Who Wants to Be a Superhero?

They must have read my mind. Talk about superpowers. After I posted my previous blog lamenting the decline of the old-style superhero, what do I find? In my email I have an advertisement from scifi.com about a show called Who Wants to Be a Superhero? that is showing later that same day. Featuring comic book legend Stan Lee. So of course I had to watch it... Honestly, I did not know about this show until after writing the blog.

If you didn't see it, I'd say it is definitely a contender for campiest wanna-be reality show of the season. And I consider many of that genre to ooze campiness... They started out with 11 contestants and one spy who all looked like they were fresh from a Comic-Con costume contest. Each had a superhero name and persona. Then they put them into a "reality show" style setting. They introduce each character (and boy, are some of them characters) and start putting them through various tests so that they can be eliminated one by one. Tests that are complete with twists and ulterior motives. The final superhero standing will get their character immortalized in a Stan Lee comic book.

All else aside, the show really showed promise. The thing it lacked is a budget and production. So if you like cheap campy entertainment, give it a try.

Underlying the show is the question "what does it take to be a superhero". Each test is supposed to expose some aspect of being a superhero as defined by Stan "the man". Once again they must have read my mind. Or maybe it is thought control on their part, because through Stan Lee (who has developed or written for such classics as Spider-man, the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, Daredevil and the X-Men) they are focusing on aspects of what I called the old-style superhero. It isn't about being the flashiest or having the most super powers. More often it was the humility and humanity that defines a hero.

Oh ... the show has another redeeming quality. Some great ideas for Halloween costumes... Enjoy!

Modern Superzeros

I miss the old style superheros. You know ... the ones who were motivated by virtue and "what was right". The everyday man and woman who was a hero in the truer sense of the word even before considering their super abilities. Special abilities that were generally kept well hidden and suppressed unless needed. It seems that a superhero nowaday has to be vindictive or conflicted and badder than the bad guys. Flashy, with incredible super powers, but tormented in some way.

Then there are the abundant antiheros. There seems to be plenty of bad guys who are demi-heros in that they beat the other bad guys or aliens or monsters and by doing so present some hidden and suppressed virtue. Like vampires that fight against vampires... Or societal rebels who fight the bad inherent in business, politics and civilization. Criminals with a "noble" cause.

Now I'm not saying we have to get rid of the new ones. Some of them are very entertaining. I rather enjoyed when Batman went from brawling with the bad guys as a whizy gadget toting brainiac to becoming the vigilante "dark knight", even though it sacrificed a lot of the common humanity, intrigue and slapstick from the original. Oh, but would someone please give the new Superman some relationship counseling before they torque him and Lois's affairs up even further...

So what I guess I'm trying to say is that while our superheros and our good guy vs bad guy portrayals have gotten more complex and diverse, I miss the simple superhero who was inherently good and beat the bad guys because they were virtuous, not because of some dark twisted psychological reason...