ScreenJunkies News breaks down "Captain Marvel" box office conspiracy theories!

I am going to go there right now and say that I believe that the world will not end because Marvel's Captain Marvel" happens to send a positive feminist message. I believe that the folks who are screaming from their YouTube channels about how Marvel is "forcing a feminist agenda" down our throats with this "SJW feminist propaganda" are betraying a reactionary agenda and bias.

Apparently, many of these people have been saying that the movie would bomb, then that the great opening weekend was rigged, then that the downturn on Monday, and then the following weekend, proved that the movie and its message was not popular.

ScreenJunkies (who did not give the movie a stellar review) decided to do the research and figure out if there was any truth to these report of Disney doing things like buying out theaters and scheduling the release to maximize ticket sales to make it look like a successful movie when it would not be, among other things.

Without further ado, let's hear what he has to say...

...and on a note relevant to this blog, this is just one more piece of evidence that there is a Captain Marvel connected to EVERYTHING!

Marvel's "Captain Marvel" Carol Danvers movie review (Part 1)

After all the fuss and sturm und drang regarding this movie, let me say: This movie was not what you feared. It is a good, exciting, superhero movie/'90's nostalgia film that you can enjoy without even having read any of the comics or seeing any of the other Marvel movies.

That being said let's get into this. SPOILER ALERT! This is going to be a full-service review/analysis, so if you are one of those "Don't tell me! The introductory paragraph to this post was too much already!" people, stop now and read my "Spoiler Free" review at http://captainmarvelculture.blogspot.com/2019/03/spoiler-free-marvels-captain-marvel.html

Captain Marvel follows the story of an alien Kree warrior named Vers (pronounced "veers") as she discovers her true origin and power when she spends time on Earth.

If you knew nothing about the character, and that this movie was part of the Great Marvel Cinematic Universe, that would actually make for a pretty good movie. A few little things could have been left out, but they were mostly amusing in context.

But such is the way with Marvel superhero movies, and part of the fun of them is to see them in context and get all those little references. But even so, even with those little things, there should be a good movie behind it, and this is a good movie. It is even a good superhero movie, and it has an important, if not unfamiliar message. But this message has not been spelled out quite this obviously and relateably as in other superhero movies yet.

But aside from being a superhero movie, the other big, important characteristic of this movie is that it is a 1990's nostalgia piece. As such there are many 1990's references made, but to the movie's credit, those references (for the most part) enhance the themes, plot, mood, and characters of the movie. There are a few throw-away jokes as well, but at least they fit within the scope and parameters of the film-making.

The story begins with us getting to know Vers (Brie Larsen). She is a warrior with a strike team of the Kree intergalactic empire who has mysterious dreams that are probably about her past, which she can't remember. The Kree have a thing called "The Supreme Intelligence," which seems to be the consciousness of the ruling faction of the empire. It might be some sort of psychic artificial intelligence, because one communes with it by being connected to blue organic wires that tap into your body, and you speak to an avatar that is supposed to be someone you feel you can trust, or something.

She is being trained and led by an officer named Yon-Rogg (Jude Law. The character's name is not mentioned until well past the halfway mark of the movie). He keeps on telling her to control her emotions in many different ways as it seems she has some kind of superpower of "photon blasts" she can shoot with her fists. They appear to be enabled by a gadget stuck to the back of her neck.

In the course of a military extraction operation gone bad against their mortal enemies, the shape-shifting Skrulls, she gets captured and her memories are tapped, revealing a life growing up on Earth, constantly being told that she cannot do things, from kiddie go-kart races to obstacle courses in Air Force training. But these dreams also reveal who Mar-Vell (Marvel Comics' first Captain Marvel) is: a Dr. Wendy Lawson (Annette Benning), a Kree in disguise on Earth as a jet plane researcher/designer for the US Air Force and/or S.H.I.E.L.D.

At this point it is important to start pointing out the differences between the movie and the comics.

Movie adaptations of comic books and comic book superheroes always have to make changes because the media won't tell the same story to the same effect. Some such movies are direct adaptations of specific book (like Watchmen, 400, and Sin City), and others are stories of characters that have had a long history in the comics (Superman, Batman, the X-Men, Etc). This is one in the former group. In such stories, their origins have probably been told multiple times in the comics by different writers and artists and with different focii, emphasis, dialogue, and sometimes even with details being changed. They have had years of adventures, battling against a variety of adversaries, with an ever-changing and evolving cast of background characters. Even their costumes/uniforms have doubtless changed over time.

This means the the producer/director/writer team has to decide what the essence of the character is, how best to portray that on the screen, and how to make the hero relevant for today to draw an audience of both the loyal fans and those in the mainstream who are unfamiliar. This may mean changing elements of the origin story, combining, changing, or replacing certain background characters, changing the superpowers, even adjusting the costume.

Sometimes these changes work, even brilliantly. Making Rogue be the introductory character of the first X-Men movie, for instance, gave the audience a hero whose very power (the uncontrollable ability to absorb someone's memories and  superpowers, if they have any) drove her away from her loved ones, a perfect metaphorical parallel for the experience of homosexuals and other outcasts for which the X-men served as identifiable characters.

Sometimes these changes don't work, or are simply irrelevant, like making Red Skull Italian in the 1989 Captain America movie. I mean, come on, the greatest foe of Captain America in WWII, Italian?

In the comics, Mar-Vell was male, and Yon-Rogg was his superior officer. Yon-Rogg sent him to Earth to spy on humans to determine if they should be wiped out. While it may yet be revealed in a future movie that this was the true reason Mar-Vell was on Earth, there was another aspect to his character that making her female completely swept away: Romance.

Captain Mar-Vell's girlfriend on the Kree ship orbiting Earth was Medic Una, and Colonel Yon-Rogg had eyes for Una. He was also jealous of Mar-Vell for his popularity and success. Thus he wanted to get rid of him. And when Mar-Vell was on Earth, he won the heart of Carol Danvers for rescuing her from various monstrous threats. They made out numerous times, and each time Yon-Rogg would make sure Medic Una saw it, in the hopes that she would forsake him.

Much as I can only imagine someone in the world might want to see Annette Benning as a lesbian cougar getting it on with Brie Larsen, and Jude Law as some sort of jerk who gets turned on by lesbians, or perhaps that the Kree are not so hung up on gender preference as us humans, making Mar-Vell female and eliminating Una in a Marvel superhero movie totally eliminates any romantic angle in the relationship between these three characters. On the other hand, it does serve a certain message of this movie that I will get to later.

TO BE CONTINUED...

SPOILER FREE Marvel's "Captain Marvel" movie review (Carol Danvers)

I enjoyed it.

TWO NEW TRAILERS! ONE FOR SHAZAM! ONE FOR CAPTAIN MARVEL!

So MovieAccessTrailers seems to like to put together videos of "coming attractions," book-ended by recent trailers. This is great because it gives us the opportunity to see a whole bunch of footage of the movies in one convenient video. So without further ado, here is the one for DC's upcoming "SHAZAM!" movie:

In it we see Sivana shooting lightning from his fingers, money flying out of an ATM into the hands of the hero and Freddy Freeman, a new member of the "Shazam Kids," and repeated viewings of what is possibly the coolest shot in any Superhero movie, Billy Batson jumping off a building, saying the word, and, in a flash of lightning, transforming into the hero.

Here is the one for Marvel's "Captain Marvel" movie:

The heading is a bit misleading. We don't see any Minerva-Ronan fight, What we do get is Annette Benning as a maternal figure, a brief look at Korath with laser wings, more Brie Larsen/Samuel L. Jackson banter, a Jude Law/Brie Larsen fight/training sequence, some air force buddy-banter between Lashana Lynch (Monica Rambeau's mom) and Brie Larsen, and footage of Brie Larsen jumping on a train and crashing a plane.

I am going to update this post with some analysis later.

MIRACLEMAN! the Marvelous revival of the British Captain Marvel Rip-Off! (Part 9 of the Blog History of ALL the Captain Marvels!

    

When last we left our hero, Marvelman (the British rip-off/follow-up/substitute to Captain Marvel created by Mick Anglo in 1953), his publisher, L. Miller and Son, had cancelled publication in 1963, due mostly to new competition from American superheroes.

In the succeeding years, the company, whose name had been changed to L. Miller and Co. (Hackney) in 1959, faced a variety of adversities as they changed their business several times (including becoming a film producer), and folded in 1974 for an accumulation of reasons. According to The Poisoned Chalice by Pádraig Ó Méalóid, there was no mention of the ownership of the Marvelman character in any document relating to the closing of L. Miller and Co. (Hackney). This will prove to be important later, as we will see.

In March 1982, a new British company called Quality Communications Ltd. launched a comic magazine named Warrior featuring several new stories, including a revival of Marvelman. Quality Communications Ltd. had been founded by Dez Skinn, a British comics professional who wanted to create a new monthly anthology comic magazine with a dark edge, and wanted to include a superhero character, preferably a revival.

Alan Moore was an English comic book writer who had recently done significant work for the British anthology comic 2000AD and for Marvel UK's line of comic books for the British market. He had become a fan of Marvelman through the 1960's and 70's, reading the old comics, and even envisioned doing a Mad Magazine-style spoof.

Alan Moore was given the job of writing this revival, and Garry Leach was the first to draw it. This is generally acknowledged to be the first "post-modern" superhero comic book.

Context of the term "post-modern" in superhero comic books: In the comics of the Golden Age (1930's - early 1950's) and early Silver Age (mid 1950's to late 1960's), superheroes were mostly simple creatures, beloved by the public, unburdened by excessive personal problems and existing in a world in which the biggest challenge a superhero faced was a supervillain, not the daily challenges of paying the rent, getting along with fellow superheroes, and negative public opinion.

The first "modern" heroes appeared in the early 1960's, when Marvel Comics introduced their new superheroes such as The Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, The Avengers, and the X-Men. With stories and dialog written by Stan Lee and pages of pictures drawn by the likes of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko, these heroes were more human. They bickered and quarreled, faced practical challenges of relationships and bill-paying, and were not always the "beloved idols of millions."

Alan Moore's Marvelman broke new ground in not just considering the personal effects of a superhero career, but also the ultimate, apocalyptic potential of super-powered humans in the real world. The hero and his alter-ego were actually separate people who switched places in a limbo-like dimension through the transformation that occurred at the sound of the word "kimota!" Micky (now Michael) Moran had grown up to be a pudgy, middle-aged schlub working as a journalist who had completely forgotten about his time as a superhero. A stressful incident with nuclear terrorists awakened his memory, but the world into which Marvelman awoke was not the one in which he had previously lived. His "mushroom cloud" transformation did physical damage to people and the area around him. His super-strength near-killed every normal human he fought. And it was the tension-fraught 1980's of Margaret Thatcher and the Cold War, not the friendly 1950's of cartoony mad scientists and fictional foreign dictators in which he found himself.

The villain turned out to be Kid Marvelman, who had not transformed back to his normal human alter ego in twenty years, and was now a charismatic business tycoon, pretending to be his look-alike alter ego, Johnny Bates. He was ultimately revealed to be a sociopath with the power to fulfill his basest desires by the most  destructive means, often graphically depicted. In the meantime, Marvelman's powers seemed to defy the laws of physics. And though he still had a basic underlying personal similarity to Michael Moran, and looked like an idealized, super-fit version of him, he proved to be smarter and more charismatic, and made love to Michael's wife in a fantastically superior manner.

The story did not reach its apocalyptic climax in the pages of Warrior, however. 

Before it got to that point, creative differences and financial difficulties led to Alan Moore and new artist for the strip Alan Davis to cease working for Dez Skinn. The Marvelman strip therefore made its last appearance in Warrior in August, 1984, after 112 pages, and with a cliffhanger.

Soon after, attorneys for Marvel Comics sent a cease-and-desist letter to Skinn, claiming that the use of a character with the name "Marvelman" misrepresented Quality Communications as the company that owned the trademark on the word "Marvel" and the name of the superhero "Captain Marvel," Marvel comics. Skinn (and his attorneys) had a lengthy correspondence with Marvel's attorneys, but the days of Warrior were numbered. Its last issue was #26 in February, 1985.

NEXT: The Marvelous Miracle! Or was it Miraculous Marvel?

Some important parts of the information in this post were drawn from http://www.comicsbeat.com/poisoned-chalice-part-4-intermission-1963-to-1982/, a very thoroughly researched work about the history of Marvelman.

Marvel's Captain Marvel (Carol Danvers) Third Trailer review!

Once again, we interrupt the "Blog History of Captain Marvel (all of them!)" to bring you the latest news about an upcoming Captain Marvel movie.

          

So, here is the third (and allegedly final) trailer for Marvel's Captain Marvel movie, a.k.a. "Special Look":

This one fleshes out a bit more of Carol Danvers' relationship with Nick Fury and the background and plot of the movie.

Combined with other evidence, it has been figured out that the leather biker jacket Carol is wearing (and presumable the helmet and motorcycle) were taken from Rob Kozinsky's character. This is clearly a Terminator 2 reference.

Skrulls are eclearly established as shape-shifters, and no doubt is left as to the race of the old lady on the subway.

Carol Danvers can shoot photon blasts out of her hands! (Reference to Monica Rambeau, Marvel's first female and only black Captain Marvel, whose mother appears in the film as a fellow air force jet pilot to Carol Danvers?)

Nick Fury tends bar in a dive in the middle of a western US desert. And what is it about Fury's left eye? We know he loses it later, but here he gets a serious cut over it. Perhaps he should learn to protect it better? Maybe not drop his left when he throws a punch?

That injury apparently happened after he first met her, as that shot of him knocking on the window nd removing his glasses did not include the eyebrow injury.

Jude Law's character (whom I am assuming is Yon-Rogg because the Funko Pop character with the same Kree-Starforce uniform, who happens to be the only male Kree in Starforce with a Caucasian face, is named so) is Carol Danvers' trainer, but there is some tension, as he warns her of reaching beyond her grasp.

Vers (as the Funko Pops reveal will be Carol Danvers' Kree name) has no memory of her past. While this might have been a reference to her split personality in the original comics (Carol Danvers wooed have memory blackouts and Ms. Marvel would not know who she was), but the YouTube breakdowners are all saying that there may well be some sort of false memories planted in her head.

Brie Larsen's performance is given more screen time than the two lines she gat in the first trailer. She has goen from deadpan to deadpan snarky.

One consistent thread through all of these trailers has been Carol Danvers falling and then getting back u p. It is my expectation that this will be the dominant theme of the picture. Carol stumbles. Carol makes mistakes. Carol bites off more than she can shew and fails, fall, collapses. But shew gets back up. Each and every time she rises up again, stronger, wiser, and more determined than ever to lick that challenge.

This is what makes HER a HERO.

Here are some easter egg/breakdown/commentary videos:

...and here are some "reaction" videos:

...and we finish it up with a couple of "reaction mashup" videos...

      

MARVELMAN! It's a Miracle! The British Capt. Marvel rip-off! (Part 8 of the Blog History of ALL Captain Marvels)

This history makes reference to material that can be found in the following books:

       

As we have already seen, in 1953 Fawcett settled the lawsuit with the company now known as DC Comics and agreed to never publish Captain Marvel comics ever again.

It turns out, however, that L. Miller & Son had been publishing black-and-white versions of these stories in the United Kingdom for years. The material was supplied by Fawcett and the books were printed in the UK. When word reached these publishers of the imminent cessation of material, they realized they had to do something, because Captain Marvel was extremely popular!

So writer-artist Mick Anglo created Marvelman, a new superhero with remarkable similarities to the Big Red Cheese, not the least of which was his name. His alter ego was young Mickey Moran, a copy boy for the Daily Bugle (I have found no evidence that Stan Lee ever saw this comic before writing Spider-Man), who met the astrophysicist Guntag Barghelt, who gave him the super-scientific word "Kimota" ("atomic" misspelled backwards) which, upon utterance, would turn the boy into the mighty hero...Marvelman!

Marvelman was super-strong, invulnerable, and could fly. He wore a blue suit with no cape and had a blonde crew-cut with a superman-style spit-curl forelock. His face was a dead ringer for the World's Mightiest Mortal. Micky Moran, likewise was a carbon-copy of Billy Batson, but with the same blonde crew-cut and forelock as the hero into which he would transform.

Marvelman's debut was presaged by a brief promotional campaign in which Captain Marvel and Captain Marvel, Jr, in their respective L. Miller & Sons comics, stated that they were taking a break, but to watch for something new in the coming issues. After a few issues of this, the titles of these comics were changed to Marvelman and Young Marvelman, respectively, and thus were the names of the new heroes that appeared inside.

Young Marvelman was a uniformed messenger boy who gained the power to turn into a superhero version of himself by saying the name of Marvelman.

Marvelman's arch enemy was Dr. Emil Gargunza, who was essentially Dr. Sivana with hair. The stories followed the basic patterns of Captain Marvel stories, and even some covers and panels were direct copies of Captain Marvel pictures. However, being in Great Britain, it can safely be assumed that neither Fawcett nor DC noticed or cared.

In time there was even a Kid Marvelman and a Young Gargunza, and even supervillains named Nastyman and Kid Nastyman. A Marvelman Family comic contained stories of the whole team.

Original stories were written and drawn for most of the decade and enjoyed a great degree of popularity. Thwn, in 1959, certain laws were changed that allowed the full-color American comics to be imported to the UK. followed by a few years of reprints, until the line of Marvelman and family comics was cancelled in 1963. by this time original comics from the US were reaching the British markets, and there was no longer as much interest in this old hero.

 Marvelman stories were reprinted in Italy and Australia, and also in Brazil, where the hero had the name "Jack Marvel." The Brazilian reprints were printed in Marvel Magazine and the "MM" logo on the hero's chest was erased.

Some parts of this history are a bit confusing. Apparently, Mick Anglo also created a character named "Captain Universe," which existed in two issues of an eponymous comic published by Len Miller's son in 1954. Threat of a lawsuit (it is unclear from whom) shut it down.  Mick Anglo left Len Miller in 1960, and saw that some of his Marvelman stories were reprinted or redrawn with the character named "Captain Miracle" or "Miracle Man" with a different costume.

Then, in 1981, Warrior Magazine in the UK published a revival of the character, written by Alan Moore. We will cover this revival in the next chapter.

Note: this is a basic overview. A well-researched, lengthy, and detailed history of the character and many issues surrounding him at http://www.comicsbeat.com/poison-chalice-interlude-1953-1985-roundup-and-some-notes-on-copyright/

A lot more detail about the creation of Marvelman, with a focus on the ownership of the intellectual property rights, can be found at http://www.comicsbeat.com/poisoned-chalice-part-16-who-own-marvelman-part-ii/

Another, more brief history can be found at https://www.leylander.org/intercom/marvelman/