Superman

Now I'm really dropping down on the calendar to steal song names, this goes back to the seventies, from a song by The Kinks. As a youth, I would read the superhero comix, but I wasn't a die-hard fan of them. I liked the war comix much more. I read them until the covers disintegrated and the pages were dog-earred and torn. One day, my mother decided to go through the collection of comics that my brother and sisters had amassed, and she threw away the ones that were ratty...the ones we read the most. She saved stuff like the Archie comics, Betty & Veronica and the ones we'd read once and didn't like, so they remained in pristine condition. Superheroes translate well into motion pictures, sales-wise and script-wise. The Christopher Reeve Superman series started out well and quickly slid into the typical Hollywood overkill syndrome. Then in the '90's the Tim Burton Batman series began, and boy did I HATE them. Michael Keaton was a terrible B-man, but the series made a ton of money so they kept it alive. Burton's second effort was even more dreadful, then he gave it up and Val Kilmer played the Dark Knight or the Flying Fox or whatever other catchy title you want to call Batman. He was a better representation of the crime fighter, but the script of the movie he starred in was so pathetically bad that nothing could save it. George Clooney was his replacement but I never bothered to watch after the first three abortions. This past week, the movie " Ironman" came out. It's gotten primo reviews, but then again so did the Batman flicks and you just read what I thought of them, so I'll have to wait before making any assessment of the nature of the movie. Black Sabbath has a song with the same title, and from the lyrics I cannot tell if it's based on the comics or not, since I never read Ironman, but using that would have been too easy, so the Kinks are the next best thing.

Also released this week is a television cartoon that was one of the first Japanese Anime styles I ever saw, I hated the artwork, the animation and the characters. The plots were beyond lame and yet the movie, "Speed Racer" is getting high reviews. I don't care if Sir Alec Guiness was in it, I still wouldn't spend any of my money on that crap. The first Anime I ever watched was a shitty cartoon called "Astroboy". It was equally lame as SpeedRacer and drawn in the same style and animated in the same choppy, inaccurate motion as "SpeedRacer". I tend to lump them into the same category. The best animation was the Warner Brothers, Bugs Bunny and those characters along with Walt Disney's movies, there was true artistry in the way they were produced and looked when completed. Speedracer did not have either of those qualities.

Change is not easy to accept, and I find myself torn between trying to get over my childhood dislikes and see if the movie is as good as they claim, or if I'd hate it as much as I despised the Batman flicks. I DO want to see the Ironman movie simply because it's based on one of OUR superheroes, not some import from Asia, but that's being stupid too. As I already said, change is not always easy and I'm wondering if I'll have an easy time liking Ironman or Speedracer, or if I'll stick to my crotchety old ways and wish I'd spent my money on something more lasting, like an ice cream sundae?