Current Ramblings
Tuesday, January 20, 2004
So today I found the Superfriends Aquaman/Black Manta two-pack from DC Direct on a really good sale at Comic Town. Like, marked down 70% from the original $50. (Yes, DC Direct is EXPENSIVE.) So I had to buy him. Anybody who has had to live or ESPECIALLY work with me knows that I think Aquaman is the funniest thing in all of pop culture. (Thor is a close second place.) I will openly admit that my most ingrained impression of the DC universe is what I got from watching Superfriends and Super Powers as a very small child. This is part of why I have this usually latent attachment to Cyborg, because I thought he was AWESOME, and I was thrilled to death to see him in the Teen Titans cartoon. By the same token, I've always, always thought Aquaman was a total goofball. He had no personality whatsoever except a vapidness implied by his grinning blondness, and a really lame power to boot. But then DC decided they wanted to make him this awesome badass and give him long hair and no shirt and a hook hand. And I was all like, "Um, no." I like Silver Age/Superfriends Aquaman because it's who he IS. He's this dippy nobody with a lame power, and no amount of 90s hardcore is going to change that. I like that image of him because it stands in the face of aggressive attempts to make not-camp out of something that can be loved for its campiness. They could have found a more subtle way to make him a good character that might have worked, and then I probably wouldn't think he was any funnier than Batman. I don't generally think Batman is funny. Good, yes, funny, not usually. Batman is probably the first superhero I had any real knowledge of, from the Scooby Doo crossovers I watched when I was, like, 4. By 5 I thought the old 60s show was serious action. Me and Batman go back a long way, and even now I don't tend to think of the older Batman cartoons as funny. When I watch it, it's hilariously silly, but I still subconsciously think of him as one of the more respectable parts of Superfriends.
Wow, this is turning into a rambling thing. I'm gonna sleep. I really need to work on coding my new site tomorrow.
posted@1:53 AM by:Trixter: 0 comments