I Can Kill You With My Brain

It was announced this morning that the Walt Disney Company purchased Marvel comics for $4 billion dollars.  Disney now owns the rights to over 5,000 Marvel characters, including much-loved characters like Spider-Man, Iron Man, and Wolverine.

I’m not sure what this is going to mean for the two companies and their characters, but so far I’m excited about this buyout.  I’ve been a big fan of Disney for almost my entire life, making my first trip to Walt Disney World when I was 4 years old and having gone back nearly once every year since.  I watched Disney cartoons almost exclusively growing up, not because they were all that were available to me, but because I simply liked them more.  My father even works for Disney part-time now that he’s retired.

As for comics, I’m a relative newcomer to the medium, only considering myself a regular reader for the past couple years.  While I do read comics from several publishers, the vast majority of my comics are Marvel.  Marvel’s characters are the ones I find the most interesting and their events are the ones that I find the most entertaining.  While the comics world may be filled with people and events that can’t possibly be real, it’s Marvel’s ability to make them feel real that impresses me and draws me to their books.  To sum up it all up, Disney and Marvel coming together is the corporate business version of two good friends finding love and getting married.

For the most part, I don’t expect much, if anything, to change for the weekly comics that Marvel publishes.  I think the most change will come to other aspects of the business.  For example, I can see Marvel characters showing up as cameos in Disney movies and video games.  One place where I personally hope the Marvel characters show up in the Disney world is literally at Disney World.  Right now, the theme parks of Universal Studios have the rights to have rides and attractions based on Marvel characters.  I can’t see that arrangement lasting much longer with Universal Studios being Disney’s largest competitor in the theme park business.

Brian Lynch is a comic book writer who doesn’t write for Marvel comics, but is making many comments about the Marvel-Disney news on his Twitter account today.  Here’s a few of his funnier ones.  If you are a Twitter user and you find these amusing, please follow him @BrianLynch

* Donald Duck and Howard the Duck just met at Chateau Marmont to work some shit out.
* Only thing stronger than adamantium? Love.
* Mary Poppins? Mutant.
* First Disney/Marvel collaboration: Hannah Montana refuses to reveal secret identity, goes to war with Iron Man. Iron Man wins easily.
* Disney just read a FANTASTIC FOUR comic while watching THE INCREDIBLES and decided to sue itself.
* Disney’s first change for Marvel: When Bruce Banner gets angry, less hulking out, more breaking into song.

Michael Stipe and R.E.M. have always been gifted song writers, especially when it comes to lyrics.  Even the words that are especially vague still manage to resonate with me on some level.  Their last album, Accelerate, was no different.  As the song “Supernatural Superserious” comes to a close and the now familiar riff repeats, Michael sings some lyrics over it with a slightly different beat to his delivery.

I love these closing lyrics.  There’s just enough vague in them that I don’t know exactly what he’s referring to, and on the flip-side there’s just enough vague that I can more readily relate to them.  They make me smile.  They give me hope and comfort when I’m down.  They lessen my fear of the unknowns in life.  They lead me to believe that everything’s going to be all right, even if everything happens to go terribly wrong.  Here are the lyrics from the end of “Supernatural Superserious” by R.E.M. that I’m referring to.

~ ~ ~

Now there’s nothing dark and there’s nothing weird
Don’t be afraid I will hold you near
From the seance where you first portrayed
An open heart on a darkened stage
Celebration of your teenage station

Zen experience, sweet delirious
Supernatural superserious
Inexperience, sweet delirious
Supernatural superserious
Wow

Wow.  I went a lot longer between posts than I had originally planned to.  It was required of me to write two posts for Game On this week and maybe that sucked all of the writing juices out of me.  If you want to read those, click on the Game On link in the header to point your browser at the right place.

Switching gears, last night I saw “A Perfect Getaway” in the theater.  I knew I wouldn’t like it as much as I liked “District 9″, but I didn’t expect to not enjoy it.  Unfortunately, that is what happened.  The movie never felt like it really took off.  The last 15 minutes or so are okay, but it’s a long, slow journey to get there.  I’m not even sure I can recommend this movie as a rental unless you’re really into thrillers and can be patient with a slow-moving one.

A decision was made quite a while ago that my girlfriend and I were going to spend part of yesterday, Sunday August 16th, at a movie.  We had a list of several movies that we wanted to see and we checked the theater schedules on Sunday morning to determine what we were going to see and when/where we were going to see it.  It didn’t take long for us to realize that we weren’t going to be able to see any of the movies on our list.  One of the movies had a limited schedule and none of the times fit with our other plans for the day.  And two of the other movies we wanted to see were only playing in Sheboygan, which was more than 30 minutes away from the other plans we had for the day.

But we were determined to see a movie.  Catching a flick had been part of the plan for a while and neither one of us wanted to abandon the activity.  Looking at the movies that did fit into our schedule, we eventually decided on “District 9″, but I don’t think either one of us was looking forward to it nearly as much as we were the other movies we had selected.  Still, we went to the movie.

I’m so glad that we saw “District 9″.  It really is such a great movie.  While I can only speak for myself, the first thing my girlfriend said as we were walking to the car after the showing was, “That is an amazing movie.”  We both completely enjoyed it.  I would love to go into detail about why, but I feel that I’d be doing a disservice to the movie if I did.  The trailer does a great job of generating interest in the movie without giving you anything substantial, which trailers rarely do any more.  And that’s all I hope to do with this post; generate interest in the movie without telling you much about it.  “District 9″ is an incredible movie.

Yesterday we watched “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl”, the original movie in the PotC trilogy.  I have probably seen this movie 10 times since it was released.  I’m a big fan and I love it.  Despite that, I was afraid that the movie wouldn’t hold up.  I have not seen it in over a year and my wonderful memories of it hype it up even more.  I was concerned I was going to be let down by one of my favorite movies of the last ten years.

I had no reason to be concerned.  The movie holds up wonderfully.  The action was still exciting, the story still engaging, and the dialog still brilliant.  I even found myself laughing out loud at much of the funny dialog, even though I knew most of the jokes that were coming.  “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl” is a modern classic.  30 years from now it needs to be known as a true classic.  It is hands-down one of my favorite movies.