Superheros

World’s Shortest Movie Review (not involving stars):

Prometheus—Not Bad  

The Avengers—Overlong.  Boring.  Silly.

Super Powers

Siobhan thinks everybody should have super powers.  Personally, she would like the power of the Finger Death Ray.  With this one, you extend your arm and fingers out fully and shoot out heat rays or bolts of lightning from your fingertip (or fingertips) and promptly fricassee your enemies or, perhaps, that ham on your grill.  I’m not sure whether Siobhan wants multiple fingers—or hands—involved, but I think discretion is the better part of valor here because I see the potential for havoc.  I mean, what if someone comes up to her and says something like “I’m looking for Siobhan P. Ellison” and she thumps her chest with her thumb and says “That’s me.”  Does she zap her very own self?  Or does the Finger Death Ray have an innate sense of self-preservation, only acting on people outside the family?  Better to keep this deadly weapon to one finger and even then to wear lead gloves.  I used to wonder why King Midas never thought of this but maybe he did.  Maybe the gloves just turned to gold, too.  These super powers are nothing to mess with.

What super power would you like?  A lot of people, emulating Superman, would pick the Power of Flight.  And sure, that seems great until you realize that Superman had other powers which complemented his ability to fly.  What would happen to your skin if you were out there flying around at 200 miles per hour?  And what about those flocks of geese that planes are always flying into?  Try flying into a flock of geese at warp speed and see what that does to your body.  There’s also the problem of clothes—you couldn’t just wear any old kind of clothes up there, they’d be blown to smithereens.  Nobody likes a naked super hero.  Oh, I know, you’re going to tell me that nothing ever happens to Lois Lane’s clothes but I think Superman always slows down when he’s carrying Lois Lane around.  And we’re also inclined to give these comic book illustrators a kind of poetic license.  Maybe someone could devise a proper uniform that would tolerate flying.

A lot of people would select the power of Invisibility.  Kids always choose this one because it would give them the opportunity to see girls naked.  But there are a lot of problems.  How do you change from visible to invisible?  Do you drink some sort of potion?  How long does it last?  What if you get some defective potion and you become visible right in the middle of the Rockettes changing room in Radio City and you’ll be as naked as the showgirls.  You can’t be wearing clothes when you’re invisible because NO potion is going to make your clothes invisible, too.  Try explaining your way out of that one.

Do you remember Wonder Woman’s invisible plane?  She’d be sitting in there flying the thing and the comic book guys would draw the outline of the plane but all the rest of it was invisible.  What the hell good was that?  You could still see Wonder Woman coming after you because she wasn’t invisible.  Did they mean to infer that the invisible plane HID Wonder Woman even though IT was invisible and SHE wasn’t?  Things like this drive kids crazy.

I know one thing.  I don’t want to get my super powers from a “radioactive incident,” like Spiderman or The Hulk or some other guys.  By the way, I don’t get The Hulk.  One minute he’s a rampaging savage, incapable of understanding anything and the next minute he’s taking orders from Captain America.  Let’s have a little cohesion here.  Oh, and one other thing—what about The Hulk’s pants?  When he turns from Bruce Banner into The Hulk, he grows tremendously in size, shredding all of his clothes, as would happen in real life.  Except his pants.  His pants are all ripped, of course, but he’s still got them on.  Now I don’t want to see a naked Hulk any more than the next person but this just doesn’t make any sense to me.

A lot of you don’t remember Plastic Man, but I do.  Plastic Man could contort his lithe body into any imaginable shape.  He could be an anvil or he could be a seacow.  It was amazing.  One of the best things about Plastic Man comics was that the illustrators would often try to hide Plastic Man somewhere in the cel so neither his enemies nor you, the reader, could readily find him, even though he wore a red, yellow and black suit.  It was a challenge.  I don’t see how anybody ever got the best of Plastic Man, although I guess you could always try to trap him in some kind of container or maybe a meat freezer.

Captain Marvel (and later Captain Marvel Junior and Mary Marvel, for the Chapter 9 audience) had a unique situation.  Most of the time, Captain Marvel was a radio news reporter named Billy Batson, who had no super powers at all, but one day he got lost in the subway and wound up in this abandoned tunnel where this old guy with a beard named Shazam was sitting around on this impressive throne thing.  Shazam told Billy Batson that any time he intoned his (Shazam’s) name, a lightning bolt would crackle and he would turn into the almost-invulnerable Captain Marvel.  This could have happened to anybody who got lost in that tunnel, it just happened to be Billy Batson.  This kinda wicked me off, to tell you the truth.  I’ve been lost in subways before, just never the right one.  I think I would have done a good job as Captain Marvel or, at least, Captain Marvel Junior, who was closer to my own age.  Some folks have all the luck.

With Superman, of course, the bad guys had a chance.  All they had to do was find a little Kryptonite, wave it in the general direction of Superman and he would become weak as a kitten.  I don’t know about you, but I, personally, have never even seen any Kryptonite even in museums and it seems there was a helluva lot of it laying around Metropolis all the time.  With Captain Marvel, though, there was nothing like Kryptonite that could stop the guy.  You had to get him before he changed from Billy Batson or you were toast.  And, of course, nobody knew he was Billy Batson.  That’s why these secret identities are so important.  I always thought I might like to have a secret identity myself.  And I’m going to, if I ever win the lottery.

What About Rotating Super Powers?

Like when you woke up in the morning you had to discover what super power you had for that day.  This could be very dangerous.  You would have to start out with careful experimentation.  Instead of jumping off a tall building in hopes of flying back to earth, a few hops off the garden bench might be in order.  And sure, you might obtain the abilities of The Flash overnight and be able to travel anywhere almost instantly, but keep some gas in the car just in case.  The whole thing could be very counterproductive.  What if you achieved the power of exceptional smell?  No more working in the slaughterhouse for you.  I always felt a little sorry for Cyclops of the X-Men.  Without his giant goggles, the gaze from his eyes would FRY a body.  It’s one thing to say, oh well, he could just wear those goggles everywhere but people look at you funny when you wear your goggles in the sauna, not to mention in bed with a new girlfriend.  I know I’d be wary.  Sometimes these super powers are not all they’re cracked up to be.  Besides which, they always seem to come with….

Arch Enemies

So here you are, doing your best, shoving asteroids back into space, repelling fleets of alien invaders or maybe just wrecking The Joker’s new plan for dominance of the rackets in Gotham City, but you can never rest easy.  If you’re a super hero, there’s always someone out to get you.  It’s either Lex Luthor or Loki or The Green Goblin, somebody out there is bound and determined to mess up your day.  And these guys are damned hard to get rid of.  The Joker has been hassling Batman for over 50 years, you think he’d be ready for assisted living.  I guess that’s just all part of the super hero experience.  Anyway, we’re all glad they’re out there keeping an eye on things so we can go about our business untroubled by the horrendous menaces that surround us.  We’d feel a little better, though, if they’d just give Batman a little super power help.  He’s out there naked in the world with only a silken cord and a utility belt.  And Robin, of course, but we’re not sure just what Robin actually does.  Oh well, I guess that’s why everybody likes Batman best—he doesn’t have any super powers, he just goes out in the world like the rest of us and tries to make it through the day, dodging bullets that won’t bounce off his body, swinging through the streets instead of flying, tying up crooks instead of zapping them with his Finger Death Ray.

Siobhan still wants the Finger Death Ray.

What’s On The Horizon?

First of all, Cosmic Crown is entered Saturday at Calder, number five out of seven in the fifth race.  She was nipped a nose at the wire last out and beaten only a length-and-a-half the race before that so she’ll be one of the favorites.

The day after that, Kristina Maier, our summer house guest from Berlin, rolls in for a few weeks of merriment and mirth.  And we continue to get surprise blast-from-the-past correspondence from the likes of old-timers Gilbert Shelton, Chuck Lemasters and Marcia Hansen, about which more later.  We’ll be back next week, same time, same station.  Until then, may the Good Lord take a likin’ to ya.  

And that’s all, folks….