Got-Thor-Dammer-Ring

When comics publishing slowed nigh to a halt a few months ago, I took the opportunity to read some really old comics runs. I’d never gone back to the 60s for any extended period of time before, but I decided on this occasion to start the Thor comics from the very beginning. It’s been a trip.

I recently reached the end of the 70s. At this point, Thor’s on a quest to discover answers about the vastly powerful alien Celestials and Odin’s involvement with them. To do this, he locates and questions Odin’s sacrificed eye, which has gained immense size and sentience. And how does the eye respond? By preceding the answers to Thor’s question with a recounting of Thor’s two previous mortal lives which he’d lost all memory of. And what two mortal lives were those? Siegmund and Siegfried, son of Siegmund. That’s right. The whole thing is an explicit and canonized retelling of Wagner’s Ring cycle within the Marvel universe. They even credit Wagner on the title page of each issue. And this goes on for 10 issues. And I just try to imagine reading the Thor comics as they came out in 1980 and being taken on this operatic adaptation for most of a year.

Then he finally gets a relatively concise answer about the Celestial stuff after all of that and goes to fight those things.

Anyway, it was a time.

Bonus Question!

Best Wagner?

Kurt.

"Gods Behaving Badly" Filmed Badly?

Big fan of mythology. Also comedy. And also fantasy stories. There was this book, “Gods Behaving Badly”, which hit that trifecta for me quite well when I read it ages ago.

Today, I just learned that it was made into a movie in 2013 with an astonishing cast. Christopher Walken was Zeus. That’s just a taste.

In the same day, I tried to find a place to watch it, whereupon I discovered that it had one showing at an Italian film festival before consensus decreed that the director’s inexperience and the general messiness of its production made the movie essentially unreleasable. Thus, it was never actually released.

But at least I saw some pictures. I got a taste.

Bonus Question!

Best movie about badly behaved gods?

“Thor”. It’s not even the best Thor movie, but the entire plot starts when Thor’s bad behaviour gets his father to overreact and send him to Earth, which is bad behaviour in itself. And then Loki starts behaving worse.

Sinbad, No Cinema

Since the movie theatres have closed down, I've begun replacing my weekly cinema trip with the sort of movie that'd fit in now but got missed because when it came out I wasn't religiously going to a film a week.

I started with an animated Sinbad feature with Brad Pitt in the lead role. Had I heard about this before? Probably. But I definitely forgot.

It served well though. I think it was part of that weakening wave of traditionally animated movies to come out right before the big studious switched entirely to computer generation for the rest of the decade, which let it fall through more cracks than it otherwise might have. Didn't this come out right around "Troy"? Traditionally, I might prefer Achilles, and  Brad Pitt slayed both roles, but his Sinbad movie gave me more of what I want out of historical adventure story. Which includes less pretension about supposedly being historical and more mythic adventure. Balls to an Achilles who's immortal because of luck or whatever! Give me that River Styx coating! Show me a war caused by a petty contest among a few divine sisters! 

And hells! You can even give Sean Bean his own Odyssey spinoff since he managed to avoid dying for a change.

Anyway. That Sinbad cartoon. See it. I can't remember the full title.

Bonus Question!

Best Pitt role?

Maybe the dude in “Megamind”? He was a dude who just wanted to practice his art outside of the spotlight, which fits with Pitt’s whole thing of a dude in a leading man body who’d love to be a character actor.