How American Are You

This weekend I was lucky enough to get the chance to attend the Purdue Astronaut Reunion Forum, which for those who weren't in attendance, was a huge Q&A event with 7 of Purdue's 23 astronauts hosted by Purdue President Mitch Daniels. I also got to attend a smaller Q&A session with Gene Cernan (the last man on the moon, Apollo 17) alone with the ECE department (as Gene attended Purdue for a BSEE back in the day).

By the end of the forum, it was our running gag that everything that Gene Cernan said boiled down to "America, F*CK YEAH," which, well, was pretty true. It was a great time, and as a result of some of the jokes that resulted from Gene's apparent patriotism, I give you "How American Are You, A Sliding Scale." You can fill in the pieces where other big names/events/things would fit. It's not exhaustive by any means, but I got a kick out of it, so knock yourself out.

Unravelling the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), Part 1

So something that's been bugging me a lot over the past few weeks is the extreme development of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), and what that means for viewers.

So, let's start simple and work our way there.

If you're not familiar with Marvel comics/heroes, then why are you even still reading this? Marvel technically started in 1939 as Timely Publication, then ran through the WWII era as Atlas Publications before finally launching as the Marvel Worldwide that we know and love in 1961, spawning the start of our modern heroes with the Fantastic Four. Some well known characters from the Marvel universe include favorites such as Spiderman, Iron Man, the Hulk, Captain America, X-men, Wolverine, Deadpool, Fantastic Four, the Avengers, Thor, and some 5000+ more characters. Now in 2009, Disney acquired Marvel Worldwide's parent company, and now controls Marvel Studios, which produces most of the recent superhero movies (Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, The Avengers), and the nice thing about one studio pumping out all these movies is that they share continuity, with one movie's storyline somehow affecting or spawning the storyline of another movie down the road, and characters showing up in different movies across the board.

So what, you ask? Why does any of this matter? And more importantly, why isn't Spiderman in the Avengers when he was in the comics?

Well, that's a good question. Our answer can be found back in the 1990s when Marvel decided to start selling off movie franchise rights to keep itself funded. They did this on the stipulations that the studios had to make a movie involving that character/franchise every X amount of years, or the franchise rights revert back to Marvel Studios. Sony acquired Spiderman, Fox got X-men and Fantastic Four, Universal got Namor, and Lionsgate got Man-Thing. Below is a nice breakdown of who owns the rights to what:

So what else does this mean? It means that Spiderman can't be in the Avengers movies because Sony owns his franchise rights and probably won't give that up until the make 40,000 reboot prequels first. That also means that any other heroes/villains directly associated with Spiderman are also over at Sony. The same deal goes with Fantastic Four and their respective villains, and the whole X-men/mutant crowd at Fox. This actually brings up an interesting point, as Scarlett Witch and Quicksilver as technically the twin children of Magneto (X-men), but are appearing in Marvel Studios next Avengers movie. It will be interesting to see how they work around that. Man-Thing got turned into a Sci-Fi channel TV movie, and Namor's screenplay got scrapped (which his rights will probably revert back soon anyways).

Ok. At this point you're probably asking yourself why you read all of this and where I'm going with it. Well, here's the short answer. It explains why Sony is rebooting Spiderman with Andrew Garfield's 4-movie contract in The Amazing Spiderman after the disappointing Toby Maguire trilogy ending, why Fox is still churning out sub-par X-men and wolverine prequel movies and is about to reboot Fantastic Four (with a black Human Torch, just why?), BUT NOT WHY THEY AREN'T MAKING A DEADPOOL MOVIE.

Part 2 comes later will more relevant information & ranting. Peace.