they didn't want to put in the work of creating their own powerful characters and their own powerful scenes;
Why would they needed to have created an entirely new mythos? Especially considering that most powerful messages are conveyed by using the culture's mythoi that already exist.
For example, there's that religious painting of the Aryan Jesus knocking at the door; my very religious Protestant grandmother (originally Catholic, but that's a story in itself that would not interest you) had one. I have a graphic file in which dialog bubbles are added (Salvation for DUMMIES by Mrs. Betty Bowers):
quote:
Jesus: Let me in.
Other: Why?
Jesus: So I can save you.
Other: From what?
Jesus: From what I'm going to do to you if you don't let me in!
Now, what if Mrs. Betty Bowers, America's Best Christian, had to follow your restrictions? She couldn't use "Jesus knocking at the door", so she'd have to invent something else. But since nobody reading that would have any idea what she is talking about, it would be meaningless. Similarly, if she had to make up another fictional character other than Aryan Jesus, the entire message would have been meaningless.
The Blue Beetle? How could that ever have any meaning?
Those of us who have ever had to endure a lit class, be it English or in another language (German in my case), have undoubtedly heard that old truism that there exist only 15 to a couple dozen different stories and that every story that has ever been written has been a variation of those very few distinct stories -- a corollary wisdom is that in evaluating a given work, the criteria do not include whether the story is original (impossible according to the truism) but rather the author's skill in retelling that particular story (another corollary fuels the content-insatiable entertainment industry --
1).
So then, using iconic figures to retell a story should not only be acceptable, but also expected.
And you deftly avoided Hyroglyphx' point:
Hyroglyphx writes:
Christmas is historically an amalgamation of different pagan beliefs that were Christianized by Constantine and other early Christian figures.
FOOTNOTE 1:
When I was a young married airman stationed in North Dakota in 1977 and we lived in a small town miles out of the base, I was assigned to the swing shift (1630 to midnight) so my wife sat alone near the middle of nowhere (the actual Middle of Nowhere was about 130 miles away outside the town of Rugby; visited the marker and took our picture, even though the Middle of Nowhere is actually about 17 miles south by southwest from Rugby) with nothing to do but watch TV from the major-network signals we were able to pull in.
One night I came home from duty after midnight, she told me about two shows she had watched that night back-to-back (apologies, but I forget the order). First was a
Charlie's Angels episode in which someone had committed a robbery with an illegal pistol that he had shot somebody with so he disposed of it in the bushes of a park while on the run. Then a kid finds it and accidentally shoots a main character and runs away scared while that main character lies mortally wounded waiting for the others to find her and rescue her in the nick of time. Following that was an episode of
The Mod Squad which ran the exact-same scenario. At the time, I had BA German and my wife had a BA French (admittedly a mixed marriage, but we were able to make it work for a couple decades), so we had about the same amount of education in literature. I agreed with her hypothesis that many TV writers write a few solid scripts and then shop them around to various productions, changing each one superficially to fit with that particular show and its characters.
So not only are most "stories" just retellings of the few "original stories", but many of the retellings are just the result of a few cosmetic changes. I've seen references to a country song that goes something like "99 Channels and There's Nothing On". That describes a ferocious beast that demands air-time content and demands to be fed constantly.
Growing up, my father would at times draw us into an argument in which he would insist that he had seen this TV show before even though it was its first broadcast. In high school, my friend and I were into reading the reprinting of Doc Savage stories, when his older sister started pointing out how the same stories were being recycled.
Edited by dwise1, : Problems caused by confusion between HTML and BBForum codes. Essentially, punctuation errors.
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