Martha Thomases: Don’t Try To Dig What We All Say
In my daily perusing of the Internets, I came across this post. A short post, it says (with one little snip):
“Dear Old People (and this includes me), the kids today are not hip to your cultural references. This is not a failure of education. Things change. The end.”
It’s not about comics or the movies or television. If anything it’s about Baby Boomers and how insufferable we can be. The popular art that moved us must move you, or you’re ignorant.
This is not a new attitude. My mother, for example, loved E. Nesbitt and J. D. Salinger, so she thought I should read them. My high school English teacher thought that Fitzgerald and Hemingway were the greatest writers of the 20th Century, and skewed their curricula accordingly.
None of this was as insufferable as my generation has been.
In Hollywood, my generation has minded the television shows of our youth into (for the most part) wretched movies. Car 54, Where Are You?, which was an entertaining glimpse of the 1950s Bronx, was made into a terrible movie that abused my beloved David Johansen. See also: McHale’s Navy (here and here), I Spy (here and here), and more. Exception: The Addams Family was genius, and so was equally transgressive movie.
We also made smug jokes. Do you know Paul McCartney was in a band before Wings? These days, if someone tells that joke, that person must explain what Wings was.
In comics, the insidious influence of the Boomers is even worse. Every attempt to reboot a character for a modern audience is eventually derailed by continuity geeks who insist that everything fall in line with the way it was when they were kids. Sometimes, I’m like this myself. I liked the Supergirl who hid her robot in a tree. I liked super pets. I think they made the world a better place.
You know what else made the world a better place? Me, being young and cute and hopeful.
We need to get over ourselves. The Flash doesn’t have to be Barry Allen (that re-reboot robbed my adult son of the Flash he grew up with). Superman doesn’t have to be in love with Lois Lane, nor Peter Parker with either Mary Jane or Gwen Stacy. Those stories exist, and we can read them whenever we like.
In the meantime, there’s lots of terrific new entertainment that us old farts could learn from. Off the top of my head, there’s Sherlock, a brilliant new way to look at a classic character. There’s Copper on BBC America, a blueprint for the way the GOP wants to rebuild American society. There’s Cosmopolis, a movie that analyzes modern life from the interior of a stretch limo. And, love him or hate him, Mark Millar is taking major risks as he creates his media empire.
Now, excuse me. I have to go and watch Nashville again.
SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman, Rob Liefeld, Scoot Snyder, and Burning Down The House
You had me until you got to the guy who gave us the Civil Wars, a maxi-series that started out written by Joe Welch and ended up written by Joe McCarthy (and I will not apologize for the outdated boomer reference).
You don’t have to like him. I do, for the most part (but then, I don’t read much Marvel). However, I really admire his overreaching ambition. He’s so entertaining about it.
But weren’t your mother and high school English teacher right? My high school English teacher, Sister Mary Michael, had us read Catcher in the Rye and The Great Gatsby. I am a richer person for having read those books.
And I’m sorry but Superman DOES have to love Lois Lane. That love is as much a part of his identity as flying and bending steel in his bare hands. I suspect the storyline with Wonder Women will last about a year and then things will return to the Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster and God want it.
George, I’m trying to figure out what to get John Ostrander for Christmas. Did Sister Mary Michael have an audiobook on Catcher in the Rye?
George, we agree totally! (Is that a first time? LOL!)
Mindy, no this is not the first time and I hope this isn’t the last.
I remember liking your idea about a Wonder Woman story in your column “The Enemy Within” back in January. And I’m sure there were others.
I grok you, Martha. Great column.
Yep. But what bugs me about reboots is that they invalidate the previous reboot that was so much better than the originals i remember from the 1960s and 70s.
Specifics:
Stephanie Brown replacing Cassandra Cain … and then dragging Barbara Gordon out of her hole to shove Stephanie off the pages. Cass was more fun as Batgirl than Babs ever was (well, except in “Batgirl: Year One”), and watching Spoiler learn the Bat-ropes was a lot of fun and had a lot more potential than it ever got to show.
And, of course, ditching Peter David’s brilliant Supergirl for … whatever that was we got.
(And, i’m old enough to remember the robot in the tree and other such stuff that seemed silly to me even then…)
Sorry to be a downer, but I resented Peter David’s Supergirl because it wasn’t MY Supergirl. And, as this column points out, I should get over myself.
Peter is a boomer.
Regarding the lousy movies, Martha–I don’t think it’s a symptom of Boomerhood obnoxiousness. I think it’s a symptom of no creative thinking and desperate need to get a movie, ANY movie, out to the theatres.