Imaginary Worlds - Origin Stories

Episode Date: September 10, 2014

What makes a good origin story? University of Oregon professor Benjamin Saunders explains how retelling origin stories is a way of returning to childhood wonder. The best origin stories are not a one shot deal, they transform characters like Spider-Man or Buffy – and keep transforming them. I see a psychologist, Dr. Robin Rosenberg, who specializes in helping her patients figure out their powers and their mission. And I unpack my own origin story, or at least a story that explains how I got from animation to public radio -- hoping it's not just a contrived piece of fiction.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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It's so gentle. We've never smelled so good. Shop Old Spice Total Body Deodorant now. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds. I'm Eric Malinsky. Do you remember the names of these guys? Well, I know some of them. Yeah. R2D2.

Oh, this guy. I don't know. The Stormtrooper. Is that the Stormtrooper? Yoda, of course. Chewbacca, of course. Who's this guy? Oh, these guys. Chewbacca, of course. Who's this guy? Oh, these guys are...

Oh, this is the bad father. This is Yobi Kenobi, or whatever his name is. Obi-Wan Kenobi. Yeah. He was good. That's my mother. When I was a kid, I used to go into this catatonic state with action figures. I mean, first I'd start bouncing them around like, you know, any kid.

But then when my imagination kicked in, all I had to do was hold the figure and I just started spacing out and my neck would go kind of limp. And apparently I looked like I was tripping on LSD. Or as my parents would say, I was luking out. Which is Luke Skywalker. And luking out means that you were in another world with Luke. The silverware in the restaurant would become Luke. That's my dad.

And yes, if Luke was not around, any object could become Luke. It was actually the knife and the spoon fighting with each other. That happened very often. Yeah, although I feel like I can't get in touch with that world like I used to. I would hope not. Really? Why? You're an adult now.

I don't think you need that world anymore. Well, I'm certainly an adult now. My hair looks like Reed Richards from the Fantastic Four with that little patch of gray above my ears. I mean, I should have outgrown this stuff a long time ago. But I'm not alone. I mean, there's billions of dollars at stake in Hollywood betting that adults are still flocking to fantasy,

science fiction, superheroes, fairy tales, and other genres that used to be just for kids. And this podcast is for anybody who still enjoys visiting an imaginary world, whether it's Westeros, Wonderland, Tatooine, or Gotham. I want to look at how these worlds reflect the people that create them, the people that dream of going there, and why we suspend our disbelief.

So if I'm doing a show about imaginary worlds and fantasy characters, my first episode really has to be about the origin story, issue number one in the comic book world. The best origin stories just become part of our culture. Like I went to Union Square the origin story, issue number one in the comic book world. The best origin stories just become part of our culture. Like, I went to Union Square in New York, and I just started going up to people saying, tell me what superhero origin stories you remember.

His mom and dad were, like, super rich. His parents were murdered in front of him. Jesus Christ. Are you making that up? No, they were. The planet was dying, right? It was imploding. It was imploding and his parents put him in a spaceship.

Yeah, and then they sent him to Earth. It became a spider after a spider bites him. But some of the origin stories were a little fuzzier. I know she's Amazonian of some type. I don't think she's of this, yeah, she's not from this planet, but I don't really know her origin story. So what makes a great origin story? You can shoot Bruce Wayne's parents last year, you know, I mean, and have him grow up to be Batman over the next 20 years. And it all still works. Ben Saunders is a professor of English at the University of Oregon. He's written a lot about superheroes, and he's amazed that anyone can remember the origin of a comic book character that was created before most of us were born.

Between 1938 and the first appearance of Superman in Action Comics No. 1, and 1946, when the superhero craze starts to really fade. There are 700 costumed crime fighters that appear in comics from that period. 700 different superheroes who are usually the hopeful flagship character for new comic books. That's a phenomenal number, of whom I think it's maybe seven that are still around and familiar and that we know. It was survival of the fittest, or the most marketable.

For a character to be successful, their story needed to tap into primal hopes and fears, especially of children. There are things that you encounter for the first time as a child, and the first time you experience something is always the first time you experienced it. You know, the first time you hear a particular piece of music, the first time you witness your parents having a fight. These are events we never forget. That, for me, is maybe one of the reasons we're also drawn back to the origin stories. We want to recreate for ourselves that experience when the fantasy was new and fresh and really exciting and not something that we take for granted. I love talking to my nephew about this. He's eight and he can rattle off the origin story of every superhero.

But he can't really explain why some appeal to him and some don't. I mean, it's hard even for me to figure that out. For that, I'd have to see a shrink. I'm Robin S. Rosenberg. I'm a clinical psychologist. Her books include Superhero Origins, What Makes Superheroes Tick and Why We Care. What's the Matter with Batman, an unauthorized clinical look under the mask of the Caped Crusader. She takes superheroes seriously because a lot of her patients do. In fact, she broke origin stories into three major categories. Trauma, destiny, and chance.

And there's a difference between the origin of the power versus the origin of the mission. The super is the power and the hero of the mission. The super is the power and the hero is the mission. Am I going mad? I'm like some sort of giant insect, like a wall-crawling human spider. Take our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. Now, traditionally, the origin of his power is supposed to be chance. He's in the wrong place, the wrong time. And that's the fun part of the story. He's a scrawny nerd asking, why me? And in the new movies with Andrew Garfield, they kind of tinkered with that. The answer to why me turns out to be, well, he's the son of Dr. Richard Parker, the scientist who designed the spider,

and only he had the genetic mutation that would allow him to become Spider-Man. and only he had the genetic mutation that would allow him to become Spider-Man. And a lot of fans were upset because now the origin of his power isn't chance, it's destiny. And that makes him a very different character. But the origin of his mission as a hero, that didn't change. It's trauma. And in fact, up until his Uncle Ben's death, he was using his power, you know, in a selfish teenage way. The things that the characters can't outgrow do get written in the origin. Peter can't come to terms with the guilt of the death of Uncle Ben, because it would take away one of the main reasons

for his neurotic, obsessive, compulsive, entirely guilt-driven version of what it means to be a superhero. Because I didn't realize in time that with great power, there must also always be great responsibility. But I know it now. And so long as I live, Spider-Man will never shirk his duty again. The best origin stories transform the characters and keep transforming them. And that's why it's hard to remember the origin of a character like Green Lantern. In Green Lantern, there was no transformation.

He was a hero already as a test pilot. I mean, to the extent that someone risks their lives every day for some greater good. I mean, he got great adrenaline rushes from it, but he already was heroic. And he just became a sort of cop, you know, an intergalactic cop. Wonder Woman is the same problem. I mean, from the beginning,

she's strong, brave, good, almost perfect. Her original motivation to be a hero was to go fight the Nazis. And whenever she gets rebooted, it's a little less clear what exactly is driving her. But when it comes to origin stories, Dr. Rosenberg really prefers a female superhero that didn't start out in the comics. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Now, if you haven't watched the show, the premise is that every time a vampire slayer is killed, another one is chosen by a very old magic. And so there's this long, illustrious line of vampire slayers going back

thousands of years. And then there's Buffy the cheerleader from Sunnydale, California. I told you I'm trying out for the cheerleading squad. You have a sacred birthright, Buffy. You were chosen to destroy vampires, not to wave pom-poms at people. It's a reluctant superhero. She just doesn't have a costume, right? Except red leather pants. Right. And it's her transformation from what appears to be a kind of ditzy, non-academic, very superficial character who has no mission,

really. Her mission is to have an MRS, you know, in the old jokey way. And she becomes incredibly smart. She may not be book smart, but she is incredibly smart. And the interesting thing, I always thought with her transformation was that, you know, all she wants is to be a regular girl and she keeps drawn away by her destiny as a slayer. And the better she gets at being the slayer, the worse she gets at being Buffy. And to the point where she, by season seven, feels like she's lost touch with who Buffy was. For seven years, I've kept us safe by doing this.

Exactly this. Making the hard decisions. And now, what, suddenly you're all acting like you can't trust me? Didn't you say to me today you can't trust us? Look, I wish this could be a democracy. I really do. But democracies don't win battles. It's a hard truth, but there has to be a single voice. So if someone is a police officer, you know, and they've been 10 years on the force, and they've seen this incredibly ugly, seamy side of the world that has tainted them. I mean, you know, really, they have been transformed by their job. Whatever altruistic motive they had, it feels very remote, or it can feel very remote.

And so why do they continue to do what they do? And they have to ask themselves that question. And they have to have an answer. And so they may then come back to their own kind of origin story about what led them to do that. But you don't need to be a cop or a vampire slayer to wonder how you ended up where you ended up in life. The inability to sort of create a coherent narrative of your own life would be one sign

of mental illness. Again, here's Ben Saunders. It's a sign of relative psychological health that you can produce a narrative of how you got from A to B. But it also means that we we're very good at rewriting history and telling our stories in self-aggrandizing ways and in having our own heroes and villains in our own origin stories. You know, that's the temptation of narrative. The temptation of narrative is always to write things in ways that suit our sense of outcome better. our sense of outcome better. I'm telling, you know, a different origin story probably every day of the week from that point of view to sort of explain why it's unfair that I didn't get this

or that it is fair that I do have that. So here's the reason why I'm interested in origin stories. My origin story changed. A lot. I used to work as a storyboard artist for the Rugrats and a bunch of other shows in Los Angeles. My dream was to work for Pixar because I loved to draw, and I loved movies, and I thought, it's a good way to go. But after a few years of working in the industry, I got restless. I was dying to get out of my cubicle and talk to people. And I felt like I was living vicariously through the people I listened to on public radio. So when our whole animation crew got laid off, I decided to

switch careers. I moved to New York, I got a job at WNYC. And I love my work, but there have been moments of doubt. The biggest one happened after I saw Toy Story 3, which was amazing. And like most men, I started to cry. And as I was on the subway ride home, I just started to spiral. I was wondering, did I make a mistake? Is my new origin story just kind of like a stupid justification for a really hastily made career shift? You're really a social person. And that even draw, you may have loved drawing, but drawing alone, you know, for 40 hours a week wasn't a good fit for you.

And so you were transformed by that knowledge. And so, of course, your origin story has to change. And of course, you're now going to pick up dots that weren't there before because you were so focused on the drawing dots that you weren't focused on the social dots. But there's a strange dissonance to some extent that we love superheroes who, well, we do reboot their origin stories. There are certain elements that you cannot change. But if we were to do that ourselves, it would be psychologically unhealthy

to some extent to not acknowledge that you cannot change. But if we were to do that ourselves, it would be psychologically unhealthy to some extent to not acknowledge that we do change. For any time they've done a reboot, the stories change. I mean, Spider-Man was written, bitten by a radioactive spider, which was a product of that time. You know, and then with the Tobey Maguire character,

it was a genetically mutated spider. And that's in keeping with the time. I have a coaching business, a superhero coaching. And part of what I focus on is, in fact, people rewriting their origin story. You have a superhero coaching business? Yeah. Tell me more. Starting from scratch with your origin story is a way of really figuring out first what is your power once you have a sense of what your powers and talents are you can then decide how you want to use them it gives people an opportunity to reboot if you will hmm and so this podcast is another reboot. And those action figures that I found at my parents' house in Boston, they're dots that

connect me from the Rugrats, to NPR, to you. I mean, that all makes sense, right? At least it does for me. Well, that's it for today's inaugural episode. Thank you very much for listening. Special thanks to Robin Rosenberg, Ben Saunders, Jonathan Mitchell, and AIR, the Association of Independence and Radio. And special thanks to Mom and Dad. You can like the show on Facebook or leave a comment in iTunes.

I tweet at emalinski. The show's website is imaginaryworldspodcast.org. Panoply