I adored that show. I watched it for a few episodes when it was first on, and had the same “Meh” reaction.
But when I had a newborn, and was up weird hours, it was being run in back-to-back episodes a couple of times a day by a cable network, which went through the entire series 3 times while I was dealing with breast pumps and a reluctant nurser, than a furious nurser who woke me up twice a night (would have been four, but I tried to pump, so DH could handle the third shift. If there wasn’t enough, he got some formula.
Then, I was home all day with him, and unless I got myself out of bed to drive DH to work, which I did only if the babychik happened to by up, I had no transportation all day, until my cousin gave us a second car when babychik was about 7 months old.
I watched the show any time it was on, and totally identified with it.
There’s a classic cartoon (Looney Tunes I think) where it’s a normal cartoon premise where the big bad is threatening the heroes, and at one point he looks at the “camera” and says “And none of you people in the back row can do anything about it either!” So at the end of the cartoon when all hope looks lost and the heroes are captured and at the bad guys mercy you see a bottle ome out of nowhere and hit the bad guy in the head knocking him out, freeing the heroes. The bad guy now captured looks around and says “Who threw that?!” only for the an off-camera reply from a burly voiced guy “It was me one of the guys watching from the back row!”.
Audience deus ex machina is certainly a unique one.
I don’t think it’s a true 4th wall break, but there’s always “The Purple Rose of Cairo”, where the main character keeps going to watch the same
movie over and over because she’s in love with the movie’s main, who then proceeds to walk off the screen to introduce himself.
Along the same lines, in the classic Bugs Bunny cartoon, “Hair Raising Hare”, Bugs finally defeats the Monster (named “Gossamer” in later shorts) by pointing out that they are being watched by an audience. “Gossamer” looks out through the Fourth Wall, sees us, exclaims in horror, “People!”, and flees.
I watched that so long ago (as a kid) I don’t remember the short at all. But I could hear Gossamer very clearly shouting “People!” in my mind’s ear when reading that. It’s just stuck in my brain from back before I actually even understood the Looney Tunes shorts.
So, I was just reminiscing for some reason about one of my favorite books as a child, and I remembered that this thread was recent, and it definitely fits: Grover in The Monster at the End of this Book.
My son has this book. It’s such a delightful little story. He’s too young to understand what’s going on, but I love making the voices and gesticulations.
I would also contribute She-Hulk comics, I think it’s in the 2004 run of She-Hulk where Marvel comics are considered legal documents that accurately catalog her clients’ behavior. They are used as evidence in court.
That’s great! I remember John Byrne writing/drawing the book earlier, and started kicking that fourth wall right away… to the extent that She-Hulk even got across Manhattan once by just stepping from one panel to the other.
(LOTS of other examples, and references like “Spider-Man got to face Doctor Doom in his third issue, why am I stuck with Dr. Bong?” Much fun!)
Note the part where She-Hulk says, “Let’s see if I can do this the way Weezi showed me…”, and she says hi to “Weez”, her receptionist, who is completely unfazed by She-Hulk stepping across panels.
That’s because Weezi is the retired retconned Golden Age superhero “Blonde Phantom” (or “Phantom Blonde” - I can never keep them straight - her granddaughter was the other one), whose power was the ability to pretty literally break the Fourth Wall. She could step outside comics panels, spy on the bad guys by reading their panels, and teleport by stepping out of one panel and into another panel on the same page.
John Byrne always liked playing with and breaking the panel presentations of comic books, and in She-Hulk, he got the chance to do that in-universe.
I also don’t think it’s been explicitly mentioned yet, but in that series, She-Hulk knows that she’s a comic book character, a trait that other writers still occasionally reference.
