Fandom Trope of the Day: Yellow Spandex

[seriousfic]

”You actually go outside in these things?”
“Well, what would you prefer? Yellow spandex?”

-Wolverine and Cyclops, X-Men (and yes, there are people who wanted Logan to wear yellow spandex)

Yellow spandex is the term I’m creating just now for anything that is widely accepted by the fanbase, but is too untenable for general audiences. Now, we can all agree there are things in comics that just don’t translate to film. Unfortunately, there generally tends to some (read: all) disagreement about what is yellow spandex and what is a vital component of a property’s appeal. According to fans, no comic book movie ever failed for being too faithful to the source.

For instance, in Batman Begins, after repeated exhortations to surrender, Ra’s Al Ghul persists in trying to slaughter millions. Batman lets him die with the badass one-liner “I won’t kill you, but I don’t have to save you either,” allowing Ra’s to reap a karmic award and incidentally taking out the head of a terrorist organization that knew his secret identity.

In the comics, of course, Batman would rescue him. This commitment to the sanctity of life has both practical (it allows supervillains to keep coming back issue after issue) and dramatic (it allows for conflict between “the easy road” and Batman’s ethical stand) reasons. In the movie, though, it would make him look effing retarded.

Expect lots more yellow spandex discussions to pop off as Frank Miller’s radical reinvention of The Spirit approaches release, despite the fact that the last Spirit fan died in 1982. And if you weren’t born yesterday, you’ll probably remember a thousand and one yellow spandex comments on Heath Ledger’s Joker before we all kinda got used to him not sounding like Mark Hamill.

Comments

[dragonbat2006.livejournal.com]

Actually, costumes are a huge area for this trope. I mean, IRL, what holds Kory's... er... suit up? Willpower? Most of the revealing costumes suffer from this because on the page, the costumes are painted on. On the actors? Not so much. (Rebecca Romijn-Stamos' Mystique being the exception, natch!)

[seriousfic.livejournal.com]

They can change whatever else they like. They can get Marlon Wayans to play Beast Boy, they can make Nightwing into a penguin, but they'd better have Jessica Biel in that outfit when they make the movie. Anything else would be like punching God in the face.

[box-in-the-box.livejournal.com]

What's interesting, in trying to separate "yellow spandex" from not, is that non-superhero stories have grown more superhero-ish over the years (between the action movie characters played by Will Smith and the founders of Planet Hollywood, as well as the degree to which John Woo and everyone from Bruce Lee to Jet Li has been aped by Western cinema), whereas self-identified "superhero" stories have progressively shed more and more of their trappings over the years (see also: every mainstream comic influenced by Alan Moore or Frank Miller since the mid-1980s, ie. all of them).

I'm probably misremembering this horribly, but I recall Stephen Jay Gould asserting that "evolution" takes similar courses in all things, whether it's the evolution of a species, a political system, a professional sport or a consumer technology - everything starts out at the extreme ends (new mutant breeds who are either weak or strong, liberals and conservatives, vastly talented versus completely untalented baseball players back in the original years of the sport, Beta versus VHS), and eventually progresses towards the middle.

His contention was, once the two polar extremes are so close together as to be virtually indistinguishable - the "weak" and "strong" members of a given species are equally capable of survival, liberals and conservatives agree on all but a handful of issues, "good" and "bad" baseball players are not that far apart anymore, and many consumers honestly can't tell the difference between regular DVD and Blu-Ray - then a new paradigm will emerge to overtake the old, sweeping away both "sides" of the previous spectrum in the process (politically, this would be why there is no longer a Whig party, and commercially, this is why the Beta versus DVD debate that I cited above no longer exists).

I wonder if the "superhero" and "non-superhero" genres aren't already doing this, each drawing inevitably closer to some "middle," at which point the distinction between the two will be rendered moot.

[lurkslikefox.livejournal.com]

Interesting. And it raises the question of whether a film has ever failed by being too faithful to the comic... I can't think of one...