The 1940s may have been the Golden Age of comic books, but we are living in the Golden Age of geeks. In the last five years, we have seen 24 — 24! — superhero movies hit the big screen. And Marvel and DC have five more in production for release this year. When A-list actors are breaking in line for a shot to play Captain America, and fanboys and fangirls are getting, er, action everywhere you look, I think it’s finally time to ask the question: Where is our female superhero movie?

Some of you will hold up a Catwoman or Elektra DVD and say, “Here is your female superhero movie!”

To which I will say, “Get that crap out of my face before I Hulk right out on you!” (What? My last name is Hogan.)

Catwoman and Elektra are half the reason we don’t have more female superhero films. Both movies bombed at the box office in 2004 and 2005, respectively, which caused studio execs to draw the conclusion that women heroes won’t play with a paying audience.

But the problem with Catwoman and Elektra wasn’t that the stars were women; the problem with Catwoman and Elektra is that they were terrible movies.

Batman movies don’t sell because Batman is a man.

Chris Nolan’s Batman reboot is one of the most celebrated superhero franchises in history because it is the perfect storm of great acting and directing, neat gadgets, an energetic score, authentic themes, killer SFX, complex moral quandaries, and stellar scripts.

Again, I say: stellar scripts!

You can’t hang the failures of Catwoman and Elektra on Halle Berry or Jennifer Garner. They could only be as good as the material they were given — and the only material they were given was spandex.

And that brings us the other half of the reason we still don’t have a good female superhero movie: Apparently, no one knows what to do with breasts when they get anywhere near a cape.

In hero movies, women either embrace their sexuality, which makes them villains; or they are completely desexualized, so that they don’t accidentally scare any small children.

For an example of the former, see Michelle Feiffer’s Catwoman, Famke Janssen’s Jean Grey/Phoenix, Scarlett Johansson’s Silken Floss and Eva Mendes’ Sand Saref. In one case, a man’s brain actually exploded because of his proximity to the sexy.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I love a femme fatale as much as the next person (Jessica Rabbit, call me!), but does it have to happen every time a woman in a hero movie wants to get laid?

For the second thing, well, I’m looking at you, Sam Raimi, and your pitiful excuse for Mary Jane Watson. I get that she was supposed to be a hybrid Watson/Gwen Stacy, but Stacy was in the third movie. Even so, all Mary Jane managed to do was frown and shriek and remember that one good time she kissed Spider-Man upside-down in the rain.

You see the problem? Sexy women are scary! Unsexy women are boring! But none of that matters because Catwoman and Elektra only made ten dollars between the two of them!

Still, I think there’s hope. People continue to happily drop ten bucks a pop to watch superhero movies. So, I’ve got five tips for studio execs and screenwriters if they really want to make a good female superhero movie:

1) Call Gail Simone and Greg Rucka. What they have done with Wonder Woman and Batwoman is the best thing to happen to women in comics in, well, ever. Their heroines are strong and complicated and smart and lovable and sexy. Under Simone’s pen, even Wonder Woman has started exploring her sexual side.

2) Embrace the standalone heroine. Both Elektra and Catwoman were sidekicks. There are plenty of female comic book characters who have held their own titles successfully for decades. Read the books! You’ll see!

3) If you’re too scared to launch an entire movie dedicated to a woman, at least test the waters by writing a strong female character into an already successful franchise. The things a Nolan script could do with Talia al Ghul (or even Catwoman) make me shiver with delight.

4) Don’t stunt-cast. No Alicia Silverstone. No Uma Thurman. Find your Heath Ledger and your Christian Bale.

5) Fish Joss Whedon’s Wonder Woman script out of the trash. I hear he’s looking for a job. And no one writes empowered women like him.

Now, light the Catwoman and Elektra DVD bonfire, and let’s get this party started! It’s time for the female superhero movie!

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Four Torches (Out of Five)

“Was the singing really necessary?” Batman asks at one point in tonight’s musical episode of The Cartoon Network’s animated series, Batman: The Brave & The Bold.

Necessary? Absolutely not. But enjoyable? Definitely!

(Somewhere in some distant, alternate universe, there must be a place where television executives have decided that musical episodes of TV shows are getting tired. All I know is that I never want to visit that alternate universe!)

It seems that the latest super-villain to take on Batman is The Music Meister. “He has the ability to sing a pitch that hypnotically controls anyone who hears it,” Batman explains.

All episodes of this series apparently show Batman teaming up with another superhero from the DC universe. This one has him paired, appropriately enough, with Black Canary (who has both a super-sonic vocal ability and a not-so-secret longing for the Dark Knight).

As with all musical episodes, this one lives or dies based on the music. So how’d they do?

Pretty darn impressively — especially for a 30-minute animated series. The music was catchy and and lyrics clever. (Batman writer-producers Michael Jelenic and James Tucker wrote the original lyrics for the episode, with original music by Kristopher Carter, Michael McCuistion and Lolita Ritmanis, regular composers for the series.)

And How I Met Your Mother’s Neil Patrick Harris, who guests as the voice of The Music Meister? If you didn’t already know it from his show-stealing turns as the host of both the Tonys and the Emmys, he has a terrific voice, put to fantastic use here.

“The show’s closing early,” Batman says when he puts The Music Meister away, “due to criminal intent and bad reviews.”

Incidentally, loved the two new bat-devices: “bat-plugs” (of course!) and a “bat auto-tuning amplifier” that enables Batman to team with Black Canary to defeat the villain.

The soundtrack is available through iTunes and Amazon (Support TheTorchOnline.com by purchasing it through this link.)

The full episode:

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Does this fall’s new genre television programming sound a little … familiar?

It should, because, incredibly, the schedule is made up almost entirely of remakes.

There’s Eastwick, a remake of the movie The Witches of Eastwick. And there’s Alice, a remake of Alice in Wonderland (to go along with the feature film version they’re also currently filming).

Don’t forget about V, a remake of the 1980s miniseries. And while The CW is pretending that The Vampire Diaries isn’t a rip-off of Twilight because it’s based on a series of books from the 1990s, everyone knows they’re lying (and Twilight is, of course, itself a rip-off of Anne Rice and Buffy).

At least Flash Forward is something new — although the network seems to be pushing it as the next Lost.

Things are scarcely any better on movie screens. TheTorchOnline.com has written previously about the slate of movies in development based, ridiculously, on old 80s cartoons, and another group of movies that will be remakes of most of Universal’s horror classics such as Frankenstein and The Wolf Man.

And don’t get me started on our current superhero rut, where were get interchangeable superhero movie after superhero movie (followed by the inevitable, even lamer sequels).

Then when a superhero franchise has been reduced to complete ridiculousness, Hollywood waits a few years, and then relaunches the “brand” with a new “origin” story. Incredibly, we’re on the third Batman franchise and the fifth Superman one in my lifetime.

Even more outrageously, sometimes if a superhero movie doesn’t do as well as expected, as with Ang Lee’s 2003 movie Hulk, Hollywood will simply pretend that the movie never existed, and just immediately remake it again.

Now that’s craven.

But this fall’s television season marks something of a milestone in Hollywood shamelessness.

That’s right: we’ve finally reached a point where Hollywood is making virtually only remakes of previous movies and TV shows, at least with its genre programming. At the gathering of the Television Critics Association in Pasadena last week, The CW president Dawn Ostroff openly crowed that that network is eagerly encouraging more such remakes.

Let me be clear: some of these TV shows and movies are pretty good. Talented writers and directors really have “reimagined” some of these stories in fresh new ways.

And there’s nothing inherently wrong about the retelling of stories. Almost all of William Shakespeare’s oeuvre was, of course, based on stories first told by others — and how many times have the Greek myths been rewritten, not to mention the stories of The Brothers Grimm?

But Hollywood isn’t remaking old properties because they include classic archetypes, or because they’re inspired by the timeless storytelling.

They’re doing it because they think it’ll make them money.

Publicizing any media property is enormously expensive, especially in an era of “media clutter,” where there’s so much information out there that it can be difficult to break through to create audience awareness.

Remakes supposedly have an advantage because most people have already heard of the story in question. “Oh, it’s the story of Little Red Riding Hood — but she’s got a red hoodie instead!”

Audience familiarity may be even more important for genre projects, because elaborate costumes and sets typically require higher budgets.

So are these remakes harmless? Not hardly.

It was bad enough that Hollywood has long insisted that every story have a “high-concept” — a simple, catchphrase-like storyline that the audience immediately understands. Now they’re saying that it literally has to be a storyline that the audience has heard before.

Every time Hollywood greenlights yet another tired vampire story, that means there’s one other, fresher story that won’t be seen. And if Hollywood continues to insist that every TV series have “built-in audience awareness,” that means audiences are never going to see anything truly new or different.

In short, we’re never going to write the next generation of classic stories — we’ll just keep repeating the old ones forever and ever.

Talk about the dumbing down of America. At least there’s HBO, Showtime, and AMC where, it seems, complicated, challenging drama is occasionally still welcome.

For decades, people have been written how Hollywood has become completely soul-less, no longer caring about creativity and inspiration at all, but rather caring solely about money.

But given this fall’s season of genre television, it’s worth writing one more time.

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There are several attributes necessary in order to be a truly awesome superhero. You need a killer costume, of course. Original and interesting superpowers help. Usually, some form of personal flaw or psychological complex adds to your mystique.

But the one thing that is an absolute must is your very own catchphrase.

I have a catchphrase of my own, but unfortunately it amounts to little more than a string of profanities, so I can’t share it with you here. As a consolation prize, let’s take a look at some truly awesome superhero catchphrases:

• The Thing — “It’s clobberin’ time!”

• Beast — “Oh, my stars and garters.”

• Dr. Strange — “By the hoary hosts of Hoggoth!”

• The Hulk — “Hulk SMASH!”

• AND “You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.”

• He-man — “I have the power!”

• Wolverine — “I’m the best there is at what I do.”

• Wonder Woman — “Merciful Minerva!”

• Spider-man — “With great power comes great responsibility.”

• AND “It’s your friendly neighborhood Spider-man!”

• AND “My spider-sense is tingling!”

• Mighty Mouse — “Here I come to save the day!”

• Superman — “I stand for truth, justice, and the American way.”

• AND “Up, up, and away!”

• Perry White — “Great Caesar’s Ghost!” (Technically not a superhero, but had to be included anyway.)

• Captain America — “Avengers assemble!”

• Human Torch — “Flame on!”

• Captain Marvel — “Shazam!”

• The Shadow — “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The shadow knows.”

• Lion-O — “Thunder…thunder…thunder…Thundercats! HO!”

• The Ninja Turtles — “Cowabunga!!”

And my personal favorite:

• The Tick — “SPOON!!!”

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Wonder Woman sings!

No, seriously. In the third season “Amazon Hot Wax” episode of the campy 70s series Wonder Woman, the title character, famously played by Lynda Carter, sang several songs from an album that the actress was releasing at the time.

Flash forward thirty or so years, and the iconic beauty has finally found her way back into the recording studio with a new CD, the appropriately-titled At Last.

Recently, we got a chance to chat with Lynda, who truly seems to have spent a few of the past decades on ageless Paradise Island, about her passion for music, her time in those very famous tights, and a possible role for her in a new Wonder Woman movie.

TheTorchOnline: So it sounds like you’ve been in touch with the producers of the Wonder Woman movie, and it sounds like there is some progress. Is there a role for you?

Lynda Carter: I have a lot of friends over at Warner Brothers, and I get updates now and again, but it really depends on the director and the script. I hope it’s a blockbuster. If there’s a place for me, great, but if there isn’t, that’s okay, too. I don’t think I would do a cameo. Unless there was a real part where there was something more than just a little, bitty thing, I’d just let them bask in the glory. It needs to be done and done well. I wish them the best.

TTO: Has there been any talk of a specific role for you?

LC: Yeah, there has been. Off and on, but then they switch gears, and they’re not happy with the script. It’s fairly simple. Everything has to be character driven. It has to be a good story. It’s not about the effects. Those will all take care of themselves. There’ll be some great things, but if they have a good story, just the story itself, it doesn’t even have to be very complicated, you know?

TTO: I’m not the first to say this, but you’re so associated with the role. They really need to get the casting right. It needs to be someone who can really reinvent the character.

LC: Sometimes that’s a problem. I don’t think it’s as much reinventing as not playing Wonder Woman. You can’t play “Wonder Woman.” You play a person who happens to have these powers, these skills. You have to play her as just a woman. You have all the opportunity in the world, because this is a dual role. I would never dumb her down. I wanted people to know Wonder Woman through Diana Prince.

TTO: When did you become aware that you were a feminist icon? Were you aware at the time when you were filming Wonder Woman?

LC: Oh, absolutely. Yes. I was very aware of it. As a matter of fact, I also felt that my personal character had to be non-predatory in any way. I would be the first person if some woman’s guy was looking at me wrong, I’d pop him upside the head and say, “Get a grip!” Wonder Woman would expect that. She was never against men, she was just for women. I was very deliberate in my approach.

TTO: I’m curious if you’re friends with any of the other female action icons: Lindsay Wagner, Charlie’s Angels, or even Lucy Lawless who plays Xena? Have you met any of them?

LC: I’ve met Lucy Lawless, and she couldn’t have been nicer. We had a nice conversation. I think how she approached her character, how the show approached her, was great. Lindsay Wagner was a friend of mine a million years ago, I just don’t have the opportunity to see her, but whenever I meet a mutual friend, I always send her my best. Same with Jaclyn Smith. I never knew Kate Jackson, but Farrah, we used to all go on the same interviews for the same one part. [laughs]

TTO: What do you think when you look back on your years in tights? You were one of the most famous people in the world.

LC: You know what? It’s very isolating. It’s about your work. That’s not a boohoo or anything, I don’t expect anyone to feel sorry for anyone, but by virtue of the fact that you are so popular, you lose a piece of your everyday stuff, of a certain kind of interaction that is important to keep.

TTO: I suppose you have people telling you you’re great, exactly what you want to hear.

LC: People aren’t going to come up to you and say, “Oh, I think you’re just so mediocre!” Unless somebody is just a jerk, they wouldn’t. It is what it is. It’s not easy.

TTO: I can only imagine how busy you were.

LC: I was pretty busy, yeah, but I didn’t have a family then, and that was what I’d worked toward all my life. But it was still isolating. I didn’t have a lot of opportunity to learn how to be in a relationship, really. We moved around a lot at first as a kid, and then I was on the road at 17, and new in town by the time I got to LA, and then famous again with that whirlwind. I did really want substance in my life, and when I stopped with the road for my children, it was really because I didn’t want to miss out. It wasn’t just selflessness. I didn’t want to miss out on that.

TTO:  But where do you go once you’ve been on top of the world?

LC: Substance? [laughs] I’m going through substance, baby!

TTO: I confess, I was very pleasantly surprised by how good your new CD was.

LC: I get that a lot. I did music all my life, it’s kind of what I did, but it wasn’t something anybody knew me for. I started singing professionally at 14. That’s how I earned enough money to move to California and study acting, and get into that. That’s what I started with.

Lynda Carter singing a song she co-wrote, on Wonder Woman

TTO: Listening to the CD, it certainly seems like this project was a labor of love in the best possible sense, and you don’t have anybody to please except yourself. I think maybe that’s why the CD is so good.

LC: It’s also that I’ve sort of moved on with my performance. The more that I work with these great musicians, it’s very inspiring. I work very closely with my musical director back in the day, and we came up with a lot of things together. I may bring ten songs to this group of musicians I work with, and they might do a track for me so I can see how it feels, and then, I take it down to Tennessee and we work on it, so it ends up being something I’m having fun with because it’s irreverent, or I always wanted to do, or I like the message, I like the way it makes me feel. I’m not so much doing my parent’s old standards that have been done so much. It’s a lot of songs that growing up I knew. I’m gearing more toward that kind of thing, as well as writing some. I don’t know what’s going to end up in the show the next time. I don’t know what I’m going to end up with. It’ll just present itself. I’m not really a genre. I’m more of an iPod shuffle — surprising things. I don’t really have a bag.

Looking to buy past seasons of Wonder Woman or Lynda’s new CD, At Last. Support TheTorchOnline.com by purchasing through these links.

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Four Torches (Out of Five)

Wonder Woman’s most difficult balancing act has never been to find a way to save the world from Nazis, or act as an emissary from the paradise of peaceful Themyscira Island to the rest of the violent world.

No, it’s been to find a way to present a reasonably authentic female action hero to an audience that is made up primarily of male fans.

DC Comic new direct-to-DVD adaptation Wonder Woman, the latest in an animated movie series that has also included Superman Doomsday and Justice League: The New Frontier, does it by emphasizing the “warrior” aspect of the Amazon women and piling on the action — some of it pretty gritty — while also playing up the story’s feminist, female-empowering roots, and even venturing out into some mild social commentary.

And they pretty much pull it off without a hitch.

It helps that they didn’t cheap out on the production. The script is smart, the animation looks great, and they’ve hired an absolutely top-notch cast of voice talent: Kerry Russel (terrific as Woman Woman); Nathan Fillion (a cheeky Steve Trevor); Alfred Molina (always reliable, as the villain Ares), and Virginia Madsen (gloriously regal as Queen Hippolyta).

But the producers of this movie know where their bread is buttered. The action is thick and heavy, as in this scene where Steve and Diana Prince, Wonder Woman’s alter-ego, take on some heavies in an alley:

Wonder Woman is far cry from the typical female in the world of superheroes: the long-suffering crime-fighter’s girlfriend, a la Batman’s Vicky Vale or Spiderman’s Mary Jane, or even the scantily-clad, one-dimensional superhero that exists to be the object of all the male heroes’ sexual desire: the Watchmen’s Silk Spectre, the Fantastic Four’s Invisible Girl, or the X-Men’s Jean Grey.

This latest Wonder Woman even has an in-your-face feminist point-of-view.

“Remarkable, the advanced brainwashing that has been perpetuated on the females of your culture,” Diana tells Steve at one point. “Raised from birth to believe they’re not strong enough to compete with the boys, and then as adults, taught to trade on their very femininity.”

But it’s not all a treatise in Women’s Studies. When those robbers attempt to rob Diana and Steve, she not only refuses to hand over their money, she — hilariously — ask for an apology, “for contributing to my present disillusionment with men in general.”

After all of Diana’s gender-generalizations, we also get Steve’s male perspective. “Newsflash!” he says. “The Amazons aren’t so perfect either. You act brave but cutting yourself off from the outside world was cowardly. Not to mention stupid — like less communication between men and women is what the world needed.”

In other words, this latest Wonder Woman actually tries to say something interesting about the relationship between the sexes.

Still, one line seemed weirdly out-of-place in this tale of female empowerment: a character’s very retro accusation to Queen Hippolyta that “the Amazon are warriors, but we are women too” — as if women are somehow required to have motherhood and men to be “complete.”

And let’s be very clear: these women can be empowered, mostly because they’re willing to fight on men’s terms, on the battlefield, and also because they’re god-like in their beauty. Toward the end of the movie, an aide to the president says they’ve been saved by an army of “armored supermodels,” which pretty much sums up how most American men seem to like their “empowered” women.

As for the story, it didn’t break much new ground, with a relatively faithful (if graphically violent) explanation of both the Amazon’s and Wonder Woman’s immortal originals, and a mildly formulaic plot about Ares’ plan to make the modern-day world even more violent.

Still, the movie knows what it wants to do, and it does a pretty good job doing it.

Woman Woman has been released in three editions: a single movie DVD, a blue-ray edition, and a two-disc edition with four hours of material that includes two documentaries, Wonder Woman: A Subversive Dream (about the comic book’s impact) and Wonder Woman: The Daughters of Myth (about the character of Wonder Woman).

Looking to buy it? Support TheTorchOnline.com and do so through this link.

Check out the movie’s trailer:

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Four and a Half Torches (Out of Five)

They didn’t dumb it down.

Plenty of naysayers said that Watchmen, writer Alan Moore’s landmark comic book series (later turned into a graphic novel), was unfilmable, not just because of its complicated story, but because of its challenging, sophisticated ideas.

They naysayers were wrong. The mainstream critics who are, even now, saying the film is too hard to follow, or that it hews too closely to its source material, are wrong too.

Really wrong. Watchmen is a fantastic film, the best superhero movie since, well, ever. It’s easily as good as Spiderman and The Dark Knight, probably the best two superhero movies to date.

Yes, the film is a surprisingly faithful adaptation of Alan Moore’s graphic novel, but that is the opposite of a bad thing. Because of it, the film is also more sophisticated than any superhero movie that’s ever come before. Yes, the enduring popularity of superhero movies has allowed some writers and directors to venture into smarter, edgier fare, in films such as V for Vendetta and The Dark Knight.

But there’s never been anything like Watchmen — which is ironic since its source material, first published in 1986, preceded by decades even the most sophisticated film superheroes of today.

And yet, in many ways, those superheroes have Watchmen to thank. It was the graphic novel (and other works by Moore) that played a pivotal role in the 1980s in humanizing superheroes and comic books, making their ideas far more sophisticated. This caused a giant forward leap in the genre, which had not strayed far from its simplistic 1940s origins.  Moore’s work led to a resurgence in superhero popularity, which led to film adaptations, which led to the current avalanche of superhero movies.

In other words, with Watchmen, the film, we’ve come full circle.

What makes Watchmen so interesting? It dares to ask the ultimate, and by far the most interesting question about superheroes: if a person or being has nearly ultimate power, what exactly are his or her limits — or what should be his or her limits?

The superheroes in Watchmen are human — all too human. They cheat, make mistakes, suffer from petty jealousies, and give into darker temptations — sometimes much darker.

In short, they are absolutely indistiguishable from all human beings, except for the fact that they have extraordinary powers.

And yet they do have super-powers.

If, like a rorschach test, you have the ability to “read” people’s souls, should you personally be allowed to punish them when they commit unspeakable crimes?

If you have the ability to travel to Mars and literally reshape matter, should you align yourself with one government, and submit to its authority? Why? The concerns of state are so unbelievably petty compared to the wisdom of the universe!

If you’re the smartest person on earth, if no one else can understand what you’re talking about, does it make sense to run your ideas past them before executing them? Why? They couldn’t understand you anyway! But what if one of your ideas to “save” the planet costs other innocent lives?

But if you don’t submit to human authority, how are you different from the super-villains you do battle with? How does that make you different from a vigilante?

And even though you’re a superhero, what if you’re wrong?

“Who watches the Watchmen?” is the graphic novel’s tag-line, and it’s the question the film asks too.

How are these questions relevant in world where superheroes don’t really exist?

Well, we live in a world where some police feel they are trustworthy enough to be a criminal’s judge, jury, and executioner; where captains of industry make sweeping, unfettered decisions that affect us all (and then expect the rest of us to bail them out financially and legally when their plans go awry); and where a U.S. president decides he has the authority to ignore our laws and our Constitutions at will, so long as he’s doing it in the name of “good.”

In other words, we live in a world where plenty of people do have super-powers, and they act like superheroes accordingly.

Who watches them?

Watchmen is a successful film on all levels: magnificently acted, wonderfully scripted, and beautifully shot. (Warning: its also a brutal, violent film — by far the most sexually and violently explicit superhero movie ever — and it’s definitely not for kids.)

But it’s Watchmen’s profound, and eerily relevant, ideas that make it special.

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