Tag Archives: long-overdue national conversation about race

Episode 6: Eternals

Eternals,

Long, long ago, a group of clueless, beautiful rich people came to our planet for an extended visit, to screw up our history and take credit for stuff that we invented. Or at least, that’s what they say in the 2022 MCU macrodisaster Eternals, which squandered Marvel’s social capital with too many characters and not enough sense.

On the podcast this week, guest Trevor Bolliger and I dig into the story of what the hell happened, starting with Jack Kirby’s cosmic failures and the white supremacist ideology behind the premise of the film. And it gets even more fun from there!

Join us as we talk about Kit Harington and his tragically small role, why Arishem and Ajak are terrible managers, and which Eternals we wish we could cut from the movie.

The podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, YouTube, Overcast, Audible, Stitcher and lots of other places. Come check it out!

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Episode 3: Steel

Hulk,

“First of all,” my guest says, already backpedaling two minutes into the episode, “I didn’t know that your intro was going to say ‘pivotal moments in the history of superhero movies.'”

But you take your pivots where you find them, and in this week’s episode of the Superheroes Every Day podcast, that means Steel, the 1997 Shaquille O’Neal epic that uses a spinoff character from the Superman comics to create something beautiful and utterly goofy.

My guest this week is Anthony Strand from the Muppet movie podcast Movin’ Right Along, and Steel is, non-credibly, one of his favorite movies. We dive head-first into the beautiful mess of this movie, talking about jargon generation, incompetent crime decisions, our new gang program, and the trouble with having a romantic story in which the two lead characters can only touch each other by their fingertips.

This is a high-energy episode with lots of enthusiastic recreations of the movie’s terrible dialogue, which need to be heard to be believed.

The podcast is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, YouTube, Overcast, Audible, Stitcher and lots of other places. Come check it out!

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Superman III 4.32: The Game… and How to Play It

Superman III, , ,

Luke Skywalker (Jedi Knight Outfit), Princess Leia Organa (Boushh Disguise), Admiral Ackbar, Squid Head, Chief Chirpa, Logray (Ewok Medicine Man), Klaatu, Weequay, General Madine, Ree-Yees, Gamorrean Guard, Emperor’s Royal Guard, Rebel Commando, Biker Scout, Lando Calrissian (Skiff Guard Disguise), Bib Fortuna for fuck’s sake, and Nien Nunb.

That’s the list of 17 action figures that Kenner made in 1983 to tie-in with Return of the Jedi. There are at least four figures in that collection that don’t even have proper names; they’re just like “Rebel Commando” and “Biker Scout”, and Kenner expected people to buy them anyway, which we did.

You know who’s not on that list? Wicket W. Warrick, the cutest of an entirely cute species, an Ewok so adorable that they gave him a middle initial. Kenner didn’t release a Wicket action figure until 1984. That’s how confident they were, that they could keep Wicket in the tank, and hold onto him until next year.

Meanwhile, you know how many action figures they made for Superman III? Find out the answer after the jump.

Continue reading Superman III 4.32: The Game… and How to Play It →

Superman III 4.29: Kotzwinkle

Superman III, , ,

So, get a load of this.

“Excuse me… sorry…” Engrossed in thought, Clark had stumbled against a woman in the street. She looked at him in disgust. “Watch where you’re going, you four-eyed moron!”

That’s on the first page of William Kotzwinkle’s novelization of Superman III, and it doesn’t get a lot cheerier from there.

Continue reading Superman III 4.29: Kotzwinkle →

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever 99.1: Make the Movie Anyway

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, , , ,

These are uncharted waters. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has become a mega-franchise that produces hits so dependably that it’s acquired a logic of its own, which does not resemble normal human artistic endeavor.

In 2018, Marvel Studios produced Black Panther, a profoundly successful movie about a character who was not particularly well-known before he started showing up in Marvel movies. The film made a staggering amount of money, with a $700 million domestic box office take. It was the #1 movie of the year in the United States, even beating that year’s Avengers crossover.

They planned to make a sequel, of course, with Chadwick Boseman returning as King T’Challa. Writer-director Ryan Coogler started working on a script, and most of the original cast signed on for the second movie. They were about seven months away from the start of filming on Black Panther 2 when the news broke that Boseman had died of colon cancer, a condition that he’d been struggling with privately since 2016.

At that point, the normal thing for the studio to do would be to announce that the film was cancelled, and that the MCU would regretfully move on without Black Panther. Instead, they decided to make the movie anyway, rewriting the script to have the lead character die offscreen on page 2.

This is a bizarre way for a movie studio to behave. They made a two hour and forty-minute film about how bummed they are that they couldn’t make a sequel to Black Panther, and released it to theaters, and then everybody showed up and loved it anyway.

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Superman III 4.3: Enter Gus

Superman III, ,

“Next!”

It’s an appropriate word to begin Superman III, history’s first superhero sequel. Superman II doesn’t count, of course, because the original Superman movie was planned as a two-part story. So this moment — the beginning of film #3 — is the first time the filmmakers have to skip over the origin myth, and start a brand new story from scratch.

And it begins, naturally, with a negotiation over how much money we’re going to give to Richard Pryor.

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Swamp Thing 3.22: The Kid

Swamp Thing, , ,

Soggy, scared and running low on second chances, Cable stumbles out of the scenery and into a new relationship with a young sidekick who, in my opinion, might secretly be a ghost.

I mean, explain Jude, if you can. He’s an extremely unwatched minor who runs America’s grungiest gas station. He appears to be puzzled by Cable and the energetic shooting war that erupts around him, but he keeps his cool and helps Cable as much as he can, appearing in the quiet moments when she needs him, and receding into the background when there are other people around. There is no evidence in the text that he is a human child, and plenty of evidence to the contrary.

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The Batman 94.1: This Would Be a Good Town Not to Be From

The Batman, , , ,

At this point in the blog, Superman II has two current plot tracks. In one thread, three powerful, untouchable people drop from the sky, and immediately start exploiting and gentrifying, destroying both the environment and the economy of a struggling rural town. Meanwhile, nerdy Clark Kent finally gets a date with the girl he’s been crushing on by revealing to her that he’s secretly rich and famous, and now he’s driving that point home by whisking her off to the ice mansion party palace that his dad built for him.

In other words, this is a movie about white people.

Now, obviously, that’s not unique for the genre. It turns out that big-ticket superhero movies tend to be produced by rich white people, so they’re usually about an individual or a small group of people who become immensely powerful, often from birth or by accident, who then battle the forces of disruption and social change, in service of the status quo.

And then there’s The Batman, which is all about how terrible white people are. And I have to say, it makes a compelling case.

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Superman II 2.21: First Contact

Superman II, , , ,

“Hmm, a primitive sort of lifeform,” Ursa muses, as she assesses the rattlesnake. Ursa’s just arrived on the planet, and she doesn’t know that you’re not supposed to pick up unfamiliar lifeforms. That snake probably had other things on its schedule for today.

Annoyed by the interruption, the snake strikes, burying its fangs in Ursa’s supposedly impenetrable skin. Wincing, she throws the reptile to the ground, and then sets it aflame with her magical heat vision.

“Did you see that?” she calls to her friends. “Did you see what I did? I have powers beyond reason here!”

Yeah, it’s called white privilege. A lot of us have it, unfortunately.

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Superman 1.87: The Other Movie About Black People

Superman: The Movie, , ,

I want to check back in about the history of blockbuster movies, which I’ve been doing sporadically so I can figure out how they work. So far, I’ve talked about the first blockbuster, the 1912 Italian epic Quo Vadis, which set the bar for the kind of large-scale spectacle that audiences could expect from the high-prestige movies. We’ve also discussed the first American blockbuster, the 1915 Ku Klux Klan recruitment film The Birth of a Nation, which pioneered most of the foundational principles of narrative filmmaking, and also made the case for the continued oppression and second-class status of Black people in the United States.

And today, we’re going to look at Gone With the Wind, the flabbergastingly successful 1939 four-hour film epic about the death of the Old South, and… well, the birth of a nation, I suppose.

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