If I were not so familiar with you by this point, I might just take you for a basic bitch who simply doesn’t know any better. But I’ve seen your schtick enough to recognize malicious misrepresentation (aka strawmanning). The experience I have is not something to brag on. It happened entirely because of my parents’ educational, social, and career choices, over which I had no particular influence.
If the subject were chewing gum, and I raised my monthslong experience working on a Doublemint production line as a teenager, that’s not “bragging”. But it would still annoy me if anyone opined that I have no more chewing gum insight to offer than any other random schmoe, just because I haven’t spent my whole life in the gum game.
I didn’t say they don’t care about the characters, I said they don’t care about the comics. The two have an independent existence, and have since at least the 70s and the various TV shows and cartoons.
Anecdotal, I know, but acquaintances I spoke to before the first X-Men film, for instance, were stoked because they knew the early-90s animated series, not because they read the comics.
Hell, Spider-Man is iconic in South Africa because of a Xhosa-dubbed version of the 70s.
Like I said, people (the general masses) don’t go to these movies in their millions because they’re fans of the comics. They go because the characters are part of our cultural heritage at this point.
I’ve been posting here for a while, and I know LHOD. I have literally no idea what “schtick” you’re talking about. I do recognize your schtick of overinflating your family and background.
You claimed to be African. You are not. You spent some time in Africa, but that does not make you a part of African culture or heritage. You do not identify as culturally African, as you made clear when you first talked about having lived in Africa–talking about them as others, not a part of your culture. And you do not currently live in Africa.
It makes perfect sense that LHOD would rather hear about what Africans think from people who are actually there who can understand from an insiders perspective. Your rhetorical card of saying you’re “African” had about as much relevance as when a racist brings up having a black friend. So what?
And, no, my claim you are not African has nothing to do with your race. I would say the same thing about anyone who happened to be born in a country and then returned to go to school there for a bit. You’re closer to a foreign exchange student. Even if you are technically a citizen (if the country you were in has jus soli, that is.)
And, no, the fact he’d rather hear from others does not mean you have to be silent. You can bring your perspective all you want.
You have a good perspective that might tell us a bit about how white folks who spent some time in Kenya might feel, but that doesn’t really tell us anything about how black Africans feel about the movie.
May I suggest Hancock did badly because it was a shit film. As a counter example, the Incredibles did extremely well, and the Despicable Me franchise has raked in serious coin.
And then consider all the serious flops there’ve been with comic bases sup movies (Ghost Rider, Green Lantern, Fantastic Four).
I agree, a foreign exchange student is a good analogue. But I would be very interested in such a person’s perspective on the country they were “exchanged” to. After all, did any American author write a better book about the early 19th century U.S. than did de Tocqueville, after spending only a few months here? Not for my money.
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There’s a big difference between these two statements. The first implies that you were born there, of people who were locals. The second suggests that you spent some time there as an expat. Elsewhere, you admit that you were only born there because your parents were in the country, and that you spent, at most, six months there as a teenager, again while your parents were working there. Not exactly the same thing as “I am from Africa”.
Look, the Science Fiction-y “Chariots of the Gods” version of Asgard in the Thor comics is the original Kirby vision. Kirby loved that stuff. Kirby’s Asgardians were Sufficiently Advanced Aliens from another dimension who visited the Norse back in the day and inspired their mythology.
This has always been canon in the Marvel comic books, but lots of the later writers have preferred to downplay the magitek ancient astronauts “your magic is our science” theme in favor of a more straightforward “These are actual Norse gods from myth come to life”.
Or not, just follow the saga of Beta Ray Bill, a literal alien from a literal other planet who was granted THE POWER OF THOR because he kicked so much ass.
Gary Kumquat and Mr. Dibble, points taken. I was barely aware there even was an X-Men cartoon, and I’ve certainly never seen it; but that was probably popular among a group of people slightly younger than I (and that generation is significantly more numerous). So, fair enough.
But I still find the MCU versions track fairly closely to the ones I knew, and I get the impression from my research that aside from the truly classic (but getting pretty far away) Jack Kirby/Stan Lee days, that “Jim Shooter era” was the other really iconic era for Marvel.
We went ‘round about this upthread, including looking at old panels. The TL;DR from me: you can’t cite shiny metallic artwork as evidence for this “canon” when the actual writing does not reflect any of it.
You have made a common error in parsing analogies. If someone says “A is to B as C is to D”, that does not compare A to C (nor does it compare B to D, for that matter). Broken down into this more formal structure, this is what the analogy was:
A foreign exchange student who spent a semester in Foreign Country X is to natives of Foreign Country X what de Tocqueville is to the prominent American writers who were his contemporaries. Nothing about that compares me to de Tocqueville, even if we set aside the fact that there’s another degree of separation due to the fact that I was accepting a comparison of my experience to that of a foreign exchange student, something I have never actually been. (And if I was going to be picky about it, I should have insisted it be a foreign exchange student whose parents are experts on the country in question and who brought home family friends from that country over the years.)
You have lost the plot. I will do a recap for you when I have a little more time to go back through the posts.
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No worries, Slacker; the fact that people find you eyerolly and gross doesn’t mean they find the plot interesting enough for a recap. Just fuckin stop talking yourself up, wouldja?
You’re so transparent, LHOD. (Thanks BTW, in case I haen’t mentioned it, for semi-ruining a book title that has great sentimental value to me.)
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But let me guess - you still are going to share your opinions on what the MCU does or doesn’t resemble, and what the people who watch it do or don’t expect, right?
I doubt it, unless you’re like 60+ - in which case your views on what was current in one country in Africa in your one high school year then really don’t have any bearing on what Africans might or might not think of BP today.
If you fail to see how closely the MCU is tied to both the Ultimates line and such recent stories as Iron Man Extremis, Planet Hulk, Civil War, etc, I don’t exactly trust your insight.
Yes, Ragnarok has a shoutout to the Shooter-Era Thor run in Skurge and his end. But the setting is changed from Norse Hell to Sci-Fi Agard (with a giant frigging space ship!) even for that bit.
Hunh? Per Wiki, the X-Men cartoon debuted on Halloween 1992, as part of FOX’s Saturday morning FOX KIDS cartoon programming. This was at a time when I had already graduated high school and gone on to college, and therefore was long past watching Saturday morning cartoons (more like sleeping off Friday night). So the “slightly younger” and “more numerous” generation I was referring to is Millennials, who at that time would be in middle school or younger. Where do you get this 60+ business?
I give up! I’ll concede the point. I have been reading Wiki histories and other sites’ discussions of Marvel history until my head hurts, and I’ve had enough. You win. (As also noted upthread, BTW, I have only seen the first Thor movie anyway.) I’ll dial back my statement to the much more unimpeachable “I prefer them as Scandinavian mythological figures with blue eyes and blonde hair. And I doubt I’m the only one.”
I guess you’ll want to do some editing at Wikipedia though. Both the articles about Asgard(comics) and Thor(comics) describe them 100% as mythological realm and Norse god respectively. No hint of their being aliens or there being anything science fictiony about them. Asgard (comics) - Wikipedia
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S’funny, I was also in uni at the time, and I made time on Saturday mornings to watch them, regardless of how hard I partied the night before (which was usually quite hard). So did my (also comic-reading) mates.
It may be you’re not as tapped in to the zeitgeist as you’d like to think.
Oh, nobody doubts that, I’m sure.
Yeah, you’re right, words like “planetoid” and “alien scouting party” have nothing “science fictiony” about them at all… :dubious:
And anyway, why refer to Wikipedia when you can go straight to the source - note, again, all the talk of “planetary body” and “flat, asteroid-like mass” - verymyffic.
I also watched morning cartoons in college but because I would stay up all night playing video games (and once in awhile actually doing homework) so I might as well watch some cartoons before going to class again.
Familiarity is not preciseness. I am not a big comic book fan. I probably know slightly more about them than the average person, as I have friends that are into them, but I haven’t ever bought a comic book, and have only ever looked at them when it was pointed out that I should check out a particular page or panel. I didn’t even know that Thor was a comic book character, rather than a mythological one until not all that long before the first Thor movie came out.
So, yes, familiarity, going to see characters that you have heard of, has value. But if that were the only thing that was needed, then the first Hulk movie would have done really well, and been well received. It wasn’t, not really. Can you explain why that is, if your claim that it is the IP that draws the crowds, rather than the production values?
Going all the way back to X-Men. The first one was very well done with some big name actors. They built that IP by investing in it. It didn’t follow the comics, nor the cartoon for canon or consistency, and other than names and vague descriptions of powers, they really ignored virtually all of the original source material.
What you are claiming is that they made a multibillion dollar mistake by not having Thor’s hair red. That is a claim that not only needs some serious proof, but has already been proven wrong.
As for the Hulk question, I would say it is a “necessary but not sufficient” deal. Besides which, they have yet to try making a Hulk movie that aligns with the comics I bought: “Puny humans leave Hulk alone!!” etc. Strikes me as much more difficult to make the central protagonist of a movie completely nonverbal.
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