No mention of Kim “couger trap” Bauer?
Brian
How about Pauline, the girl in the Donkey Kong video game? She just stands there and lets Donkey Kong keep taking her up the tower.
:eek:
Oh, hell yes, and then they make her dance in red hot iron shoes. That’s my idea of punishment.
But the cartoon version didn’t do a whole lot to save herself.
Amen to dat, brudda.
The [strike]Best[/strike] Worst of the Helpless Females
Dakota Fanning. She gets a partial pass because she’s still just a kid, and it’s not necessarily her, her character has to act a certain way. But, damn, I wanted her to die in War of the Worlds. My fiancee and I seem very suited to each other if for no other reason than that we both looked at each other soon after the aliens started to attack and reached a consensus that we’d have thrown the screaming little bitch out of the car without even slowing down after about the first 15 seconds of her tantrum. That role just confirmed that, yes, she does indeed annoy the hell out of me.
I’ve been watching the old series MacGyver. I remembered that the show was sometimes painfully bad, but what is most striking after all these years is how much better female roles have gotten. Every woman in MacGyver, at least for the first three seasons, is stupid and obstructive, constantly in need of rescue because she did the obviously dumbass thing that had been pointed out to her as an obviously dumbass thing to do. And there seems to have been a pattern that being taken hostage was punishment for a woman not acknowledging that she was only a woman after all.
Wel in the movie specificallyl, Mulder did have to rescue her from a giant jelly-filled test-tube in a UFO buried under the Antarctic.
(And considering she was buck naked as they stumbled out of that ship, I’m amazed that Scully survived ten minues in the typically waaaaay below subzero temperatures of that continent. But that’s another story.)
From the TV show, there were the several months of episodes in which Scully had been kidnapped and MIA, and then she was impregnated by forces unknown. Face it, Scully tended to go down without a fight fairly often.
Well, I don’t agree. Sure, the bad guys get the drop on Scully every so often, but the same can be said of Mulder, too. In fact, I wronte an article once about the TV shows that most frequently had their heroines tied up, and among the top shows were Xena: Warrior Princess (49/148 – 49 bondage scenes in 148 episodes), the Avengers (46/161), The Girl from Uncle (9/29) and The Adventures of Lois and Clark (22/81) and the classic Adventures of Superman (18/108). X-Files actually came in rather low at (9/148).
But the point to me is that the women who tend to get restrained tend to be the more kickass women on TV, and I think it’s just because their more adventure-oriented shows tend to get them in thos situations more often. I mean, no one calls Xena a helpless heroine yet her show had more bondage scenes than ANY other show on TV that I know of, but no one accuses Xena and Gabrielle of being helpless heroines.
I think in any event the OP referred to “helpless” heroines as heroines who were not physically restrained in any way, just not the sort of character who would or could help themselves. I don’t think Scully belongs in that category.
Yeah, you’re not a helpless female if the bad guys beat the crap out of you and tie you up…you’re a helpless female if they don’t need to beat the crap out of you and tie you up, because all you can do when confronted with danger is stand stock still and scream your head off.
Well, by that standard the best of the helpless females are from a 1980s TV series called “Code Name: Foxfire,” a cheap-ass Charlie’s Angels ripoff that died an early and deserved death.
In one episode, a bad guy confines two women to his hotel room. His method of confinement – he tells them not to leave the room. Then HE leaves the room. The women are so slow and timid about leaving the room against their kidnapper’s orders, that he catches them leaving on the way back to his room, and easily forces them to return (maybe he just glowers at them). Later, he takes a shower or something, and again tells them not to leave the room. This time, they DO sneak out of the room and escape.
So you have to figure it’s a matter of stupidest bad guy ever or most helpless females ever. Then again, they do tend to come in matched sets.