I’ll give you Labyrinth. Movie Wizard of Oz too, but definitely not the book. In the book(s), the trip to Oz is definitely not just a dream, and (as @DrDeth pointed out) she does go back, still as a child.
I don’t think you can make the case that Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a “young girl’s journey out of childhood,” though it is a dream. (Alice is, after all, still a child in the sequel, Through the Looking Glass.) I think it would be more accurate to call it a parody of the adult world as seen through the eyes of a child.
I agree, except that I’d go less “parody” and more “scathing indictment.” The adults Alice meets are uniformly idiots and mostly psychopaths, constantly imposing absurd rules and enforcing them with horrible violence. She does her best to put up with them, but finally loses her shit, and when she does, it’s triumphant and allows her to escape.
There’s not much “journey into adulthood” in the story, more “repudiation of adults.”
Yeah, it’s definitely funny, and reading it as a kid got me hooked for a lifetime on its brand of absurdism. But I think a lot of folks don’t pick up on how dark its view of Victorian adulthood is.
In his Philosophical Dictionary, Voltaire argued that Cherubim were the winged bull-men from Babylonian art, claiming that the name is derived from a word meaning “bull”. That makes a lot of sense, since those figures (properly called lamassu) were guardian figures, often placed on either sides of a doorway, and the first mention of cherubim in the Bible has them guarding the Garden of Eden. (Although where a bull-bodied figure would hold a flaming sword isn’t clear to me. Maybe in its mouth).
Others hav suggested different Babylonian protective creatures as origins of the cherubim, including griffins. see the Wikipedia article on cherubs — Cherub - Wikipedia
Somewhere along the line, the cherub became confused with the putti, those images of winged children that became really popular in Renaissance paintings of saints. In some case the putti/cherubs were reduced to mere baby heads with wings, an image I find really creepy.
Is that something “everyone seems to misunderstand?” I don’t think I’ve ever seen a depiction of their relationship that didn’t emphasize how dysfunctional and toxic it is, going back her first appearance in Batman: The Animated Series.
I have to admit that I never thought this – it was obvious that they’d traded the formula for big hunks of thick plastic sheeting. I don’t know of anyone who thought they were using Transparent Aluminum, but I’m not surprised they were out there. (There are apparently people who think that in 2001 they found the monolith on the planet Clavius.)
I’m impressed by the similarities, but I don’t think that Thor was created as a conscious homage to Captain Marvel. Most of those things you cite didn’t come about until the series had been running for a long time. The initial “Dr. Blake turns to Thor in a stroke of lightning” might have been adopted from there (although it probably owes as much to the stage magician transformations and disappearances), and having the power of a mythological god (rather than from a bunch of them) is the same, but the Warriors Three and Sif didn’t come in until years later. Ditto for the Enchantress and the Executioner. Loki and Odin were there from the start, but they were obvious characters from the Norse mythology that Thor came from – there’s not an obvious connection there to Captain Marvel.
If anything, Marvel (Jack Kirby. mainly) might have started consciously or unconsciously “mining” the ideas in Captain Marvel after Thor had been running for a few years.
Ok. If you personally know people who misunderstand their relationship, I won’t contradict you.
It just seems a bit odd to me that people would know of those characters and their relationship and not know it’s toxic, dysfunctional, and abusive. That’s pretty much the entire point of the recent Birds of Prey movie and the Harley Quinn animated series, so it’s not like you’d have to read the comics to know that.
I’ve seen people (well, women (well, young women)) who lean more into the Bonnie & Clyde, “Us against the Normies” aspect and who, frankly, probably never read a comic or follow that culture at all. They just see a couple of bad ass, counter-culture types and run with “They’re so cool”
Pop culture knowledge is not limited to the folks who actually read/watch/listen to the material. Pop culture is the popular ideas of what is going on in the comics/movies/tv shows.
(While I’m here, I believe Thor, at least originally, was not an homage to Captain Marvel but a swipe. Weakling who gets cosmic powers from a magic (word, artifact) is adolescent wish fulfillment at its purest. Kirby swapped out a crippled doctor for the homeless orphan and stole the hero from Norse mythology instead of making him up from scratch, but it began as the same story.)
But that part isn’t even a swipe from Captain Marvel. There are a lot of now-forgotten Golden Age characters, many preceding Captain Marvel/Shazam, with precisely that origin - ordinary kid or schmuck gets a magic potion/spell/artifact/blessing/whatever that transforms them into an Olympian (sometimes literally) hero.
There are serious conundrums with this song, and the video.
Distilling a four-page thesis down to a few paragraphs, the problem is that their mom “busts in, asking ‘What’s that noise?’”
What do they say?
Aw, mom, you’re just jealous, it’s the Beastie Boys!
They don’t explain, so presumably their own mother knows of this band called the Beastie Boys… but has no idea her kids are in this band? A band that is experiencing world-wide fame at that point?
Which hearkens back to the other problem. Why did she ask ‘What’s that noise?’ if she already knew who the Beastie Boys were? Ahh, you say, she just wasn’t aware at that moment. But if you watch the video, you can tell that the mom knew she was in a music video, and you don’t do that without signing a stack of papers, all of which would’ve had “Beastie Boys” typed a dozen times. And, digging deeper, that scene was Take Twelve, so her ‘What’s that noise?’ had just been asked and answered eleven times.
I always assumed the “you” in this song was a fan, not the Boys themselves. So if “you” are a Beastie Boys fan, that might be something you’d say to your mother.
Of course the video has to feature the Boys themselves so it gets very meta and confusing.
It’s both, kinda. Carroll had a difficult time relating to other adults. He created Alice while on a rowboat with three kids but had a particularly strong connection with a little girl named Alice Liddell. As she grew, his contacts with her became fewer and fewer. The books are absolutely satirical in part because the illustrator, John Tenniel, was a political cartoonist, and in part because Carroll wanted to make a story without the usual stodgy Victorian moralizing. But the books, particularly the end of Alice and parts of Through the Looking Glass contain heavy themes of the fleeting nature of childhood. The old White Knight is likely a stand - in for Carroll himself as he must part with the growing Alice Liddell. For anyone interested in the intricacies of these books I strongly recommend The Annotated Alice.
Children three that nestle near,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Pleased a simple tale to hear —
Long had paled that sunny sky:
Echoes fade and memories die.
Autumn frosts have slain July.
In a Wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die:
Ever drifting down the stream —
Lingering in the golden gleam —
Life, what is it but a dream?