LEGENDS OF YESTERYEAR PT 3

I've altered my thoughts on this passage from LEGENDS 2:

Historical figures, when subjected to fictionalization, can go either the way of artifice or the way of verisimilitude. To repeat one of my earlier counter-examples to Billy the Kid, Adolf Hitler's historical record can never be diminished by fictionalization. Hundreds of years in the future, he might become a legend of evil, but at present his presence in literature is always dwarfed by his presence in history. A fiction-story can depict Hitler in dozens of completely artificial situations-- he creates the Red Skull, he gets burned to death by The Human Torch, his body (or, more frequently, just his brain) gets preserved so that he can be revived in some new, world-conquering form. But these artifice-tropes never supersede the historical record.

I've decided that "superseding the historical record" is not that important in most cases, since often legend-types don't supersede history so much as exaggerate it. The average citizen interested in Old West history usually knows that Jesse James and Billy the Kid in reality are very different from any fictional treatments. So when that consumer enjoys a fictional story of Jesse James meeting the Two-Gun Kid, there's an automatic disregard for historical facts.

If anything, a simple, uncomplicated demonization of a historical figure-- such as Hitler's contemporaries Mussolini and the Emperor Tojo-- is usually so one-dimensional that it fails to take on "legendary" status. Hitler, though, is nothing if not a demon who fits many fictional roles. I might not consider Hitler to be "legendary" when he merely appears in a cameo, as in the film INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE. But he would qualify as a legend when he's used to launch schemes against WWII superheroes, as in THE INVADERS cover I printed in LEGENDS pt 2, and certainly in stories where he's a contemporary villain who's escaped the confines of his historical record. Such is the Adolf who appears in a 1947 multi-part SKYMAN story that I choose to call "Hitler on the Moon."

    

BATTLE OF THE GIRL BOSS FRANCHISES

 It's difficult to tell when "girl bosses" have negatively affected an ESTABLISHED franchise. Even if an audience does not like a given female character, they may still like the franchise enough to support it. But if the audience does NOT support a previously profitable franchise, it's also difficult to prove that the presence of a bad female character was the reason.

INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY was an unquestionable box office bomb. I liked it much better than the much more profitable entry in the series, CRYSTAL SKULL, so I have to ask, "why did audiences not want to see it?"

Long before the film hit theaters, there were podcasts bagging on Indiana's co-star Helena Shaw being a "girl boss." So many people may have stayed away from DIAL with the negative sense that Disney wanted to "replace" Indiana with a younger female hero. BUT-- the same negative opinions also swarmed around 2021's NO TIME TO DIE, in which it was rumored that Bond was going to be replaced by a female 007-- and TIME was not a flop. In both cases audiences had reason to believe that the respective films were going to be the last hurrahs for both the Craig Bond and the Ford Indiana, but they supported one and not the other.

I also personally think that Helena Shaw was a better character than her detractors claimed, even after they saw the movie. Certainly she's more three-dimensional than Nomi, the new 007. I think both female characters were being floated by their studios as POSSIBLE new feature-characters, but neither is so overbearing as to beat the original character into the ground, as the early podcasters feared. Those podcasters MIGHT have overreacted, though it's important to state that such neutralization DOES happen when an old franchise character's on the way out and a new one's on the way in.

So we can't in the end say that DIAL failed because of a girl boss. Her presence might not have HELPED, that's the most one can say. Given that some complaints were made that DIAL was depressing because Ford looked his age, I find an alternative theory more believable: TIME succeeded because it allowed Bond to go out looking good, DIAL flopped because it didn't allow Jones to look unfailingly great from start to finish.

HOWEVER, all of that applies to ESTABLISHED franchises, and I think Disney has flopped with many of its NEW girl boss franchises. Take THE MARVELS (please). There's no reason to see that film except to celebrate the girl boss rhetoric, but it was so bad, even the people who want more girl bosses didn't go see it, and it was a tremendous bomb. So IMO one can blame the "girl boss" theme for "going broke" only when there's no other contributing factor.