What happened to your voice?
What do you mean what happened to my voice?
I heard you had a bridge.
I know what a girl sound like.
We love superheroes.
From their meteoric rise to prominence in the 1930s
to their cultural ubiquity of today,
they've become a symbol for moral fortitude
in the eternal quest to defend the downtrodden,
and yet recently there's been a palpable homogeneity
specifically in the way they speak.
So why do all superheroes sound the same?
You mocking me?
He's trying to copy me.
You're just-- you're imitating the god man.
Superman, Batman, Blade, Spider-Man, and the X-Men,
their film adaptations provided the cultural foundation
that the house of ideas built the MCU on.
Despite the wave of successful comic book adaptations that
appeared throughout the 2000s, the first film
to really give a super hero a quirky,
funny, and sardonic personality was 2008's Iron Man.
The film's credited screenwriters
are Mark Fergus, Hawk Ostby, Art Marcum, and Matt Holloway.
However, Robert Downey, Jr. and Jon Favreau
used the script for Iron Man 1 in a highly unconventional
manner.
They used it as something to play off of, not film.
Large chunks of the film were completely
improvised on the day by the director and star.
Thus the film has a naturalistic yet hyper stylized patter
to the dialogue, and most importantly, it was funny.
If you douse me again and I'm not on fire,
I'm donating you to a city college.
This seems like an obvious path to take
at this point considering how it's
almost a requirement for the genre,
but in 2008, this was a true deviation
and one that would prove wildly successful for everyone
involved.
Michael Keaton, a literal comedian prior to the role,
wasn't funny as Batman.
Daredevil, Ghost Rider, Catwoman, none of these films
were funny unless you were laughing at them.
Arguably, the greatest innovation
that Iron Man and the MCU made to the newly blossoming genre
was taking a joke a minute view on the source material.
How do we get people to fall in love
with objectively obscure characters like Moon Knight?
Make them funny and charming.
She said I needed a suit.
The ceremonial armor from conscious temple
not Psycho Colonel Sanders.
The MCU's movies are basically built
off having characters banter, but this banter oriented way
of making superheroes speak has its roots all the way back
in the comic books.
It's hard to overemphasize the effect
that Brian Bendis had on the comic book
form in the early 2000s.
He pioneered the decompressed model of telling stories
and brought a real human lens to the characters who
had been stagnant for decades.
Starting with his Daredevil, Alias,
Ultimate Spider-Man work, and running through New Avengers
and Secret Invasion work, Bendis took traditional superheroes
and made them feel human primarily due to dialogue.
Bendis's chief creative inspiration was David Mamet,
the playwright and screenwriter behind Glengarry GlenRoss
and Ronin is recognized for his ear
for dialogue, extensive monologues,
and hyper specific verbal tics.
A always, B be, C closing, always be closing.
Bendis took these tropes and incorporated them
along with a deep love of crime and genre fiction
into a way of building superhero stories
that hasn't been rivaled in the last 30 years.
He loves long stretches of dialogue
where characters are rapid fire asking each other questions.
He loves quick short bursts back and forth,
and specifically he loves jokes.
His DNA is laced all throughout the Marvel films
to say nothing of the fact that he
was a founding member of the Marvel Creative
Committee, which was a closed door club of comic book writers
that Marvel contracted to consult on all the film
projects to try and make them as accurate as possible.
As the first phase of the Marvel universe was gaining momentum,
the inevitable question was raised.
Who is going to direct The Avengers?
Why the hell should I take orders from you?
I need men in those buildings.
They wanted someone who had a keen knack for character,
love of Marvel, and an ability to actually adapt
a script to the screen.
And so Marvel hired Joss Whedon.
Similarly to Bendis, Whedon had made a name for himself
through his strong sense of characterization and emphasis
on fast-paced snappy dialogue, which were typically littered
with pop culture references.
Primarily known as the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
Whedon had also worked on the Eisner
award-winning Astonishing X-Men run.
A longtime fan of the characters in question, Whedon
was responsible for taking what Favreau
had established with Downey, Jr. and pushing it even further.
He really played up the man out of time elements of Cap,
the snarkiness of Stark, and the general humor
that would be mined out of bouncing The Avengers off
of one another.
Needless to say The Avengers was a smash hit,
and Marvel signed Whedon to an exclusive contract
to write, develop, and consult on all their projects
for the next three years.
This run would eventually come to an end with Age of Ultron
not performing quite as well and Whedon feeling like he
was undercut by the studio.
Oh, actually he's the boss.
I just pay for everything and design everything
and make him look cooler.
Now by this point, the Marvel machine was a juggernaut,
and everyone was trying to get in on the bandwagon
or rebelling against the status quo
that Marvel was establishing.
The first wave of the DCEU orchestrated by Zack Snyder
was directly in opposition to the bright and accessible MCU.
It was attempting to be a more grounded
and adult take on superheroes.
It was also trying to embrace gravitas over comedic timing.
In theory, that could have worked as an alternative,
but in execution, it became something else.
What are your superpowers again?
I'm rich.
Which leads us directly into Justice League.
This proved as the training ground for the
does one size fits all approach to dialogue and character
execution.
Joss Whedon accepted the job of rewriting
and re-filming large chunks of Justice League
after Zack Snyder was forced to step away from the picture.
And that's how you get moments like this.
Oh, something is definitely bleeding.
Look, we don't need to rehash it.
Justice League was not well received.
However, the most important fallout from it
was that it made Warner's want to steer away
from the dark and gritty stuff they were doing, aside
from one off projects like Joker or The Batman,
and have a more bombastic all ages feel
to their mainline cinematic universe.
Shazam, Aquaman, and others emphasize a stylistic approach
that veers into a more Marvel-adjacent mode of telling
stories, namely jokes.
[LAUGHING]
I'm visible.
Your mileage may vary on if Warner's is fully replicating
the Marvel magic, but this issue is
something the comics struggle with, too, especially when
a new writer gets moved up to an A-list level.
They can put on a bunch of books,
and they don't have time to develop unique approaches
for their takes.
It just becomes the easiest stock solution wins.
Every character has the same dialogue style now.
In Bendis's critically acclaimed X-Men run and his new Avengers
run, multiple characters use Yiddish words or turns
of phrases in contexts that aren't exactly
true to their character.
Fans have pointed out that all have Bendis's characters
sound exactly the same.
Everyone is quippy and has bouncing dialogue.
Everyone.
Wolverine doesn't make jokes unless Bendis
is writing him, which is the exact same thing that
happened in superhero movies.
We used to have the archetype of the stalwart hero
and the plucky comic relief, and now
we just have the sarcastic hero who
cracks jokes at the other characters' expense.
[LAUGHING]
I think you're overreacting a little bit.
You must be so embarrassed!
At this point, being a superhero means you have to be funny.
Overall, we're reaching such a cultural breaking point
with superhero media that there's no way around it.
The issue at hand is that there's literally
billions of dollars wrapped up in weaponizing
these stories to be hyper commercialized,
and the most financially successful versions
of the characters have all shared
a common voice, a predilection for lifting dialogue
and snappy banter.
Only problem is that formula is already old,
so what comes next?
That's it for this episode of Nerdstalgic.
Do you think the superhero genre is in any danger of going away?
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