Forgive the clickbait-style title. I’m in a bit of a hurry today.
There are times I wonder if a good or at least decent production is thrown off due to one detail that gives the wrong impression. Obviously a bad adaptation can ruin a good story for fans of the source material that should have just been an original idea, but that’s something I admit too. Let me give you an example, Robert Townsend’s The Meteor Man was the first actual all-black cast superhero movie. It’s actually a pretty good movie. So why didn’t it do any better?
My theory is that Townsend around this time was known for his movie Hollywood Shuffle, which is still a praised movie, and a series of HBO comedy specials. Both were known for social commentary, mostly the treatment of black actors and characters forced to play their stereotypes, as well as rather raunchy humor. The Meteor Man has neither of these. Instead he wanted to give black kids a superhero they could look up to in a story that bypassed those stereotypes in order to raise inner city black kids up. This caused Townsend’s usual supporters to give the movie a pass and in my opinion this unwillingness to let Townsend do something other than raunchy commentary may be why the film never got a decent chance. It’s like when Seth MacFarlane created The Orville without the humor he uses in The Family Guy. the difference is MacFarlane got a better chance as Star Trek fans looked for something closer to the franchise they loved and weren’t finding it in CBS’s offerings.
So I want to try something with a certain Saturday morning cartoon that also is only known for one thing, this time being something it added that is the only thing mentioned. The actual story seems ignored by most internet critics, but I’m not going to say what it is just yet. I’m not going to list the character until I talk about the premise first. Then decide if my theory in something like The Meteor Man has some merit and we can be biased over silly things. (And no, screwing up the source material isn’t silly. There are reasons this material was popular enough to get an adaptation in the first place.) As a friend of mine used to say: “let me pitch it to you”.
BW’s Daily Video> Can Aspirational Heroes Kill?
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“Batman needs to learn…”
What did you think Bruce was doing all those years traveling the world? Learning how to punch? Why is so hard to believe that in searching for new ways of stealth combat and otherwise useless information about the world he wasn’t learning about people, too? For I think the reason he gives ex-cons a job so they won’t go back to being Penguin’s henchmen or something is that when studying criminals he realize that not every criminal commits crimes because they’re evil but because they’re fighting to survive. That’s why some ex-cons go back into crime, because they can’t adjust to a society that won’t give them a second chance. So he gives them that chance.
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Posted by ShadowWing Tronix on August 17, 2022 in Uncategorized and tagged aspirational heroes, Batman, Captain America, commentary, Jedi, Luke Skywalker, Professor Geek, Superman.
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