THE DARK KNIGHT

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DrGrood	Re: THE DARK KNIGHT	#21	[url]	[-]
Serial Fan Posts: 3839 16-Dec-08 09:38 ezOP	Well, I hope you're not implying this thing has anything else in common with any such film that has ever done any good for the world. Apart from the possible cathartic effect, which I think to a great degree it is having, and that is what Zorro may actually be expressing he's experienced to a degree when he says "it's just a movie," I see about as much good in this thing as the average sadism-porn movie, which this actually resembles, without the nudity. Remember how older folks would label some things like pulp magazines or horror comics junk that was bad for you? That's DARK KNIGHT all over. The place it comes from is the absolute bottom of the barrel. Its sadistic intent, though, is far deeper than just to attempt to show you a couple people being whipped. It actually is the polar opposite of GREAT DICTATOR in that it portrays, and approves of, not a world in which people are treated fairly and as equals, but one in which sadism and violence must be perpetutated at all costs. Time will tell, though, if the amorality and pointless rage in this movie are things that people will have been glad to have left behind, or will want to see more of in the future.
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Obnoxiad	Re: THE DARK KNIGHT	#22	[url]	[-]
Serial Fan Posts: 1 24-Dec-08 06:24	I'd like to say, with incredible sarcasm, thanks for the warning in your rant about ruining the ends of at least two serials before I figured reading anymore would ruin "good" films for me in the future. Black Arrow goes off the shopping list. Batman & Robin can wait a while now. I, a very serious comic guy, didn't love the film. It was interesting, visually very appealing, but after IRON MAN I felt this was too dark, to far gone, too little hope is given. I KNOW Gotham is a rough city, but after seeing this I was not lining up to go right back in and see it again like I did IRON MAN. However, I do think it is a film worth watching, and I did enjoy quite a bit of it. I just didn't enjoy the feeling it left me. SPOILER...see, that's not so hard. In the end the "world's greatest detective" and the newly crowned chief of police can't come up with a better idea to clear Batman than to blame him. That's just weak. END SPOILER...very easy. However, the box office doesn't lie. This movie made BANK! It made HUGE BANK! It could have bailed out a small bank. The DVD is making loads of cash as well. The public voted, aint democracy grand, and it said give us more. Now, about the whole it's too long then. STAY HOME! I'm tired of all of the damn whiners about LONG MOVIES. Put on some depends or STAY HOME! Dr. Grood's rant about this movie, and it was a rant....it was a LONG rant, is about how I feel about all of the movie goers who want this bull feces (censored by the writer for sensitive eyes) about placing every film into a cookie cutter 90 minutes. You've been TRAINED like one of pavlov's damn dogs. Hollywood LOVES 90 minutes because THEY can get an extra showing in the same theater. THEY HATE Austrailia, Titanic, and movies over two hours because they can't get that extra showing per day in that theater. Just for the record "THEY" are theater owners. I LOVE a long movie. I pay damn well to see a movie, and I ENJOY a long movie. Now, if it's padded crap it's padded crap, but I didn't feel that this film was padded. Now, I can't WAIT to hear what Grood thought about the new PUNISHER film!
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DrGrood	Re: THE DARK KNIGHT	#23	[url]	[-]
Serial Fan Posts: 4031 31-Mar-09 04:08 ezOP	The fact that Black Arrow is revealed to be a non-Indian by birth isn't the "real" big surprise at the end of the serial -- I did not give away that surprise. The "he's really a white guy therefore OK" thing, as such, is an irrelevancy, and as such is no pleasant surprise but instead comes across as a ridiculous trick. It is better to know it's coming than not to, because it was just tacked on anyway and makes no sense. I can think of no better textbook example of an arbitrary onscreen race-adjustment and may continue to use that one in further discussions, because it isn't a real "reveal" as would be a mystery villain's identity, it's an adulteration pasted on to fit with the political mood of the time -- which was that the country was not yet ready for an action serial with a non-white hero (and I wonder sometimes if some people STILL aren't ready for that, considering how poorly Mala gets treated around here despite the fact that several leads in other serials are far worse actors than he is). Sorry, but the serial is something like 60 years old now and some sorts of things like this need to be considered discussable!
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Black Tigrrr		#24	[url]	[-]
Serial Fan Posts: 150 31-Mar-09 11:40	I think you should have prefaced that with a "Spoiler" note, Doc. I enjoyed the serial more not knowing about that until it happened.
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DrGrood		#25	[url]	[-]
Serial Fan Posts: 4033 1-Apr-09 12:17 ezOP	Are you kiddin' me, BT? This was a good thing for you? As I said, I didn't reveal the larger other "surprise" and I don't intend to. But this bit? Ugh. Sorry, I disagree, I think this is one bad call that needs to be at least noted if not thoroughly talked about. The implied racial switch thing doesn't even make SENSE in consideration of the other related reveal. It has been 60 years now since BLACK ARROW came out, and 10 years since the Squadron started; shouldn't we by now have developed enough of a social consciousness around here to be able to recognize and discuss boners like this and kick them to the critical curb where they belong? Can't we act like grownups at least SOMETIMES? Last Edited By: DrGrood 1-Apr-09 04:15. Edited 4 times.
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Sherwin Lyman	Spoiler alert	#26	[url]	[-]
Serial Fan Posts: 639 1-Apr-09 07:17 Thunder Rider&SA Founder	I hate to tell you but the same thing happened in White Eagle with Buck Jones. He also turned out to be white. Wow.
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Mort Bakaprevski		#27	[url]	[-]
Serial Fan Posts: 208 1-Apr-09 10:30	Not too surprising. Remember, those were the days when pro baseball teams were all-white... by design!!
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DrGrood		#28	[url]	[-]
Serial Fan Posts: 4034 1-Apr-09 11:02 ezOP	I think this kind of thing went back all the way to the Civil War -- I have got a melodrama script from just afterward in which the main character is a young woman happy to be about to get married -- until she discovers that she may have been switched at birth with her parents' actual baby, and be a "quadroon," or 1/4 black and therefore in legal terms nothing but a slave. She faces the loss of all her property and status and of course cannot marry her fiance. Of course at the end it all turns out to have been a mistake and/or something set up by the villain to assert his power over her. What is interesting, though, about this scenario is that it could have actually happened. How much more dramatically interesting it would have been WITHOUT the switch-back! But dramatists dared not venture into the realm of allowing a story to be about a leading lady of "inferior" race.
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Mort Bakaprevski		#29	[url]	[-]
Serial Fan Posts: 209 1-Apr-09 01:00	I'm old enough to remember the day my neighbors across the street disappeared... not to re-appear until after the war. I also remember frequent arguments with my father about the inequities of segregation in the south. My father was, socially, very liberal & agreed with me... but always added, "You just can't rush these things."
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DrGrood		#30	[url]	[-]
Serial Fan Posts: 4035 1-Apr-09 03:27 ezOP	What amazes me is that this stuff doesn't just involve you sit over here and you sit over there -- in scriptwriting terms, being of a different race here is treated as what is called the "dreadful alternative," in other words, the worst thing possible that can happen, which we are supposed to hope the hero/heroine can rise above and so not be doomed. Comparable not just to the back of a bus but the back of a bus about to explode. I would wonder what a non-white audience member might have thought of this sort of melodrama, but undoubtedly they would not have been allowed in the theatre. BLACK ARROW is a different story, though. I can not imagine how a little Cherokee kid in Oklahoma sitting watching that serial for 14 chapters and undoubtedly cheering the hero would have felt at the end of that one.
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DrGrood		#31	[url]	[-]
Serial Fan Posts: 4036 1-Apr-09 05:40 ezOP	Thinking back even further, it comes to mind that even in some fairy tales and children's books the device of someone being turned "black" as a means of punishment was used. In the otherwise pretty good story "The Wild Swans" the witch turns the Snow White-like heroine black with a spell so she will not be recognized and be cast out of the castle into the forest. And in the ostensibly humorous German children's book "Struwwelpeter," if I recall correctly, there is a story about children being punished by being dipped in an inkwell and turned into "inky boys." Some long-established conventions were hard to break, I guess. Things have come a long way in the past 50 years.
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Black Tigrrr		#32	[url]	[-]
Serial Fan Posts: 151 1-Apr-09 10:15	Love "Struwwelpeter" by Heinrich Hoffman. All stories of kids behaving badly and coming to an untimely end. Hoffman was a doctor with a talent for illustration that sought to find a way to communicate good behavior to his kids in an entertaining, albeit dark, way. The story you refer to Doc is the one story that has been questioned over the years and usually omitted or changed in reprinted editions. There was an entertaining staged musical version by the Tiger Lillies called Schockheaded Peter that is must see. Although I can't imagine anyone but the Tiger Lillies starring in it.
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Mort Bakaprevski		#33	[url]	[-]
Serial Fan Posts: 210 2-Apr-09 11:40	DrGrood wrote: BLACK ARROW is a different story, though. I can not imagine how a little Cherokee kid in Oklahoma sitting watching that serial for 14 chapters and undoubtedly cheering the hero would have felt at the end of that one. But, the writers weren't writing for that kid. It's not that they thought of him & then dismissed him. He never entered their minds. Who was the audience they envisioned? All you have to do is look at the comic book ads of that era. The kids who lusted after a Daisy Red Ryder BB gun; the ones riding the latest model Schwinn; & the lads who followed in Captain Tootsie's wake. In short, white, Christian, pre-pubescent males. The only difference in the "adult" films was that they were targeted for a larger audience than pre-pubescent males. Even if you lived through that era, it's difficult to grasp what a vastly different world it was from the one we live in today... or the world we lived in 30 years ago!!
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DrGrood	Only worthwhile thing I have ever seen related to DARK NUT	#34	[url]	[-]
Serial Fan Posts: 4051 8-Apr-09 05:49 ezOP	http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2yv8aT0UFc
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Sgt Saturn	Non-White Heroes	#35	[url]	[-]
Serial Fan Posts: 379 9-Apr-09 09:21	... the country was not yet ready for an action serial with a non-white hero ... Even in features you can count the non-white heroes on the fingers of one hand, Charlie Chan, Mr. Moto, Mr. Wong (the only one to be played by an Asian -- Keye Luke one the last of the series). Can anyone think of any others from the 1940s? The Ol' Sarge
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DrGrood		#36	[url]	[-]
Serial Fan Posts: 4053 9-Apr-09 11:45 ezOP	Probably the first serial I ever saw was DANGER ISLAND from 1968 or 69, which had a black hero. Herb Jeffries would fit your question but of course the entire rest of the cast of his "segregated" films was black too.
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jadm1	DANGER ISLAND?	#37	[url]	[-]
Serial Fan Posts: 56 10-Apr-09 07:15	(Sorry....after my morning coffee, I woke up and realized you couldn't be talking of the "lost" DANGER ISLAND serial, hence the deletion.) Last Edited By: jadm1 10-Apr-09 07:35. Edited 1 time.
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