I feel like I’m the only person who’s not really looking forward to the announced sequel to Disney/Pixar’s The Incredibles.
Don’t get me wrong; it’s not because I didn’t enjoy the first movie, quite the opposite, I thought it was great, one of my favorites, if not my all-time favorite Pixar movie, but I was actually OK with The Incredibles being a one-and-done film. The story was told: Superheroes fell out of favor with the public, the Parrs settled down into domestic life, a crisis erupted, the Parrs faced adversity (and their own personal issues) and triumphed, the public became OK with Supers again, and the family was back in business. The end. What more needs to said? What questions did the first movie leave unanswered?
It’s usually at this point that some wag pipes in with:
“Duh, they need to make a second movie since the first one ended on a cliff hanger. Ah-hyuk!”
Yeah, no. The ending of The Incredibles wasn’t a cliff hanger ending, it was a “We’re back in business” ending. Did you honestly think that Pixar was planning to devote an entire movie to The Underminer? Anyways, there was already a video game about that, Incredibles: Rise of the Underminer.
Which brings me to the other reason why I’m not exactly anticipating an Incredibles sequel: the reason the first one was so good was because it was about the superhero mythos as a whole; it wasn’t your typical “Bad guy makes trouble, good guys have to go out and stop him kind of deal”, it dealt with so much more: family, marriage, relationships, acceptance, hero worship, hubris, isolation. My big fear is the next movie will just end up being another generic superhero story, and reading some of the fanfics and story ideas that people have suggested for an Incredibles 2, most of which stink like day-old sushi, doesn’t make me any more optimistic. I really hope they don’t opt to make it a time-skip, ’cause I hate those.
However, Brad Bird has said that he wasn’t going to embark on an Incredibles sequel until he had a good enough story for one, and Pixar has managed to surprise us before (Finding Dory seems to be going over well with audiences, though it’s worth mentioning that I still haven’t seen Finding Nemo yet–yeah, I know; talking fish movies just generally aren’t my thing), so I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. I’m trying to remain optimistic, though I still have reservations.
Anyone who’s ever worked in an office or a corporate or team environment has experienced that one day or meeting where their unit succeeds at getting absolutely nothing done. The Super Friends’ archenemies the Legion of Doom are having just such a day in this favorite Cartoon Network bumper from back in the day. Enjoy.
Note how Solomon Grundy always just piggy backs onto whatever request the last person who spoke makes. The “Solomon Grundy want pants too!” line gets me every time. Good stuff.
Today Nerdvana pays tribute to one of our favorite tropes in fiction: space aliens, those guests of ours from beyond the stars.
Today we’ll be listing some our favorite fictional Visitors from Beyond. First, some ground rules:
These won’t be in any particular order, so we won’t be numbering them.
We’re only talking about friendly aliens here; not the would-be world conquering kind…
…Or the human abducting and probing kind.
“Now understand, human, that we derive no pleasure from this procedure. This is purely for scientific research. That said, is it OK if my buddies here watch?”
Now that we’ve gotten the preliminaries out of the way,
LET’S ROCKET!
STARFIRE
Jason’s favorite Teen Titan, and who am I to argue? Starfire was and still remains one of our all-time favorite alien characters. She’s a golden orange skinned princess from a species of interplanetary hippies who naturally absorb sunlight and are fueled by their emotions, who can fire heat-and-light energy blasts from her hands thanks to experimentation by a race of scientist shnooks called the Psions, possesses the strength of 7 humans, can naturally fly and absorb language through epidermal contact, i.e., kissing.
Baby, you can learn colloquialisms from me anytime!
J’ONN J’ONZZ AND M’GANN M’ORZZ (aka Martian Manhunter and Miss Martian)
The stars from Mars. They’re from the same planet, belong to the same race (technically Megan is a White martian, but why split hairs?), have the same power sets and M’gann is J’onn’s niece, so we’re listing them together. Martian Manhunter was my favorite character on the CN Justice League show. I like the Martian’s power set: strength, flight, invisibility, intangibility, telepathy, metamorphosis and sometimes telekinesis (MM has been referred to as ‘the Swiss Army Knife of Superheroes’ for good reason); over the years he’s had more powers than a toad has warts, but good producers have modified them to decent effect for a good balance…
…Plus the dude rocks an awesome costume!
As for Miss Martian, imagine Martian Manhunter as a cute, perky teenager. The freckles are a nice touch.
I like how Miss Martian’s costume is a cuter, more feminine variation of J’onn’s. Kind of looks like a super sailor suit.
Cute green alien girl in a bikini? Yes, please! Captain Kirk would approve.
Bonus: the DC Super Hero Girls’ version of Megan is super-shy around anyone else besides fellow alien student Starfire. She squeals and goes invisible whenever anyone talks to her. Awwww.
QUANTUM RAY
He’s here and he’s Quantum!
The show Cosmic Quantum Ray wasn’t around for very long, but I dug this guy while it was. A delightfully daffy super guy from the 9th dimension who can lift a chunk of building over his head, detach his body parts due to being held together by some cosmic mucilage that we mere 3rd dimensional beings can’t see, can fly through space, transform his molecules into any organic substance from steely steel to anti-matter and exist in 6 other dimensions simultaneously. In this photo, Ray just happens to standing in front of a 7th dimensional kielbasa stand.
SUPERMAN AND SUPERGIRL
The Man and Girl of Steel, respectively. Like the Martians, they have the same planet of origin and the same powers, so we’re listing them together. Kryptonians rock, plain and simple. Superman is one of the greatest super aliens of all time…
…And Kara has all that, plus Barbie blond hair and an exposed midriff. (No, a bare belly doesn’t make sense to fight crime with, but Kara’s bulletproof so no big deal.)
Now some people feel that the Kryptonians aren’t so great. they think that Supey is a boy scout, that they’re too powerful, that they’re boring and lame, etc. Now those people are entitled to their opinions of course, but in actuality, well, I’ll let Dr. Cox field this one:
MARS (Milky Way and the Galaxy Girls)
Yet another green skinned Martian, this time with antennae! Mars has always been one of my favorite Galaxy Girls. It’s cool how Lauren Faust chose to represent Mars as a classic green alien (Ms. Faust must like 1950’s sci-fi kitsch too). her symbol is a flying saucer (nice!) and she’s a wacky modern artist who’s not afraid to get her oddball on. As weirdo artists ourselves, we stand by you, baby.
Words to live by.
THE WONDER TWINS
They’re twins. They’re named after Tarzan (Zan) and Jane (Jayna). Zan’s got the ‘tude and Jayna’s got the sass. Their pointy ears were inspired by Mr. Spock. They can touch and morph into any form of water or any animal, respectively. They’re alien versions of Donny and Marie Osmond. The eat CDs. They get to hang with the Super Friends. Plus they have a blue space monkey which they received as a gift from a space clown. ‘Nuff said.
YANCY ROBERTS (Out of Jimmy’s Head)
The sassy green teleporting space alien sister of the kid who has cartoons in his head, who was adopted by his astronaut mom. OOJH was a train wreck to be sure, but even though this plot point had nothing to do with the show’s premise, Yancy was one of the best parts of OOJH. I guess you can tell that we like our green teens here.
WASHU HAKUBI
Tenchi Muyo!‘s resident Greatest Scientific Genius in the Universe! Washu’s either an intergalactic mad scientist, Ryoko and Ryo-Oki’s creator, a goddess who chooses to employ technology instead of her natural powers and stay in child form or all of the above, and she’s all kinds of awesome. Anybody who can create a doomsday device and a dimensional portal with a star-shaped door is A-OK in our books.
-And now, some Honorable Mentions:
MR. SPOCK (Star Trek)
Everybody’s favorite half-human, half-Vulcan science officer. To not include Spock would be illogical.
STARLEE HAMBRATH (TMNT Fast Forward)
Cody Jones’ blue skinned, pointy-eared alien intern. She has no powers, but like Washu she’s a genius (Starlee’s race, the Omatronians, possess twice the brain capacity of humans), plus she rolls around her lab on roller skates, so maybe she’s an honorary Galaxy Girl.
THE CAT (Red Dwarf)
Oooooooooooooooooowwwww!
OK, maybe this isn’t a conventional choice, but he belongs to a different race and he was born in space, so I’m counting him. Deal. Who doesn’t like The Cat? He’s a stitch! Delightfully vain and shallow, with a fashion sense even more outrageous than Mars. What’s his special power?
Lookin’ NICE!
ATEE & GEECEE (Cosmic Quantum Ray)
Two more crew members from Cosmic Quantum Ray (technically 1, since they hail from a planet where everyone’s a twin and therefore count as a single crew member). Another set of alien twins, these 2 possessing the powers to create super-strong, super-elastic DNA strands. Atee (the one in pink) is sweet, while Geecee (the one in baby blue) is sassy. Plus they’re pilots with the need…the need for warp speed.
COLONEL BLEEP
OK, the propeller on top of his helmet serves no purpose since there’s no air in space and the unicycle is kind of dorky, but we can’t help but like an alien ambassador who comes from a planet called Futura (so what did they call it in the past?), lives on an island located at exactly zero degrees longitude and zero degrees latitude and possesses ‘Futomic Energy’ which can conjure up a house in seconds.
Plus he has a mute cowboy puppet and a caveman as his running crew, or flying crew to be more accurate.
So there you have it, our favorite fictional super advanced space aliens. Let’s just assume that they are super-advanced; after all, if they can get here, then they’re already more advanced than we are.
A Squared plus B Squared equals C Squared, Dum-dums!
Over the years, there seems to be a trend towards “More is better”. hence, due largely to the success of the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe), the recent wave of comic book/superhero movies such as Batman V Superman: Dawn of Sucking, X-Men: Overstuffed and Ninja Turtles 2: The Legend of Curly’s Gold, are now trying to cram as many characters as they can into a single movie and on TV shows the trend leans toward expanded worlds with a large number of cast members…
Hey! Did you spot Waldo?
…So naturally, I have to go against the grain and state this Unpopular Opinion:
I prefer small casts to large ones. Always have, and probably always will.
Yeah, I get that a lot of people think huge casts are great; there’s a ton of different characters and plots to explore, it feels more like an actual world, blah blah blah, but I’m more of a minimalist (and let’s face it: I’m also lazy); having to keep track of so many characters and story lines is a chore to me, and when there’s too many, I just lose interest.
Case in point: I was probably the only person on the internet who wasn’t having a fangasm when Cartoon Network’s Justice League mutated into Justice League Unlimited.
The original JL format wasn’t perfect (I was never keen on the idea of Hawkgirl/Hawkwoman being on the team without Hawkman, not that she wasn’t a good or capable character, but in my mind she’s part of a duo and I can’t see her alone, and shipping Hawkgirl with someone other than her spouse and turning Hawkman into a Shayera Hol fanboy stalker didn’t sit right with me at all) but it was worlds better than the format change. I never liked the expansion of the League from the Super 7 to the JL Army; I didn’t like it then and I don’t like it now. For one, it just came off as gimmicky to me, like a ploy to sell more toys, especially since 2/3 of these new characters never actually did anything. Some people were fan-wanking:
“At the end of the Static Shock episode “A League of Their Own”, the heroes said that Static and Gear would be joining the Justice League one day, so why weren’t they on JLU? Where were they?”
To which I respond, if Gear and Static were actually going to be the focus of stories and you know, do stuff, then I’d be totally fine with them appearing on JLU; they’re both cool characters, but I don’t see the need to put them on the show just to occasionally see them hovering in the background every few episodes.
-FTR, we did get to see Static in the League in “Time, Warped”…
…and we got a glimpse of Gear in the SS episode “Future Shock”…
Too much time in front of a monitor, I see…
..So there’s that.
The other reason I didn’t like the JL Army was because it cheapened the whole product; made it look like any Joe Shmoe with a flashy costume and a gimmick could get into the League; not the best image to convey for what’s supposed to be the greatest force for good on the planet. A club’s not exclusive if just anybody can be a member. If the League was going to open their doors for total jobbers like Vibe, Gypsy, Shining Knight and Vigilante, then they might as well have gone the whole 9 yards and stuck Mr. T, Inspector Gadget, the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling and the Super Globetrotters in there as well. The producers wanted to bring in some other DC characters to mix things up? Fine. Then just bring the occasional Super Guest like they used to do on the old Super Friends show and keep the Big 7 as an elite (and exclusive) group.
When it comes to fiction, I happen to follow the rule of KISS:
DETROIT ROCK CITY!!
That being Keep It Simple, Stupid. Give a hoot, don’t convolute . Don’t over-complicate things when it’s not necessary. Keep everything streamlined and only focus on the main characters and their stories. This results in a better quality end product, since the creator only has to concentrate on the characters that matter, rather than trying to squeeze in a ton of ancillary characters that you really don’t need and have no real reason to be there.
A good example of the latter is The Amazing World of Gumball.
Gumball‘s producers seem to want to take a Simpsons type approach to the show, focusing on the entire town/world as a whole and intent on giving every single character a spotlight episode, even the 1-note, 1-joke characters who simply aren’t interesting or capable enough to sustain an entire plot…
…Whereas my brother Jason feels that the show should focus solely (if not exclusively) on the Watterson family first and foremost, and I have to say, based on what I’ve seen of Gumball, I have to agree with him. (Big surprise, I know.)
It’s like the game Sonic Heroes. Why cram your game full of a bunch of ham ‘n’ eggers that most people aside from super-hardcore fans really don’t care about…
..When you could just as easily make a kick-ass game that only stars the biggest, most dimensional and most layered characters that people actually want to play as?
Again, think KISS: Keep It Simple, Sir. Let’s not confuse quantity with quality. More doesn’t automatically equal better, or even as good. Some of the best comedians used restricted tools, and some of the greatest works of all time have done so by keeping things small: The Honeymooners and All in the Family each had only 4 protagonists, Sanford & Son and Two’s Company only had 2. Red Dwarf, one of THE best shows of all time, has never had more 3 or 4 regular cast members (5 counting Holly). The best Looney Tunes shorts have always centered on only 2 or 3 characters at a time, like Bugs and Elmer or Bugs and Sam or Bugs and Marvin or Bugs and Taz or Bugs and Daffy or Bugs, Daffy and Elmer or Daffy and Porky or Daffy and Marvin or Porky and Sylvester. I’ve always preferred smaller casts and fewer main characters. If the characters you have are cool and interesting, you don’t need a ton of characters.
I’d rather have a small set of elites and mega-stars…
Think the current 20th Century Fox X-Men movieverse is the most messed up, convoluted clusterf*ck representation of the popular comic book franchise?
Yes, believe it or not (see what I did there?), before there was the First Class Trilogy or even the 2000 X-Men trilogy, there was an X-Men film which somehow managed to be an even bigger train-wreck than any of those films combined. It’s the subject of today’s TV Special Showdown: a made-for-TV movie based on Marvel’s Generation X.
X Marks the Shlock
For those who don’t know, Generation X was a made-for-TV film directed by Jack Sholder, which aired on FOX on February 20, 1996. It was based on the Marvel Comics comic-book series of the same name, a spin-off of the X-Men franchise, in which X-Men characters Banshee and newly reformed Emma Frost (the artist formerly known as the White Queen) starting a new Xavier School for Gifted Children in upstate Massachusetts. The TV special was produced by New World Entertainment and Marvel Entertainment, and it imitated the comic it was based on the same way that a castrato imitates a man. X-Kuteer Droll Call:
The first thing you’ll notice about this TV movie is that half the cast of the comic were nowhere to be found, and the other half were barely recognizable. Gone from the get-go were the characters of
Chamber (Jonothan Starsmore) is a crazy powerful psionic whose immense psionic energy powers have already blasted a huge gaping hole from his jaw to his upper chest, with free-floating energy oozing around inside it.
Say, would you mind facing the other way?
“Are you kiddin’? Do you know how much special FX that would cost?!?”
So bang goes his application. Next was Husk (Paige Guthrie, younger sister of Sam Guthrie, X-Force‘s Cannonball), whose mutant power was the ability to rip away her skin, revealing a new form underneath (either animal or mineral) each time.
Take it off. Take it all off.
“DUDE! We can’t do anything like that! It’s not in the budget! We can barely afford the muffin cart!”
I’m sensing a pattern here. Also absent was Penance, a Yugoslavian mutant (originally, anyway, but more on that later) whose entire body was diamond hard and razor sharp.
And I honestly didn’t give 2 candy-coated squats that she wasn’t used, since I always thought Penance was lame anyway. Moving on…
The final character not to make the cut was Synch (Everett Thomas) who possessed a bio-genetic aura which allowed him to synchronize with and duplicate the powers of other mutants as long as he was in their proximity.
Purty colors!
I guess this character isn’t within the budget either, right?
“Nah, we’re just lazy. We could audition another character, but I’ve got me a hankering for Firehouse Subs!”
-Now let’s move on to the characters “lucky” enough to make it into the film.
First up, fan favorite Jubilee, who actually was featured in the Generation X comics and was already a popular character on the X-Men cartoon series which was enjoying success on Fox Kids at the time.
THIS is the movie’s version of Jubilee.
Wow. Just…wow.
Looks just like her, huh? They sure captured the character there.
“That is the whitest Jubilee I’ve ever seen!”
Word. FOX freakin’ whitewashed Jubilee. A fan favorite character, and one of the few Asian characters in popular fiction who isn’t a stereotypical computer nerd or a martial artist, and they give the part to a white girl with neon yellow lipstick that makes her look like she just French kissed a lemon!
“WHIIIITEWAAAAAASHIIIIINGGGGG!!!!”
I can understand altering the character’s back story so as not to include Wolverine, but changing Jubilee’s race was unforgivable. Jubilee is Chinese-American, not Caucasian. If you’re trying to honor the character and/or please fans of the comic, casting a white actress in the role is not going to do that. Not only is Jubilee the wrong race (as these executive geniuses probably didn’t know, the character’s code name is merely a portmanteau of her actual name, Jubilation Lee, and her mutant power is a nod to Chinese fireworks, so being Chinese-American is part of the freaking character, ya morons! You DON’T change that!), but the rendering of her power is also totally wrong. Cheap yellow sparks that look like they were done in Mario Paint.
Hey movie producers, you may not have been aware of this, but Jubes’ fireworks are MULTICOLORED. They’re not all just yellow.
“But different colored filters cost money!”
The First Class trilogy at least got Jubilee’s look down,
Of course, the one scene in X-Men: Apocalypse where she uses her powers ended up on the cutting room floor.
OK, rant over. Back to discussing this joke of a movie.
We also got M (Monet St. Croix), who was about as necessary to this film as an 11th finger.
In the comics, M’s powers were basically being superstrong, a genius, psionically powerful, invulnerable and able to fly, but all of these abilities were merely offshoots of her true power*, which I’ll get to in a minute…
Here, we get this chick, who basically fell into the ‘high school bitch’ stereotype and did literally nothing other than the occasional display of super-strength.
“Hi, I’m Monet. I have several amazing powers, but you’re not going to see any of them in this movie because the producers blew the budget on a Happy Meal!”
*Incidentally, comics writer Scott Lobdell, M’s creator, didn’t originally plan for there to be an actual Monet at all, but rather the character known as ‘M/Monet’ was in reality prepubescent twin girls, Nicole and Claudette St. Croix, ‘Monet”s younger sisters, assuming the form of the originally made-up Monet.
…This explained many facets of the character: the reason for her childlike mannerisms and habits, such as enjoying climbing trees and having the handwriting of a 1st grader despite being a genius, was because ‘she’ was in fact a pair of little girls, and the characters period bouts of catatonia were due to one of the twins, Claudette, possessing a bit of autism. But Marvel later retconned all that away, and I think that sucks, as that was much more interesting than the whole “the twins were just posing as Monet while the ‘real’ Monet was revealed to be Penance trapped in that form by their brother, the evil empathic vampire known as Mplate” BS they changed it into later.
-Where were we? Oh yeah, this crappy movie…
We also got Skin (Angelo Espinoza), a kid from the LA ‘hood who possessed several extra layers of skin which we could stretch and contort (Angelo couldn’t stretch his bones like Reed Richards, so the extra skin was always there), but unfortunately this made him look like a Chinese Shar Pei.
Gross!
You know, in retrospect, this might have been why the comic lasted such a short time: it wasn’t very marketable since so many of the characters were grotesques.
“That’s right. I went there.”
Of course, this movie didn’t have the budget for anything like that, so instead we get…This guy.
Some wimpy dude with a Geri curl, who’s basically a sawed off Mr. Fantastic and only uses his powers like twice in the whole movie. Yawn.
The final member of the comics’ hit parade was Mondo, who in the comics was a fat, easy going Samoan who could assume the physical properties of whatever organic object he touched…
…But here was a cocky, loudmouthed douche-nozzle played by an African-American actor, Bumper Robinson (presumably because no suitable Samoan actor could be found, though that doesn’t explain why they gave Mondo Skin’s personality)…
And whose sole scene using his powers was so limp that he literally had to inform everyone that he did it (“Hey I picked up a rock and absorbed it”), otherwise we would have missed it entirely.
As an added bonus, we got 2 other X-Teens who didn’t even exist before, but were stand-ins for Chamber and Husk, whose powers were too expensive to portray on screen. On the boys’ side we had Kurt “Refrax” Pastorius, some dude with a Billy Idol hairdo who possessed controllable eye beams and X-Ray vision.
“Oy!”
To be fair, Refrax’s power was kind of cool: X-Ray vision and heat vision…
…Even if he looked like Vyvyan from The Young Ones with his hair dyed blond.
For the girls, we had Arlee “Buff” Hicks, who possessed super-accelerated musculature, giving her amazing strength and an incredible physique, as well as body issues up the wazoo.
Despite possessing an awesome physical form (which we only got to see once, and then it was an obvious body double), Buff is super-insecure about her muscled-up bod, so she hides it by wearing sweats most of time so nobody can see it.
Not to mention how since M here was so Nerfed that the only power we saw her do in this movie was super-strength, so M and Buff were more or less interchangeable power-wise. Given how extraneous M actually was to the “story”, they could’ve written Monet out and it wouldn’t have made a lick of difference.
Trivia Time:Generation X was the first FOX X-Men movie to use the Hatley School for the exterior shots of the X-Mansion.
So this flick did one thing right.
I know I haven’t said much about the plot of this movie, that’s because there isn’t much to say about the plot, other than it was gobbledeygook. Instead of Mplate or Bastian or any actual villains from the comics, we got Matt Frewer as some psycho named Russel Trech…
A sociopathic, psychopathic borderline pedophile whose mugging, spasms and contortions would later be emulating by Jim Carrey in Batman Forever.
There was some nonsense regarding virtual reality and jumping in and out of people’s minds and invading their wet dreams…
WE ARE VR!
And I hope you like this shot…
…Since it’s at the very end of the movie and the ONLY time we see any trace of the team’s costumes. And Buff is covered up again. Surprise, surprise.
Generation X wasn’t just a bad TV movie, it was also a bad pilot for what was planned to be a bad TV series, but alas, the movie earned dismal ratings and the proposed series never happened.
And we’re all the better for it. This team of super zeroes was so lackluster, I’d have rather gotten a TV movie starring these guys.
Twin Images 
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