nearly its entire line was outlawed. Their publisher, William Gaines responded by changing the format of his remaining book from comic to magazine and aiming it at a more mature audience. This was Mad and it continued to appeal to adults through the 1960s (the first issue I read was my parents').

The comic book industry turned back to superheroes as its mainstay. DC began introducing new characters based on ones from the 1940s starting with the Flash. In 1961 Marvel followed suit by introducing a superhero team, the Fantastic Four. All of this led to the Silver Age of comics.

Since then the Comics Code has lost its grip. Stan Lee and Marvel challenged it around 1970 with some anti-drug stories. All drug use was banned by the code, even anti-drug stories (a lot of crime comics involved drugs). Marvel published three issues of Spider-Man without the code symbol and no one cared. As a result, the code was modernized.

Today most comics are sold through specialty stores. Most independent labels don't bother with the Comic Code and the target audience is back to mainly adult.

We've come full circle.

Indiana Jones and the Impossible Expectations

Many critics and many viewers were disappointed in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Is this justified? It depends on your expectations.

No, this wasn't the greatest action movie ever made.

Yes, it was a satisfying sequel to the original Raiders of the Lost Ark. As far as I am concerned, it was the first satisfying sequel. The second movie, Temple of Doom, was just plain bad. I watched it again a couple of weekends ago and it has not aged well.

The third movie, Last Crusade, was much better but I didn't like the ending for several reasons. The biggest is that they found the Holy Grail only to lose it forever. Oops. I thought that Indy's father should have stayed to become the Grail's new keeper, thus fulfilling his life's ambition.

Crystal Skulls follows the general formula pretty well. There is an opening sequence followed by the real plot. In this movie the two are more closely linked. Indy starts out looking a little old and rusty but the longer the movie goes on the less you notice it.

It was established in the first movie that Indy can beat the average goon so Skulls doesn't even bother showing all of the fights. The supporting characters watch Indy climb on top of a truck and commies start falling off.

The communists are a good replacement for the Nazis. They establish early on how ruthless they are and go from there.

There are some major plot holes. I won't go into them. Ignore them and the movie works better.

I went in expecting a 50s adventure movie with 50s aliens and I was not disappointed. Mutt was a lot more enjoyable than I expected. The return of Marion was a great move.

So why are people complaining? The original movie was a lightening in the bottle event that holds up after decades and multiple viewings. That is nearly impossible to top. The Crystal Skulls at least manages to capture a lot of the original feel without embarrassing itself but it cannot stand on its own. Too much of the movie references the earlier releases.

But this is a sequel so what's the problem?

Flight part 4

I've written some other entries on how superheroes fly but I didn't get into assisted flight. This is usually done with rocket boots, jet packs, flying belts, or, occasionally, rings.

The Rocketeer is a great example of flying with a jetpack. As portrayed in the movie, there are serious issues with control. The Rocketeer solved some of these problems with a fin on his helmet. The movie also had a few other nods to physics. He only flew in short bursts reflecting the fact that a pack like that couldn't have more than a few minutes of fuel. Landing was difficult. Finally, the whole thing ran on highly alcohol and could burst into flames if there was a leak.

More common in comic books are rocket boots. These are usually as light as hiking boots but contain enough fuel for extended flight. They also allow the wearer to hover, fly like a missile, or land. Obviously several laws of physics are being violated here.

The movie version of Iron Man addressed several of these. Stark's first attempt at flight gets him airborne for a few seconds but doesn't allow for any sort of soft landing. It's more a ballistic trajectory. Later Stark adds thrusters to his gloves so that he can balance. He also has flaps that pop out of his suit to assist banks and other maneuvers. Even with all of this, he still has some problems. This is probably the most realistic example of powered personal flight.

There is one big question about Iron Man's flight - how do those thrusters work? The movie drops the term "repulsor" early on. These might work something like the repulsor rays in the comic version. These were always represented as being different than his boot jets but jets that are only an inch or two thick (and still leave room for retractable skates) are impossible. Presumably the repulsors are similar to ion drive except with much greater thrust. They are powered by Stark's chest piece which represents a miracle in electrical power production.

The Legion of Super-Heroes has gone through a few generations of powered flight. They started out with backpacks then moved to flying belts. Finally they developed flying rings. These use an anti-gravity metal. Will-power is also required.

Meanwhile, in the real world, someone demonstrated a jet-powered flying wing. This has several drawbacks. You have to be dropped from an airplane in be high enough, you only have around five minutes of fuel, and you use a parachute to land. Control is accomplished by the flier's body movements. Still, this is getting close to the Rocketeer.

Iron Man & Politics

I mentioned the politics of Iron Man briefly before. I'd like to go into more detail.

--------- SPOILERS ------------------------

A couple of minutes into the movie Tony Stark has a life-changing experience. He is blown up by one of his own company's missiles.

So what does he do? He builds a new weapon and breaks out. When he gets home he announces that his company is going to stop making weapons but not because he has suddenly been transformed into a pacifist. His concern is that the wrong people are getting hold of the weapons.

His solution - build a better weapon and take over personally.

I'd like to point out that this isn't a comic book where heroes don't kill. Iron Man kills lots of terrorists. Some of them are faceless like the crew in the tank. Others he targets and blasts without a trace of remorse.

He's fighting a war with the terrorists. When he flies through a no-fly zone and has to take on a couple of American jets, he doesn't fight them, he just tries to avoid one, eventually having to save a pilot.

Eventually the big villain turns out to be an American - Stane - but Stane is a traitor. He is selling weapons to the enemy.

The US government, as embodied by SHIELD, supports what Stark did and would have arrested Stane if he hadn't gotten his Iron Monger armor working first.

There is never any suggestion that US policy is at fault. No snarky comments about how everything is W's fault. No suggestion that the military is anything but dedicated. When he returns, Stark tries to get his military liaison to help with the armor.

In the opening part of the movie, Stark is grilled by a liberal reporter who hits him with leading questions. He answers all of them and seduces her for good measure. He never shows any signs of backing off of the sentiments expressed. It is unlikely that, even before he was injured he would have approved of selling arms to terrorists. The main difference is that after his injury he started taking matters into his own hands.

I've seen a conservative or two complain about the movie. I don't see this. I suspect that the person complaining is so used to liberal Hollywood productions that he assumed there must be a liberal message hidden in Iron Man somewhere.

Not here.

Iron Man took in over $100 million its first weekend for the second biggest non-sequel opening. The way things have been going, the just-announced sequel will bring in even more.

This is the first movie to show Taliban-style terrorists as the bad guys and Americans (except for Stane) as the good guys. It's opening weekend gross was higher than the last several anti-US movies put together. Coincidence?