(joyful music)
- Cosmic.
- What a charming kid's superhero television show.
Now let's see what people are saying
about it on the internet.
(drum thudding)
We might be waiting into it a bit on this one.
Ms. Marvel is not for me, but I'm good with that.
Hello internet, I'm a lifelong comics fan.
My dad raised me right,
on a healthy collection of classic Star Trek, Dr. Who,
mostly the Pertwee and Tom Baker years,
and a whole slew of comics.
Of course, Spider-Man and Batman,
but with some fondness for X-Men
and classic Ironman,
long before RDJ turned Tony Stark
into an A-list cinema character.
Along the way, I picked up some of my own favorites
and I had a blast as a teen and 20-something
digging through troves of indie comics.
Capes and cowls are firmly entrenched
in pop culture today.
They're mainstream in a way
that I never would have imagined they could have been
as I was growing up, and I'd be lying
if I said I wasn't a little protective of the medium,
but along the way, sharing some experiences
with my daughter and watching her
at the very beginning of building her own taste,
there also comes a time when I feel grownups
need to let the medium go
and hand it off to the next generation of comics fans.
Ms. Marvel is not my jam, but I kind of love it for that.
(energetic electronic music)
And after you're done digging through troves
of graphic novels at your local comic shop,
we hope you'll be keeping up
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So hit those subscribe links down below,
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We've got a whole team of folks making really cool stuff
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Jumping in, this script started out
as a more straightforward review of Ms. Marvel,
and I kept rewriting,
and doing that thing where you make a point
then you preface the point, then you explain what you wrote,
and then you try to anticipate people
with different opinions,
it was a legit mess of me talking.
I'm obnoxiously rambly on my best day,
and the first draft of this script was not me
on my best day.
Ms. Marvel is the newest Marvel show
streaming on Disney+, featuring a teenage hero, Kamala Khan,
she discovers a magical bracelet that gives her powers.
How her family has a history with this artifact,
and we see how she tries to balance this discovery
against being a teenage girl in high school.
Might sound a little familiar,
because that's what I grew up with
reading Spider-Man comics.
When I was reading Spidey at 10,
the stuff about high school was just as important to me
as his struggles with super villains.
I think the biggest sin of the series
actually had more to do with the initial promotion.
The first advertisements for Ms. Marvel struggled to capture
the tone of the show as it's really presented,
lots of people had opinions before the series even began.
And what we arrive at is a relatively fresh tone
for a Marvel property.
It strikes a healthy balance
of teen girl coming-of-age story
against a backdrop of CG superhero effects and stunts.
It's a little lighter fare,
it's not mired in the history of the MCU.
It's an origin story
from the perspective of someone who grew up in an age
of increasing super threat.
Kamala Khan as a character would be reminiscent of a kid
who was born in the mid to late 90's,
just old enough to remember the events of 9/11.
The show is a little brighter and it's a little goofier
than other recent Marvel properties.
It's almost perfectly designed in a lab
to not be for me as an old guy who grew up on comics.
I already know all these tropes, but it delivers something
I think I appreciate more
than my personal direct need for entertainment fulfillment,
just as when I was a kid,
and my dad would page through my X-Men comics,
I'm sure he wasn't as entertained by them as I was,
but there was something he recognized about that,
against his own fondness for classic superheroes.
Spider-Man stories weren't written
for 40-year-old comics fans,
they were written for a current audience
of emerging readers.
They were written for kids and it was a side victory
if some of those story elements
also appealed to the parents as well.
I'm appreciating Ms. Marvel
because it's the first live action Marvel show I can watch
with my young daughter.
WandaVision, Loki, Falcon and Winter Soldier, Moon Knight,
well, Hawkeye was just kinda boring,
but what show am I supposed to watch with a seven-year-old?
She has seen a handful of select Marvel films
that my wife and I vetted first, but otherwise,
the only media for her are kids toons that run the gamut
of politically intense to almost gratingly immature.
Just so you know what my wife and I are dealing with,
my daughter enjoys drama,
and she's starting to recognize story elements
and character arcs over just wanting the action.
This is a little girl who held her breath
at the end of A New Hope
and gasped when the Millennium Falcon showed up,
that Han came back.
I guess, spoiler alert for A New Hope, sorry about that.
That was her takeaway from the movie,
it mattered more to her that Han was a good friend
who came back than even the Death Star being destroyed.
So it's my hypothesis
that comics need to be rebooted regularly
to catch the pulse of a new audience.
With movie franchises taking over the big money,
in comics we run a serious risk
of creating an echo chamber chasing nostalgic cash
for dudes my age, and we miss all the opportunities
to create new characters and tell new stories.
I want to share my love of Batman with my daughter,
but so far, the only age-appropriate media
is either the original 1960s Adam West Batman which,
let's be honest, that show rocks,
it's still hilarious today.
Or we can also watch some of the amazing animated series,
but modern Batman, the movies?
We're into a third reboot of the character
trying to find even darker, and edgier,
and darker, and emo tones for Bruce Wayne.
My idea of Batman was kind of a goofy vigilante
with a screw loose, who was as much a detective
as he was as stealthy ninja fighter.
This new Batman has a terrible haircut
and just walks directly into shotgun blasts,
that's not even fun for me, but I digress.
I'm enjoying Ms. Marvel,
not because I'm so captivated by the story,
I'm so intrigued by the drama,
I'm 25 years too late for that,
but my daughter is discovering this
and it's fresh for her, which is also fun and fresh for me.
I want more of those experiences
that I can share with her.
They're launchpad experiences.
She's gonna take off like a rocket and find her own things,
and I wanna be along for that ride.
So I kinda wish we weren't using
the classic superheroes as the recycled media
for older cynical audiences,
where goofy concepts like costumed vigilantes
need to be grittier and more realistic.
If we want to explore
the more realistic consequences of superheroes,
we can do that
in any number of other properties.
From comedic satire
to straightforward political discourse
against authoritarianism.
I'm a grownup and there's a ton of stuff made
for my grown-up dollars that satisfies the deconstruction
of the superhero idealism.
I can revisit The Tick for a laugh,
Watchmen is a brilliant rite of passage read
for any comics fan.
We can pick apart comic heroes through Invincible,
The Boys, Jupiter's Legacy.
I personally can't wait until my daughter's old enough
for me to throw her my copy of The Maxx
for a little good old-fashioned MTV era on WE,
and maybe some poorly-aged conversations
about how we should be discussing mental health.
There's all that stuff for me as a grown up,
taking apart superheroes,
we don't need to do that to Batman, and Wonder Woman,
and Superman, and The Flash, but I digress again.
Ms. Marvel is striking all the right notes for her today.
It's vibrant, it's fun,
it doesn't overly reference years of films
that she'd need to watch, but it calls back
to some of the things she's already familiar with.
It shows her a caring family dynamic
that is very different from her own home life,
but in showing her that, it helps her understand
that something different really isn't that different
from what she knows.
And in classic Spider-Man fashion,
it's also about a kid learning to stand up.
Comic books are these fantastic little morality tales
like fables and myths, we can use them to inspire.
and I see that in my daughter's face
when she's watching this show.
Now, Ms. Marvel has been something of a lightning rod
for hot takes, it's currently
in a tug of war online for reviewers,
and if you watch the show,
especially with a kid in the room, it's more than a bit sad
how much energy is going
into talking about how people are talking about the show.
Ms. Marvel is for my daughter
and that's all I really need it to be.
But, of course, we wanna hear from you,
how do we find something fresh
in a film and TV series running for so long?
How do we bring in a new generation of fans
while still keeping older fans along for the ride?
But most importantly, for the comment section this time,
what were your favorite media experiences
to share with your folks?
Drop us some of the heartwarming hot takes down below.
As always, thanks so much for watching,
for sharing these videos, and subscribing to the channel.
For reviews.org, I'm Juan Carlos Bagnell,
AKA Some Gadget Guy,
and I will catch you all on the next video.