Pride Cometh Before the Autumn

My latest favest TvTropes, fresh for [two]oh-ten, suckaz!

• Ever seen an invisible character beat the crap out of antagonists, even when they know s/he's coming? But, wait, how can you see someone that's invisible? The Badass Blink. (e.g. The only time you can see Batman is when he is kicking your ass.)
• When a supposedly awesome attack ends up effecting negligible damage, what you have isn't awesome: it's a Worf Barrage. The trope's named after Star Trek: TNG's resident Klingon warrior Worf, who can't win a fight for his life.
• Shows are often criticized for worsening over time, i.e. "jumping the shark." But some shows gets better over time. This is called "growing the beard." Again, this is named after Star Trek, but the most important example in my memory is the growth of the The Daily Show after Jon Stewart took over for Criag Kilborn.
• Deadpool. Just a hilarious read.[1]
• Villains like to brag and show-off, but sometimes they bite off more than they can chew — say, an evil frog who wants to be an ox — and end up paying the price. Derived from an Æsop fable, this gets my love for its real world example of Reggie Miller!

Miller is a guy who posted game winners over Michael Jordan, utterly annihilated the Knicks, and even taunted Spike Lee with a choking gesture... but the Pacers have never-ever-EVER won a championship.

PONÊD!

[1] Honorable mention to the Candlejack entr—...

Spoilers, Sex & Songs

Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" is the backing track to a love scene in Watchmen. Although considering it a sexual song is not a novel concept, there is now a very specific scene which I will forever associate with it.

• "Rock Lobster" - B-52's (Knocked Up)
— Near as I can tell, this song is gibberish (unless a "rock lobster" is some weird phallic reference), but it plays when Seth Rogen performs the titular act upon Katherine Heigl.

• "Faithfully" - Journey (Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby)
— Back before anyone was enchanted[1] by Amy Adams, she delivered one of my favourite movie-motivation speeches to Will Ferrell as Journey's "Faithfully" demi-diagetically plays in the background. It's not so much that this isn't a love song, but what Ferell and Adams do during it is...not quite romantic.

• "Street Lights" - kanYe ('Grey's Anatomy')
— kanYe's lamentations on his inability to reach a point in life that he's already paid his dues at which to arrive becomes an excuse for Sandra Oh to impersonate Marilyn Monroe.

• "Crazy On You" - Heart (Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle)
— Unlike "Faithfully," the manic meter of "Crazy on You" matches the fervor of the...affection...of this pair The scene merely happens to feature a gigantic, anthropmorphic bag of weed. One can debate whether more obvious choices would have been better.

• Honourable mention: "How To Say Goodbye" - Paul Tiernan (Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist)

[1] No level of irony can mitigate how horrible that was, so I will just apologize. (._.)

Super Tix for Hero Pix

Superman (1978), Batman (1989), and Spider-Man (2002) each broke box-office weekend records. Adjusting for inflation, theater counts or population growth may mitigate the impressive intakes of other comic book blockbusters, but not those three. Today The Dark Knight has set a new mark for weekend ticket sales, putting it in deceptively good position to join the pantheon.

Top 25 Comic Book Movies by Tickets Sold[1]

Batman's 10.2-million-tickets opening bested previous record-holder 1984's Temple of Doom by nearly 50%.[2] Yet, while one in every 24 Americans[3] saw Batman on its opening weekend, one in every 13.5 saw The Dark Knight.

≈96% as many people saw The Dark Knight this weekend as saw 1997's Batman & Robin in its entire run (23.4 mil). Previous record-holder Spider-Man 3's opening run represented a whopping 45% of its total; similar attrition for The Dark Knight would bring in 51 million tickets, surpassing ...Begins (32 mil), ...Returns (39 mil), and ...Forever (42 mil) to become the 2nd most-seen Batman movie.

Catching the original Batman would require the sale of 38 million more tickets. 47 million more would match Spider-Man's 69-million-mark, which is the 2nd-highest this decade, but — as Shrek 2 proved — doable even for a sequel. To match Superman's being seen by one-in-every-3.88 Americans, however, The Dark Knight would have to sell 56 million more. At today's prices, that would be a haul of $540 million, smack dab between Star Wars: A New Hope and Titanic.


[1] Sources:
Box office data -- http://boxofficemojo.com/genres/chart/?id=comicbookadaptation.htm
Monthly Population 1978-1999 -- http://www.census.gov/popest/archives/1990s/nat-total.txt
Monthly Population 2000-2007 -- http://www.census.gov/popest/national/NA-EST2007-01.html
July 2008 Population -- http://www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html
[2] Coincidentally Ghostbuster II set the box office revenue record in the prior week and Returns would end up breaking it yet again.
[3] Box office numbers we see include Canada, so this ratio is ntrinsically flawed. Of course, the ticket sales themselves are just estimates and can't account for such variables as discounted prices (eg children) per picture. This is all just an excuse to post a pretty chart, though. p_^

The City's Spoony Bard

14 years ago[1], there was a Saturday morning cartoon about a blue superhero who used "spoon" as a battlecry. Even now — for a certain class of people — "spoon" conjures up images of a valiant warrior going into battle against villains with chairs for faces, Mad Bombers What Bomb at Midnight, and Soviet-made computers that speak like vaqueros.

Suffice to say, it was one of the best shows ever made in the history of showmaking, and you can tell by the fact that someone, somewhere, typed spoon out to 97 o's[2]. Here's a graph of Google hits yesterday for "sp[o^x]," where 3≤x≤100[3].

[1] Judging by the fact that I was watching Saturday Morning Cartoons only 14 years ago, would you guess that am I young , immature, or both?
[2] I accidentally skipped 63 Os when I was making the graphic, so if you count backwards from 100 Os you'll get the wrong number. /")_("\
[3] Google hits where x=2 were ≈31.6 million, at x=1 it's ≈7.4 million and for x=0 it's ≈10.8 million (S.P.N. is a surprisingly popular name.)

Death of Superman

Why I Wanted to Read It: After feeling disrespected by last year's Braniac Attacks, Superman: Doomsday--an animated take on the "Death of Superman" comics from 1993 -- was refreshing. I started to believe the '93 story could also be similarly thrilling.

Why I'm Glad I Did: Having Infinite Crisis and World War III [1] less than a year apart soured me on the whole One-Threat-vs-the-world comic. The fights you want to see get restricted to only a couple panels, and often The Threat is made so powerful that you're just hoping whatever ploy the writers devise to wrap things isn't too cheap.[2]

"Death of Superman" has none of this, because it isn't a vs The World deal. The Threat (aka Doomsday) only fights the Justice League, an at the time inconsequential collection of superheroes and since J.M. DeMatteis wasn't writing this, we shouldn't care.

The rest of the story occurs over maybe a half-an-hour period. We can assume any other superhero who heard there was some monster tearing through the Justice League decided everything was okay once Superman was on the case. Except it wasn't, mostly because Superman is an unimaginative boor.

Why I Wish I Hadn't: Guess how many times Superman used his freezing breath against Doomsday in the comics. ZERO. It was the first thing cartoon-Superman tried in the DVD. Sure it failed, but it provided variety. All comic-Superman did was try heat vision and punching. The point was made that Doomsday was too "agile" to be flown away, but how is failing to do that a couple times a worse idea than hitting Doomsday with trees? Do you have any idea how boring that is to read?[3]

Finally, why-oh-why did Bloodwynd/Martian Manhunter "teleport" away? If I know my friend is just as good a fighter as I[4] and when we team up against a bully that bully dusts us, how is retreat a good strategy?[5]

Why I'm Ambivalent: Killing Superman was a risky move, even considering that superhero comics had been killing and resurrecting characters for some time now ::cough::Jean Grey::cough::. At the same time, its success inspired a host of other "risky moves," like turning Green Lantern into a homicidal maniac, breaking Batman's back, and having Spider-Man turn out to be a clone. Some of those were great reads -- I actually enjoyed the Clone Saga -- but most were inconsequential. Does it matter for current continuity that any of them happened? Not really. You can't say that about 80s-era gimmicks like the death of Jason Todd, Barry Allen's sacrifice in Crisis, or Spider-Man gaining cosmic powers.

...

Okay, maybe you can about that last one.


[1]& Zero Hour & Amazons Attack & Day of Vengance & Our Worlds at War & Graduation Day &...
[2]Justice League's 4th Season Finale is one of the best examples of a cheap but thrilling trick. World War Hulk may just redeem itself yet, but I doubt it.
[3][Joke about how boring this entry is to read]
[4]I can go on and on about this, but it's done much better here, there, and in this.
[5]Phil Morris-Manhunter better make up for this in the 'Smallville' premiere...

Geek Culture and Jock Culture Collide

[1]http://www.43folders.com/izero/

[2]http://www.nba.com/blog/gilbert_arenas.html
[3]http://www.marvel.com/universe/Agent_Zero
[4]http://www.readingquest.org/pdf/venn3.pdf

The Alien Costume: Part 1

Why I Wanted to See it: In anticipation of Spider-Man 3 I rewatched the beginning of the 94 cartoon's alien symbiote saga. Why this series isn't on DVD in its entirety, or why I don't know of a blog devoted to it is beyond me.[1] Granted SM[:TAS?] lacks the groundbreaking seriousness of the Timmverse Batman, the convoluted comics wonkery of FOX's 'X-Men'[2], or the animation fluidity of post-Saturday Morning ghetto superhero shows like 'Teen Titans' but it had its own charm and, in any case, is likely the source text for the movie.[3]

Why I'm Glad I Did: Much like Spider-Man's origin, there's no way to explain his black costume that's not stupid.[4] That doesn't matter, though, because it's simply awesome: shape-shifting, strength augmentation, turning one into a jerk and, I mean, look at it: it's black! How is that not enough?

The best part is the nightmare Spidey has when the not-yet-revealed as a symbiote takes over his body as he sleeps: he envisions the suit and his original red-blue-threads battling it out 怪獣, style. Once the black suit wins by shoving the original on some power lines, it swallows Spidey-as-Peter Parker, and then he wakes up hanging upside down in the "emo" outfit. If that sounds familiar, it's because the movie trailer clearly swipes it. Whichever of the six writers[5] for this episode came up with that, you better get your residuals.

Why I Wish I Hadn't: Every animation misstep in this episode has stuck in my mind for the past 13 years because it vacillates between excellent — Message to Sony Imageworks: this is what Spider-Man looks like swinging webs — and blatantly cost-cutting. No other series so shoddily reused animation: when the super-villain Rhino fights Spidey in a space shuttle teetering on the edge of the GWB[6], they used the same footage of the shuttle tilting back and forth a half-dozen times within two minutes.

'Alien Symbiote' is actually one of the better episodes in that regard, so my main problems are little script issues. Why does Peter Parker just leave his Spider-tracer-locator in his closet? How did transforming the symbiote into a police uniform let Spidey escape, when he did so in the middle of daytime traffic? I don't see how the security guarding "the specially enhanced control rods" the Kingpin was stealing for Alistair Smythe expected to stop The Rhino[7] by (irony of ironies) randomly charging.

Why I'm Ambivalent: Spider-Man's voice actor is really unconvincing as someone with edge, and this approaches ludicrous heights in the next episode. It's very uncomfortable to listen to, but haunting in its own way. Picture Greg Brady maniacally screaming "I'll tear you limb from liiiimb!" and you should get my point.

[1] Given how large the comic sub-blogosphere is, there might be lots, but I'm just not indie enough to get into that set. I do follow a decent blog on the Spider-Man newspaper strip, though.
[2] They revealed that Immortus was the main character behind this huge time/reality traveling story arc...except they never explained who Immortus was.
[3] Simply because there's no space for either the Beyonder or Richard Parker in a movie already packed — Batman & Robin style, it seems — with three villains.
[4] I don't know what was worse: Todd McFarlane's rationale in Spider-Man #13, or Bendis' rationale post-Civil War.
[5] Stan "The Man (aka The King's Second Banana)" Lee, Avi "Got Out While the Gettin Was Good" Arad, Len "Wolverine" Wein, Meg "I'm Sorry But I've Never Heard of Her" McLaughlin, Stan "Paul Dini Don't Run This" Berkowitz & John "Oh Shoot, He's Black!" Semper
[6] An equally awesome and unreasonable setting
[7] Wow, y'know, the cast list for this episode actually seems to be a lot longer than the movie. There's hope yet.