I’ve been binge watching The Tick for a future episode of the podcast (so much better than I remembered, and I remembered it pretty damn fondly) and I was struck by something that happens in episode four, The Tick versus Mr Mental where the Tick is forced to confront his greatest fear: WORKING IN AN OFFICE.
Dispatch is a 2025 superhero adventure game by AdHoc Studios released on Windows, Playstation 5, X-Box and Switch. And it, too, mines humour from the incongruity of a superhero working in a mundane office setting. But the way the game depicts this is very different from the way TheTick did thirty-two (JESUS CHRIST) years ago in ways that are both interesting and (to me, at least) kinda depressing.
My friends, I ask you to consider a simple hypothetical:
Maybe we’re the assholes?
This meme did the rounds last year after Pixar’s Elio crashed and burned and someone at Disney had gotten into the hard liquor and had some feelings they needed to express. And while I do believe that 90% of the time creators blaming the audience for the failure of their project is the mark of a talentless hack so high off their own farts that they genuinely believe that the only way anyone could dislike their output is if there was something morally wrong with them…
Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.
…you know what? I gotta give them this one. And I can say that, because I am actually one of the two people who saw Elio (Micro-Mouse is the other one). Elio is not a perfect film and I probably won’t watch it again. But it was charming, well animated, sincere and, yes, not a retread or rehash or cynical nostalgia bait cash grab and we all just left it to die on the road like a leper.
It’s one thing for Disney to complain that we didn’t give them a participation trophy for Strange Worldor Wish. When we said “we want original animated films”, the rider “…that aren’t absolute bobbins” should have been taken as read.
But with Elio, they showed up. They gave us what we said we wanted. Aaaaaand it turns out we were a bunch of lying hoors because we instead gave a billions dollars to this:
I’m acknowledging this exists. Enjoy it while it lasts because this is the only time.
Then again, this year saw the hugely succesful release of Hoppers, which was not merely good like Elio but genuinely excellent with a truly original premise, animation that actually innovates and shakes up the old Pixar house style and some great comedy. Well, I say “original”. Clearly they stole wholesale from Don’t Trust Fish.
“You’ll be hearing from my lawyers.”
“Our lawyers ate your lawyers. And left their bones in a pile outside the entrance to “It’s a Small World””.
But it doesn’t matter! Because the next Hoppers might end up like Elio. We can’t be trusted, and once you’ve proven you can’t be trusted no one will ever deal with you because they know you’ll never negotiate in good faith and now somehow fucking Iran has the world’s economy by the goddamn short-hairs.
Between the Superman radio series’ colossal decade-long run, the Fleischer cartoons and two multi-part film serials, I have to wonder if audiences in 1951 were starting to experience superhero fatigue. Remember how people complained when we got the Ed Norton Incredible Hulkso soon after Eric Bana’s? That at least was a five year gap. Kirk Alyn had barely flown offscreen before George Reeves stepped into his bright red boots.
Now, you might be a little confused as to why I’m covering this. If I’m only doing the theatrical live action Superman movies, what is George Reeves doing here? Didn’t he play Superman on TV? Indeed he did. Reeves, as well as being the reason why everyone gets Christopher Reeve’s name wrong, was the star of The Adventures of Superman which ran for a mighty impressive 106 episodes in the fifties. However, this movie served as a pilot of sorts for the TV show and was released in theatres. Alyn was apparently offered the chance to return to the role but he declined for two reasons. One, like many movie actors at the time he thought that TV was a passing fad (incorrect) and two, he worried that being typecast as Superman would kill his acting career stone dead (sadly, right on the money).
And so, the mantle passed to George Reeves, a military veteran and B-movie player whose acting career prior to becoming Clark Kent had deteriorated to the point that he’d been forced to take work digging cesspools just to make ends meet. Reeves was a fascinating and admirable man who deserved so much better than his tragic and mysterious death. But, if nothing else, he was for decades THE definitive onscreen Superman.
Considering the character kickstarted the comic-book superhero genre (asterisk, asterisk) Superman has always been the comic book character least beholden to that medium. In 2025, while it is accurate to call Superman a “comic book character”, it’s also incredibly reductive. Superman is more like Santa Claus. He doesn’t belong to one medium, he simply is. And, unlike almost every other comic book character, I would argue that virtually all of his most important and iconic stories took place outside of the medium of comics. Very early on, Superman expanded beyond the panels of the comic book page and appeared in radio dramas, newspaper strips, novels, cartoons, movie serials and TV shows, to the point that a vast majority of Superman fans aren’t even regular comic book readers.
Consider this: The years between the end of the second world war and the start of the sixties was marked by the near collapse of the superhero genre in comics. And yet Superman not only survived the implosion of the genre he’d birthed, in the fifties he was bigger than he’d ever been, as The Adventures of Superman became one of the first major hits of the television era. But we’re not there yet.
Before he get to George Reeves, we must see out the Kirk Alyn era in style. I won’t lie, I was a little apprehensive approaching 1950’s Atom Man versus Superman. Superman1948 was a very pleasant surprise but crappy sequels aren’t a recent Hollywood invention and the very few reviews I was able to find (this is, almost certainly, the most obscure Superman movie to ever be put on the big screen) agreed that it was inferior to the first one. There was also the fact that serials from the fifties, the last dying gasp of the medium, are notoriously cheap and ropy.
So colour me shocked that I actually prefer Atom Man versus Superman to its predecessor.
Because the experience of watching Son of the White Mare again could never top the experience of watching it for the first time.
And you know what’s crazy? This is…drumroll please…my final reader’s request. And the reason I left this one to last was because the requester simply asked me to review “something Eastern European” and I just chose this because it looked interesting. I picked this one almost at random.
Funny how these things work out. I was pretty sure I had run out of candidates for this particular feature and then look what happens! A Dracula* AND a Frankenstein movie arrive within a year of each other. Both critically acclaimed, big budget adaptations directed by genuine auteur directors. Bats versus Bolts is back from the dead like a…what’s a good analogy. A mummy? Sure, that works.
So join me in what promises to be a real knock-down drag out fight. Robert Eggers 2024 Nosferatu versus Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein. FIGHT! (Oh, and spoilers past this point).
Yeah, I’m sure you’re all shocked. After watching James Gunn’s Superman I decided it was high time that the big blue boy scout got the same treatment as a certain pointy eared co-worker of his.
So yes, we’re going to be looking at every live action Superman movie while we wait for Matt Reeves to finish the script for The Batman 2 roughly around the time of the heat death of the universe (I am not bitter, I am passionate.)
Let’s begin at the beginning. It’s 1948, a mere decade after Superman’s debut in Action Comics and the character is already a bona fide cultural icon with a radio series, newspaper strips, some of the greatest cartoon shorts ever made and a metric shit ton of merchandise. But, weirdly, despite kicking off the entire superhero genre (asterisk asterisk) Superman was actually pretty late to the party when it came to being adapted into live action.
Some of the choices I stand by but jeez, I’ll probably have to re-do that list entirely. Or will I? Are listicles even a thing anymore? Are blogs? Is anyone out there reading this who’s not a bot? Hello? Hellooo?
Anyway, existential dread aside, one of the big surprises for me was that 2014 Mouse apparently put 2008’s Kung Fu Panda on the list, a movie I think I have seen maybe once and have never had the urge to watch again. I have no idea why I did that. I feel like the years must have Ship of Theseus’d me into a completely different person because I cannot imagine that movie provoking that strong a reaction in me, either positive or negative. And I know that this is definitely a “me” problem. These movies are, structurally, very very good. Like, just put together magnificently well. I get the praise for them. Mostly. Some of the more rhapsodic critical responses to this movie I find a little baffling. Particularly the praise for the visuals. Again, they’re very good. But I came across one review (from a critic who’s opinion I rate very highly) who actually claimed that Kung Fu Panda 2 was the most visually beautiful film Dreamworks had made up to this point in their history.
It’s not a job I’d want as a writer, I’ll tell you that much.
Trying to write the first movie about a black Captain America in such a viciously polarised time is a hell of a poisoned chalice and I don’t envy the approximately eighteen thousand screenwriters who worked on Captain America: Brave New World. What does it mean for a black man to represent America given, y’know, the whole business? That has to be delved into right?
Or does it? Is it fair to insist that Sam Wilson has to make some great serious statement on The Issue of Race, when you would never ask that of Steve Rogers? Shouldn’t Sam Wilson just be able to be Captain America without it being a whole thing?
Personally, and this is just my instinct as a writer, I would have focused on winning the crowd over in the first movie with a really kickass Captain America movie and keep the heavy stuff for further movies down the line once Wilson/Mackie had been accepted by a critical mass of the fanbase as the new Cap.
I don’t know how I would have done that exactly.
I can tell you one thing: I wouldn’t have done this.
This being a stealth sequel to 2008’s The Incredible Hulkwhere Captain America feels like a supporting character in his own damn movie.
There really should be a sub-genre for animators who left Disney during the eighties all ready to set up their own animation studio with blackjack and hookers…only for Disney to get their groove back with The Little Mermaidand eat them alive. We all know of Don Bluth, of course, the one who came closest to unseating the Mouse from its throne. And we’ve also met Phil Nibbelink. Well today we’re going to look at another of these would-be contenders; Richard Rich:
So how’s this for some animation bona fides: Richard Rich was the director of not one but two Disney animated features.
Now now, let’s be fair. Disney in the mid-to-late eighties was in its most hellish creative funk since World War Two. The kind of hellish creative funk that would not be seen again until the early 2000s and…now. Of all the hellish creative funks Disney has been in I’d rank it…somewhere in the middle. Bad times, anyway. Disillusioned by working on Oliver & Company (as anyone would be) he left in 1986, convinced that the old studio was a goner and that nothing could ever change that.
Oops.
After a stint in the desert making religious animation for the Church of Latter Day Saints, Rich watched the Disney Renaissance take off and decided to make his play for the crown with The Swan Princess, an animated re-telling of the ballet Swan Lake, without any actual ballet (thank Christ). Made on a paltry budget of 20 million dollars, it was worked on for four long years before being released in 1994, where it had to compete against The Lion King. The result was pretty much what would happen if you pitted a real swan against an actual lion, but it did have an extremely healthy second life on video. It’s not the worst of the Disney-chasers of this era, nor is it close to being the best. But it is significant for one very important reason. This was the last feature length, cinematically released animated motion picture that was created entirely by hand. Not a single cel of this was touched by the infernal machine. So let me be clear, no matter what I think of this movie…
unshavedmouse 