The Ghosts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki vs. Butler Robots: The Origins of Big Hero Six

After purchasing Marvel for billions of dollars it was a bit of a surprise that the first property Disney adapted was the obscure comic Sunfire and Big Hero 6. The original comic bares little resemblance to the 2014 Disney movie, and is kind of crazy. After reading the original it’s hardly surprising the Disney has altered so much, after all, there really isn’t a place for the ghosts of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear attacks in a movie for kids.

Bringing Back Dad and Fighting A Radioactive Ghost

In the Disney movie Baymax is an adorable, soft and gentle robot that could melt anyone’s heart. In the comics he is a shape shifting robot that switches between being a butler, complete with bowler hat, and a badass dragon. Oh, he is also the reincarnation of Hiro’s dead father who is secretly in love with Hiro’s mother because she has no idea that her dead husband is now a dragon. The rest of the big Hero Six team is made up mostly of of X-Men characters and a cute blonde whose superpower is carrying around a purse. She is pretty amazing though as her purse is kinda like Felix the Cat’s bag-o-tricks where she can pull anything out of it that she can think of. It’s like the Clueless version of Green Lantern. Things get rough for Big Hero 6 when the mysterious Everwraith shows up and kidnaps Hiro’s mom. The Japanese superhero team sets out to save the day only to find out that Everwraith is the spectral form of all the Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims. He then goes on to tell the quirky team of dragons and purse girls that his master plan is to turn one of them into a nuclear bomb and nuke Japan. His great idea is to nuke Japan because he feels that the original nuclear attacks did wonders in unifying the country, which made them more progressive. Perfect material for a kids film.

The More Things Change, the More They Stay The Same 

It’s hard to understand why Disney chose to adapt this particular property, and even stranger still when it has very little in common with the source material. The comic is strictly focused on Japan and firmly set in Tokyo while the Disney movie is really just Avengers junior. What’s even stranger, and raises some historical questions, is what the hell is San Fransokyo? The movie is obviously set in America, but did the Japanese take over? Did they win World War Two? How did the world of Big Hero 6 come to be? Why is Baymax so lovable? Unless Disney moves into some dark directions these questions will never be answered. They didn’t throw out everything though, they kept the name Hiro and Baymax and kinda, sort of, kept the two female characters. Honey Lemon is by far the most similar thing between the two stories. In the comics, just like in the movies, she’s an upbeat, blonde with big heels who uses her purse to dispense justice. In the comics though, her purse is a straight up, super powerful item with no real limits put onto it, and Hiro is obsessed with her. Gogo in the movie is known as Gogo Tomago in the comics, and while she’s got a chip on her shoulder in both, her power in the panels is her ability to transform into force energy which allows her to move, and attack, incredibly quickly. TJ Miller’s stoner character and Wasabi are nowhere to be seen in the comics, and their positions on the team are filled by Silver Samurai and Sunfire of X-Men fame.  Hiro’s still a boy genius, but in the comics he is super arrogant, super rich, and loves to wave a gun around. Their the perfect team to take on the fused together souls of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Big Hero 6 is a great kid’s movie and full of imaginative settings and characters, but the comic is really a completely different beast. Every Marvel fan out there owes it to themselves to read this interesting and short-lived series. It’s definitely not for kids.

– Ian Benke

Captain Kirk vs. Jesus: The Star Trek Movie That Never Was

Four years before Star Trek: The Motion Picture came out Gene Roddenberry wrote a script for a Star Trek movie aptly called Star Trek II. Despite Star Trek always being ahead of its time when dealing with social issues, Star Trek II was too aggressive in its treatment of religion, something that scared the Paramount executives who ultimately passed on the film. People in 1975 just weren’t ready to see Captain Kirk and the crew face off against God. The movie, and its subsequent novelization, have come to be known as Star Trek: The God Thing.

 

The God Thing

The movie opens with a mysterious object near Jupiter suddenly appearing and directing asteroids towards Earth while destroying a Starfleet ship. The mysterious object causes people across the solar system to receive psychic messages in which it declares itself God, and through psychic manipulation convinces Starfleet that it is in fact, God. The Enterprise crew, who have all been promoted except for McCoy who has become a vet and Scotty who’s now a drunk, are all immune, because you know, plot. Kirk and the gang then go on to engage the menacing object which responds by becoming different interpretations of messiahs before settling on Jesus. They find out that the object is a very old spaceship with an advanced AI that is sentintent and extremely powerful. However, because every movie needs a villain, it’s programming has gone wonky and  has become a threat to Earth and only Kirk and the crew can save the day. It then tells the plucky bunch, after cutting off Sulu’s legs and then reattaching them, that it has come to Earth several times before and had some hijinks. It came before to inspire the early Israelites who worshipped it as a god, and then came back later on as Jesus to teach galactic law. Kirk and the gang convince the god thing to travel to another dimension and everything comes out peachy.   Pretty wild stuff, but it gets pretty weird at parts.

Covered in Oil and Popping Chubs

The studio rejected the script, according to Roddenberry, because of their religious views and the anti-religious views of the movie. In his own words Roddenberry gives an example.

It was too controversial. It talked about concepts like, ‘Who is God?’ [In it] the Enterprise meets God in space; God is a life form, and I wanted to suggest that there may have been, at one time in the human beginning, an alien entity that early man believed was God, and kept those legends. But I also wanted to suggest that it might have been as much the Devil as it was God. After all, what kind of god would throw humans out of Paradise for eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. One of the Vulcans on board, in a very logical way, says, ‘If this is your God, he’s not very impressive. He’s got so many psychological problems; he’s so insecure. He demands worship every seven days. He goes out and creates faulty humans and then blames them for his own mistakes. He’s a pretty poor excuse for a supreme being.’ Not surprisingly, that didn’t sent [sic] the Paramount executives off crying with glee.

Well that sounds pretty thought provoking and a good use of the Star Trek lore, he also wrote the following about Kirk encountering some sexy ladies, as Kirk does.

They were nude of course except for their paragame sandals, and young women that way had a disconcerting way of looking quite different. It disconcerted Kirk that the thought made his own genitals tighten against the metallic mesh which protected male vulnerability during the game

Only Captain Kirk could end up in a sexy, oiled up threesome and face off against Jesus in the same movie.

 

Jesus Reincarnated

If some of this sounds familiar that’s because a lot of these ideas were used. Star Trek: The Motion Picture used some key scenes and character developments, like all the crew being promoted, while Star Trek: The Final Frontier grabbed onto the idea of God as a spaceship. What those works were missing though was the biting commentary that The God Thing was full of. Gene Roddenberry was incredibly forward thinking on countless ideas. Despite being a campy TV show Star Trek managed to tackle some heavy social issues with a tremendous of grace and intelligence. It would have been amazing if Paramount grew some Kirk sized balls and put this movie into production. Religion is a hot topic that too many people shy away from, and a topic Hollywood regularly avoids. It would be interesting to see the landscape of movies and pop-culture today if The God Thing had been produced in the 1970s.

– Ian Benke

Check out this link for the first part of the script

The Death of Mega Man

With the Mega Man Legacy Collection recently announced the blue bomber is back in the spotlight again, or at least a tribute to his history is. It’s been five years since a proper Mega Man game was released, and with no title on the horizon, it’s safe to say that Mega Man is dead. Capcom has no plans to resurrect the iconic character and that begs the question, what happened to Mega Man? The answer to that is both interesting, and a bit tragic.

A Cancelled Legacy

During the early months of 2011 Capcom announced that every Mega Man game in development had been cancelled. Fans of the 8-bit hero were heartbroken as games that had been previewed and looked promising were suddenly turned into vaporware. The long anticipated Mega Man Legends 3 for the Nintendo DS promised the return of the fan favorite series and its cancellation was a tragic moment for the franchise. Mega Man Universe was a title that sought to fold in the social and creative level building aspects of Little Big Planet into the Mega Man’s universe, and the combination seemed like a natural fit for the blue bomber. Sadly all gamers got were some awesome screenshots and videos of what could have been. Capcom had even started development on a FPS Mega Man game called Maverick Hunter which was a dramatic reinterpretation of the Mega Man X franchise that would have taken the character into a whole new direction. Mega Man was poised for a renaissance, but instead he ran out of lives.

Japanese Breakups

Keiji Inafune is credited as being the creator of Mega Man and a creative force behind many of Capcom’s iconic franchises. In October of 2010 Keiji Inafune and Capcom officially parted ways and all of his games that were in development, including everything Mega Man, were cancelled. In an interview with the Japanese gaming website 4Gamer, Keiji Inafune gave a very detailed and thorough explanation of what happened, and it’s probably not what you think. Throughout the interview Inafune continually brings up the idea of salarymen, a term used in Japan that is applied to the lifelong employment model, and that many Japanese developers have been on the decline because of the salarymen system. He explains that many Japanese developers have avoided taking risks and have lost their passion for game development. Inafune blames both the salarymen who actually make the games, claiming their only goal in making games is to make sure it doesn’t fail economically, and that the board running these developers have no understanding of what a videogame is. Inafune continually states that he wants Capcom to succeed and improve, but that that he had become an antagonistic force within the company because he pushed them to make better quality products. Eventually these issues became insurmountable and Keiji Inafune has since started his own company and crowdfunded money for a spiritual successor to Mega Man, Mighyt No.9.

The Future of Mega Man

The future is bright for Keiji Inafune who has had a tremendous amount of success in kickstarting new projects. However, Mega Man belongs to Capcom and his role in the future of the gaming landscape is unknown. He has appeared in a couple of fighting games, and most recently The Mega Man Legacy Collection has been announced, but nothing else is planned. Hopefully Mega Man will return from the grave, but right now it sure doesn’t look like it.

– Ian Benke

Check out the full translation of the 4Gamer Keiji Inafune interview here

James Cameron’s Sexually Awkward Spider-Man

Spider-Man has been through the ringer when it comes to live-action movies. From his hilarious Electric Company appearances to the abysmal Spider-Man 3 the wall crawler has had a tultmoutus relationship with the silver screen. In the early 90’s, hot on the heels of Tim Burton’s Batman, Spider-Man was poised to make his big screen debut with James Cameron at the helm, but the movie got caught in development hell and was abandoned. However, the scriptment, not quite a script and not quite a screenplay, of the dropped movie has surfaced online over the years and it’s pretty weird.

Waking Up Stuck to the Sheets

James Cameron’s scriptment follows a pretty routine formula for a super-hero movie. Most of the script is the familiar Spider-Man origin story, which has been covered by two movies, and sticks to the tale of a nerdy kid being bitten by some fancy genetically altered spider. You know the drill. What is definitely different in the Cameron scriptment is his almost singular focus on the fact that Peter is going through puberty. Peter wakes up the day after being bit and is stuck to his bed sheets by  thick, white webbing that is covering his hands and legs. Right after that scene Cameron wrote the following in the scriptment.

Hopefully this will be seen correctly as a metaphor for puberty and its awakening of  primal drives.

To give Petey an outlet for all of those primal drives Cameron wrote in the familiar love story of Peter and Mary Jane. He definitely steered their romance in a stalking/bondage sort of direction.

Stalking and Binding for Love

One of the first things Peter does once he gets his spider powers is stalk the girl he has a crush on. Cameron constantly reiterates throughout the scriptment that Peter is the boy, and Spider-Man is, well, the man. Cameron wonderfully expresses this with the following excerpt.

 He feels like an adult for the first time. A Man. He goes to Mary Jane’s house. Drops down from the roof and looks in her window. She turns off the light, and thinking she is unobserved, strips off her clothes.

On a separate stalking trip Peter sees Flash, her boyfriend, hitting her. It’s a pretty scummy move, to be sure, but Peter just rage storms on Flash. He follows Flash to his car and brutally beats him, slamming his head against the door of his Porsche, before telling him to stay away from Mary Jane. Then, being an angsty teenager wrestling with the throws of puberty, Peter reflects on how great it was to almost kill Flash. Naturally, Mary Jane falls in love with Peter and Spider-Man, but thinks they are separate people. At one point Spider-Man sweeps her away and takes her to the top of the Brooklyn Bridge and starts to recite the various mating rituals of his favorite spiders. He then webs her arms against the bridge, makes her close her eyes so he can take off his mask, and then they have sex. She doesn’t figure it out till later that Peter and Spider-Man are the same person. During the film’s climax with its generic villains, heavily revised versions of Electro and Sandman, Electro grabs Mary Jane and forcefully makes out with her in front of Peter. She’s really just a punching bag for all the male characters in this movie.

What Got Stuck

Lots of ideas from this 90’s scriptment carried over into future iterations of Spider-Man like the organic webbing and the general beats of his origin story . It’s odd reading the scriptment now after countless superhero movies have come and gone. It’s easy to forget about a world when there weren’t many superhero movies. The general structure of Cameron’s Spider-Man is now the standard formula for all of the Marvel movies, and in a lot of ways, it was ahead of its time.

-Ian Benke

Check out the scriptment here

The Perverted Ant-Man

With the early reviews of Ant-Man being overwhelmingly positive it’s clear that Marvel has another smash hit on its hands. There have a been a few people behind the mask of the miniature hero, but Eric O’Grady’s Ant-Man is like no other Marvel hero. He’s a peeping tom with a black heart who manages to lie his way into being a part of The Initiative, a group similar to The Avengers. While Eric O’Grady is not Ant-Man in the upcoming movie, that honour goes to the burglar with a heart of gold Scott Lang, it is worth taking a look at his origins in the short lived comic series The Irredeemable Ant-Man written by Robert Kirkman of The Walking Dead fame.

Selling Nudes and Breaking Hearts

The Irredeemable Ant-Man wastes no time in establishing how shitty Eric O’Grady is, and throughout the 12-issue run he just gets worse. Eric isn’t a villain, he doesn’t do evil things, but he is pretty heartless and very perverted.  He is a low-level agent of S.H.I.E.L.D that spends his days slacking off at work, playing cards with his friends, and trying to get nude photos of women. Once Eric gets the Ant-Man costume, which he peels off of the corpse of his best friend because he figures it will help get him laid, he embarks on an adventure that’s full of spying on women in showers, including Ms. Marvel, and running away from S.H.I.E.L.D as they hunt him down for stealing their suit. After the death of his best friend Eric wastes no time trying to sleep with his friend’s grieving girlfriend, and even tries to seduce her on top of his grave. He eventually does manage to get in her pants, and then promptly dumps her. In order to get by, Eric joins Damage Control , a group of minor superheros who clean up the destruction the bigger and better heroes make when they fight. Eric uses his time with Damage Control to loot from the destroyed areas so he can make some extra cash. As the series wraps up, and there’s no sign of redemption for Eric, he finds out that he has gotten someone pregnant and she wants him to help raise the kid. Eric, being irredeemable and all, tells her off and refuses to be in the kid’s life. The series then concludes with Eric lying his way into the Initiative, a smaller state-by-stare version of the Avengers.

The Big C

The Irredeemable Ant-Man was cancelled abruptly, and though the major plotline had concluded, Eric as a character had little to no growth. There is a panel in which he shows desire to be better, but he never does anything better within the series. Eric has Robert Kirkman’s style all over him, the moral ambiguity that strikes a little too close to home, but that ambiguity seems out of place, even jarring, against idealistic characters like Captain America. What is great about The Irredeemable Ant-Man is that Eric isn’t likable, but he is still a great character. It seems necessary in comic books to create likable, charismatic, and cool heros, but the fact that Eric isn’t makes him stand out from the pack. What Kirkman gives us is a much more realistic and familiar villain, but he plays the part of the hero. Eric is the shitty ex-boyfriend, or the employee that lies and steals. He is the absentee father and the unreliable fried. Eric is a villian that everyone has encountered, but Kirkman turns him into hero. It’s an amazing feat and a series everyone comic fan should check out.

– Ian Benke