I’m an American, and I have never heard of Tom Brady until right now. Of course, I haven’t lived in America for a long time and certainly don’t waste my time with TV when I do go there.
I did not know Tom Brady, either. My interest in sports is pretty much non-existent.
I was wondering – how recognizable to the mainstream is Marvel’s version of “Thor, God of Thunder”?
Justin_Bailey said:
I don’t necessarily care if most people know they originated in comic books, just that they have mainstreamed enough to be across several media. However, I will grant that G.I.Joe and Transformers may not count because their primary importance is the toy line, and the other media are just promotional tools for the toys. (Which isn’t quite the same as Star Wars, which the merchandising was done heavily and promoted by the films, but the films were the primary source and had merit without the toys.)
Ellis Dee said:
Thank you for making my point. I realize Yogi Berra has been out of the media long enough that the youngsters don’t know who he is - I barely do. I could have gone with Michael Jordan, because his legacy isn’t quite as old (though still fading).
The problem is that sports people’s careers end, they lose their market share, but comic book characters don’t have to go away just because they’ve been around a long time, so they can stay atop the podium. Thus Superman and Batman are still hot properties, but Michael Jordan is someone I bet most teenagers would give you a quizzical look over, and anyone under 10 will think you mean Michael Jackson.
It’s an analogy, so it isn’t quite a direct analogue. There’s room for quibbling over the individual comparisons. The principle is sound.
I’ve heard the name, I know he’s a quarterback, I might could recognize him in a photo or commercial. But I don’t follow football (or most sports, for that matter), and tune out names when I hear them. Unless it’s about the Cowboys (because my family follow them), I just don’t absorb it much.
I could get behind that. I wouldn’t say that Tom Brady nor Wolverine is “universal”, though I would say that both Babe Ruth and Superman are. I think that the bare minimum definition I’d accept for “universal” would be “recognized by 50% of Americans”, or possibly “50% of the developed world” (yes, I know that that ignores the rest of the world, but we’re talking universal in the context of a culture, here), and I’d be much more inclined to set the bar at 90%.
Agreed, Chronos.
My contribution to this thread is more along the lines of the other recent thread about comic book ubiquity. I forget what it was titled, but a recurring theme in it was that comic book characters aren’t as ubiquitous as comic book fans would think. I believe that got distilled down to nothing is as ubiquitous as hardcore fans of that thing would like to think.
Some posters seemed to have trouble relating to the concept, and I remember thinking at the time why would it be hard to imagine people completely ignoring an entire subject that dominates the media? It’d be like not knowing anything about sports, which I imagine is not uncommon among comic book fans.
So again, I’m not trying to prove a point or argue with anyone in here. I just offered a comparative example to help those who can’t imagine how someone could ignore something as prevalent in pop culture as, say, Wolverine.
By the way, Tom Brady is more famous than just his four Superbowls thanks to marrying Gisele Bundchen (supermodel) and the fact that Bridget Moynahan (actress) is his baby mama. When you knock up an actress then marry a supermodel, yeah, that gets people talking. He’s also widely considered hot by women, so he passes the “do soccer moms know who he is?” smell test quite nicely, being a hot celebrity on all the gossip shows.
Folks who don’t know Tom Brady – at least check out this SNL short. 
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?
Half-serious, here.
I was going to say this, too. Merchandised all over the world, TV, comics, multiple movies…there’s a whole generation of kids that can recognize Pikachu. Even South Park did a Pikachu parody.
Pikachu’s a videogame character, not a comic character. Unless you’re going to count characters that have appeared in comics incidental to their main appearances, then you’re opening a big can of worms and have to count Mario and Sonic the Hedgehog as “universally” known comic characters. Hell, you’d have to count Hulk Hogan and The Rock for that matter.
I think either TMNT or MIB are the best answers given in this thread, with Wolverine being the answer for mainstream Marvel/DC characters.
I’m not entirely sure TMNT count as comic characters since 99% of people know them from the Saturday morning cartoon, and Men In Black are products of '50s Cold War Paranoia and later Conspiracy Theorism, long before any comics or movies about them came about.
The Transformers are not comic book characters. At least not originally. They entered the culture first as toys. Comic books followed.
Not true, Spoke. The names and characters of the Transformers were all created by Marvel Comics. Jim Shooter and Denny O’Neil, specifically, over a weekend. The whole Autobots, Decepticons, Cybertron, and so on. (It’s fun to go back through earlier comics and see previous uses of the name. Cybertrons were a group of robots that fought the X-Men at one point, just before the series was put into reruns.)
The figures predated the concepts, but not as a toyline.
I’ll second that. Snoopy is still making commercials.
Jim Shooter and Denny O’Neil were hired by Hasbro to create a backstory for the toys. Like I said, toys first, comics later. From Wiki:
Like Kimstu, I’ll provide another data point. I’m 57 and have had virtually no direct exposure to comic books since reading them in the early '60s. And I think I represent my circle of friends pretty well because we had a discussion similar to this at a recent party.
Limiting my recognition quotient to comic book superheroes, here is my list:
Superman
Batman
Spider-Man
Hulk
Wonder Woman (but only because of the television series showing at a time when my hormones were raging)
I’d actually also recognize the Phantom because he was one of my favorites as a kid, but I don’t think he’d make anyone else’s list.
Wolverine is a close call. I had heard of the X-Men but have never seen any of the movies, yet because of movie trailers I think I’d recognize him. But only if I could see his hands. Otherwise I’d likely mis-label him as the Wolfman.
Iron Man? Until I saw the movie I didn’t know he was a comic book character.
Captain America? Sandman? Death? I’ve heard of Captain America, but not the others.
Then there is the whole other universe of cartoon characters that fall outside of the superhero genre but are recognizable by a large portion of society:
All the Disney characters
All the Peanuts characters (though probably only Snoopy and Woodstock are most recognizable)
Simpsons
Garfield
Dilbert
Calvin and Hobbes.
Popeye and Olive Oyl
Pikachu? Nope. I might have been able to place the character as some sort of Asian creation, but that’d be about it. Pulling a name out of my memory would have been impossible.
Entirely correct, spoke. But really, what is a character? Is Ultra Magnus the same as Optimus Prime? The toy was the same in the Diaclone line. (Powered Convoy even had a little Roller toy.) That’s why I consider the Transformers themselves to be originated by Marvel. Much more so than, say, Shogun Warriors or Godzilla.
Still doesn’t change the fact that they’re not comic book characters. The comic was always created as a spinoff of the toy line and the TV show.
Except that, in the case of the Transformers at least, the storyline isn’t really essential to what they are. What’s essential to Optimus Prime (by any name) is that he’s a semi truck that turns into a giant robot. If I got an Optimus Prime toy for Christmas, the limit of my interest in his backstory was that he was the leader of the good guys. As long as he transformed, it didn’t really matter where he came from or the like.
Excellent post!
Billy Zane is not a good approximation of “The Ghost Who Walks” and thus his movie probably suffered for it. Perhaps other versions would help some people remember him.
It’s a shame, too. With all his toys and dog and horse and ring and mask and such, he was a kid’s fantasy hero.
The Shadow was the only one of those characters, after The Lone Ranger of course, from my comic book days to last into my teen and young adult consciousness. (That’s excluding the obvious OP characters.)
I would suggest that anybody over 50 still wild about comic books is outside the “universal” group anyway. And I could definitely be wrong there.