Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 170: Iron Man

Episode Date: September 21, 2018

To mark the 10th anniversary of the movie that changed the face of modern cinema (for better or worse), Jeremy talks Iron Man—the character, the games, and the weird lack of games—with comics expert Chris Sims and long-time Iron Man superfan Benj Edwards. Also this episode: The end of "Micros"! Now the biweekly Friday episode will just be plain ol' "Retronauts," whatever their length. Because this week's 80-minute podcast sure doesn't look so "micro" to us...

This week of Retronauts, we kill the people we would say. Everyone, welcome to a retroactive. Everyone, welcome to a Retronauts micro. This week, we're doing, something that's maybe about video games, but mostly not. And there's a reason for that. I think our minimal discussion of video games in this episode is fully justified by the nature of the topic we're discussing. And that topic is Iron Man. And here to talk about why Iron Man was not in very many games until recently,

we have an Iron Man expert. Sort of. It's Chris Sims, and I cannot wait to tell you about Teen Tony. We have a comic book expert. Yes, yes. And we have an Ironman fan, possibly the only one. Van Jenwards. Well, the only one before 2008.

Ben Edwards. That's right. That's all I can say. Yes, it's true. Tell us why you love Iron Man. Okay. Back in the 90s. That's great.

Okay, so. Brutal. I'm kidding. No, no. Like, I do think it's interesting that you go to bat for Iron Man, and no one really cared about Iron Man until the movie came out. And because this is the 10th anniversary of the movie, which basically marks the end of art in movies as we know it, yeah, I thought we should talk about Iron Man. And the reign of Robert Downey Jr. And you are, exactly.

You are great to have on this episode because you do sincerely like, yeah. Yeah, well, I just, back in the 90s, I'll start ever again, early 90s, we're talking 91, 92. I went to Texas as I do on one of my yearly trips there down to see my grandparents. Oh, my God, I'm so sorry. Well, grandparents are great, but Texas. Yeah, but it was one of those fateful summers when my grandma pulled out a giant box of comic books from my uncles who were born in the 40s and 50s. And they had originally, they bought like all the Silver Age Marvel comics from the 60s until the 70s and stuff. So I had Iron Man, the whole run of the 1968,

Iron Man 1 through 30 or something. I still have them. They're really great. But I spent a lot of time that summer reading classic Iron Man and Hulk comic books and Fantastic Four, X-Men, all that stuff. But Iron Man really resonated with me is probably the technology angle and how he could use technology to get out of problems. But, you know, Reed Richards was a genius with technology.

So what about Fantastic Four didn't resonate with you the same way? Man does. Because Reed Richards is lame. He can stretch. That's about it. See, Iron Man uses his wit, his intelligence to construct devices. Yeah, so does Mr. Fantastic. Well, I think there's a key difference there is that he only has that.

All of Reed's technology is sci-fi technology. Like, it's, I mean, not that Iron Man's isn't, but Reed is building time machines. No, Iron Man's technology is based very much in real science. Right. Transistors, mainly. Transistors. Hey, let me tell you about my transistors. My electrical transistors, I'm going to save everything with my transistor.

You've been reading some comics from 60s comics? I've been reading some 60s comics. Chris has a great point that I didn't think about. Yeah, it's rooted in real technology. And I guess I found that interesting because my dad's an electronics engineer. He was. And he, you know, he, I grew up listening to all that transistors, transistors, transistors, transistors stuff.

And it's neat to see a hero that had a weakness and he could use that his love of technology to overcome his heart condition, for example. And his alcoholism. And alcoholism. And fly at the same time. So, yeah, this kind of, I think, gets to what makes Iron Man interesting as a character in that he is very much a Marvel hero, but he's also very much not a Marvel hero. Like you said, he has those flaws. He has those intrinsic flaws. He, you know, he has the physical defect of his heart, which not a defect, but like an injury. And his technology barely keeps him alive at every minute. But then also he has a lot of personal demons. So, you know, just like Spider-Man is kind of a nebish, and the thing is sort of unfriendly and also ugly. You know, every Marvel character, that was kind of the thing that they brought to comics in the 60s was like, these aren't paragons of virtue, like DC's characters. These are people who are more real.

They're more grounded in kind of something that's relatable. Like, they're not always the most popular or they're most talented, but they, you know, have to figure out how to integrate these amazing abilities they have into their lives when they're not perfect people, as opposed to, like, Superband or someone. So that was, that was very revolutionary. But Marvel was also very much about the youth culture of the 60s and, like, really tapping into sort of the teen revolution that was happening. And that was, you know, a canny business decision because in the 40s and 50s, they were

part of timely comics, and you had guys like Stanley and Jack Kirby and so forth making war comics and making like sci-fi comics and western comics and so forth, you know, whatever the market was kind of supporting at the time. But when Marvel launched, it was right around, you know, the time of Beatlemania and everything. And I think they recognize like, hey, you know, kids are into different things now than they used to be like, you know, it's not so much about Davy Crockett hats. It's more about mop tops. So they jumped on that. And a lot of their characters are like, you know, X-Men. It's teen outcasts or Spider-Man who's like the nerd who also has an amazing power, but he has to keep it a secret because it's kind of a curse.

But Tony Stark is not a hippie character. He is not the kind of, you know, the kind of guy that the teenagers of 1963 would have been into. He is very much the man. Iron Man is the man. He's literally an arms dealer. Yes. He's Destro. He is a war-profitering middle-aged white man and, you know, incredibly wealthy and incredibly playboyish. He's very much like Batman, but that really stands out in Marvel's kind of early characters. I think you kind of hit on something when you mentioned that he's very much a Marvel character and also very much not, because I think a lot of what doesn't work about Iron

men and didn't work about Iron Man to make him like a top tier Marvel character for so long is stuff that is common among DC. heroes. Like, it's all the, it's all the Bruce Wayne stuff. It's that he runs a company that he's rich. He's, he's the only, like, 1960s Marvel main character who voted straight ticket Republican. Well, there's... He was into the Southern strategy, is what I'm saying. There's... I think he's an Eisenhower. Okay, okay, maybe that's, that's, that's probably a little much. He's an Eisenhower Republican, I think. That's true. That's true. I wouldn't go as far as... That's a much war, more, more war than race. Got it. There's two secret identities in that

first wave of Marvel comics that don't fit. And it's Don Blake and Tony Stark. And Don Blake very quickly is moved away from. You should explain who that is because they didn't even touch on that in the movies that most people know Marvel characters from now. Don Blake was a doctor who had an injured leg who found a stick in a cave that turned him into Thor. But very quickly it becomes apparent that he's not just tapping into the power of Thor. He is literally Thor, Thor the Norse god of Thunder who lives in Asgard. And by 65, I think, maybe earlier, 65 or 66, we're getting Tales of Asgard backup stories.

They're like, no, no, no, these are the gods that you've read about in school. And so Don Blake becomes this weird little vestigial ancillary character who is done away with. But not completely. Like, the most memorable, one of the most memorable runs of Thor history is Walt Simonson's run, where he does, you know, you get the schism between Don Blake and Thor. Thor again. Only in the first two issues. Right. But that wasn't totally forgotten. So it was still this thing that kind of circulated through there. Even then it had been revealed already. And that's 83. And it had already been revealed that Don Blake was an identity created by Odin to teach Thor humility. So there's, you know, and by the third issue of the Walt Simonton run, we're done with Don Blake pretty much forever. We're done with Thor having to see for everything. Yeah, it is. Yeah, it is. That stuff rules. Tony Stark should have not had a secret identity in the way that Steve Rogers shouldn't have a secret identity. Like, he did for a really long time, but it doesn't quite work.

And I think the thing that is most endemic of how it doesn't work is that until the late 90s, Iron Man was Tony Stark's bodyguard, which does not make sense. It is, it makes less than the glasses. Exactly. Right. Unless it's Roody in the suit. Right. So, yeah, we'll talk about this when we talk about the movie, but I do feel one of the most important changes or decisions that they, creative decisions they made with Iron Man the movie in 2008 was to end it with Tony Stark saying, I am Iron Man. Because that completely changed the dynamic of the character and really kind of set the tone for that entire cinematic universe where there are some characters who have secret identities, but, you know, there's also characters who are much more out in the open.

Whereas in the comics, it was pretty much like, everyone knows who the Fantastic Four is, and they love the Fantastic Four, but everyone else is kind of regarded with suspicion. Yeah, there's no real reason for Tony Stark to not be like, oh, yeah, because everybody knows he made the suit. Right. Which is weird. Yeah. But even, like, Captain America and Steve Rogers were kind of treated as separate entities for a long time, right? Well, yeah, there was a long stretch where Captain America's secret identity was that he was Steve Rogers, the artist of Captain America. That's actually so dumb it works

Yeah, one of Steve's things Was that before he became Captain America Before he joined the Army, he was an artist So when he gets thought out in the 60s And then in the 70s He becomes a comic book artist Which is hilarious But I didn't know that

Yeah, it's great My uncles didn't like Captain America As much as the other one So I missed out on something Yeah, and he's not publicly Captain America Until 2001 either Like he's like well known But like he just kind of stops having

secret identity issues and wearing his shield under his jacket. But Tony, by virtue of being this wealthy industrialist with, you know, a mustache and a three-piece suit, is much harder to relate to, even than I think a Reed Richards, who is, you know, always at the center of family strife or, you know, obviously a Peter Parker. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Reed Richards is kind of difficult to relate to by design. He is kind of, you know, so smart that he's always thinking like five steps ahead of the rest of humanity. So everyone, you know, like, that's one of the core problems of the Fantastic Four is like everyone's always trying to sort of relate to read. Whereas Tony Stark isn't a genius on that level. So there's kind of the question of like, yeah, like how, how, well, he doesn't have that strong a supporting cast either.

The Fantastic Four is all about the supporting cast. Fantastic Four is all the family. There's no main character, really. Yeah. Tony had Pepper and Happy, who, again, for a long time, we're not. Not really great characters. Pepper and happy. Hopping happy.

And then, you know, Rody comes along and Rody's a really good character who eventually becomes Iron Man and makes a lot more sense as Iron Man, especially in that time. But, yeah, there's not like a good... There's Mrs. Arbogast, who nobody knows, except for maybe Benj.

I don't know who that is. She's Tony's secretary. Okay. That's it. She's awesome. Pepper Potts is not a secretary? Pepper Potts. Is administrative assistant?

Pepper Potts. stops being his assistant and Mrs. Arvigast becomes his assistant in the 70s and 80s. Again, super obscure stuff that nobody knows about because it doesn't, it's adding weird layers that don't work, I think. Well, it took a long time for them to figure out what to do with Iron Man in the comics. Like, I went back for this episode and said, I'm going to read some Iron Man from the very beginning. And wow, those Tales to Astonish comics are out there.

He's like all over the place. He's going back in time. and there's like this, you know, this sort of time limit to how long he can be in the past because he has to plug into an AC outlet to recharge the machine that keeps his heartworking. But then he's like going under the sea to meet the Atlantians, but not like the Namor Atlanteans, just like a totally different set of Atlanteans going to other planets. Like every single episode, I mean, it's their issue.

It was an anthology comic, but there's no real, like, I don't know, like defining character here for quite a while. Until the 68 one starts, that's when the real, the timeline. So when they actually launched the proper Iron Man comic and it stops being Tales to Estonish. Yeah, it would turn from Tales to Astonish into Iron Man, right? Yeah, that one. I'm doing the pose on the cover, which no one can see. Yeah, the blue one, it's kind of blue.

The blue one. Yeah. I love it. I love it. Because I think that's when they really start leaning into Iron Man as a weird technological sci-fi kind of character. Yeah, I mean, the art. is really good. I love the art.

That art style of the classic Iron Man. Who did that? Was it Ditko? Well, Dicko designed the red and gold suit, but he never drew the actual issue. Who was the main artist for the proper launch? In the 60s stuff, Don Heck did a lot of it. It was Tales to Astonish.

Yeah, the Tales of Assonished stuff was Don Heck. I don't know who drew, like, when it became Iron Man. I should have brought my issue. So it goes. But I feel like every kind of enduring Marvel character most of them had these kind of doldrums, like the X-Men for a while. It was like, why would you read an X-Men comic? And then they launched new, or, you know, giant-sized X-Men or whatever.

And they found the formula for the team. With Daredevil, like, it was kind of like, who cares about Daredevil until, you know, Frank Miller got his hands on him. But I don't think Iron Man really had that defining moment in comics. He had it in the movie. And that was 2008. That was 10 years ago. Like, up until that point, other than binge, no one really cared of it.

about Iron Man. It was just, he was just, like, he was, he was, you know, a co-founding member of the Avengers. He was, you know, always treated as sort of like a heavy hitter. There was always an Iron Man comic. Sometimes there would be spinoffs like War Machine. But I just feel like he was kind of in the background and very few people's favorite character. And now he is like, you know, a global icon. Everyone in the world knows who Iron Man is. Well, that movie was really, really good. Yeah, it was. The first movie. I loved it. That's something we're going to talk about. It was. So well done, yeah.

But, you know, there was a time in Iron Man, the time I don't like it was when he was in that red and silver suit with the triangle thing. Is that what? I love that suit. You do? I think it's a good suit. That's too weird for me. I was all about the suits. I love the many armors of Iron Man.

Like, there was a Digest Book, you know, and then there was an Iron Manual comic book that showed you, like how the technology worked inside the suit. That sounds like a character from the tick, Iron Man, Well. Iron Man, well, yeah. The, the weird thing about Iron Man is that, you know, there's the big three Avengers, right? Like, there's Cap Thor and Iron Man. And Iron Man's a distant third. Like, Cap's probably the number one. It's like if the Justice League were Superman, Wonder Woman, and what, like, Green Arrow.

Yeah, pretty much. But Iron Man has really good individual stories. Like, one of my favorite comics of all time is Iron Man 150, the one where he goes back to am a lot with Dr. Doom because the stuff with two dudes in robot suits going back to King Arthur Times is really fun. I remember that. Yeah. It's a really good two-part story.

What a hundred years do you think about transistors? Loved them. That's awesome. Then a hundred issues later in Iron Man 250, the same team that did that story comes back and they send them into the future when King Arthur's reincarnated. Wow. Very, very fun stuff. I also love Dr. Doom, by the way.

Yeah, Dr. Doom's great. He's awesome. He's a great Ironman villain. He's like, yeah, evil Iron Man, but do they fight each other that often? I think of Dr. Doom is mainly a fantastic four villain. They fight each other in the way that Dr. Doom is kind of... Dr. Doom's been in everybody's comic, you know? Like, he has those good issues of Iron Man that are kind of all about two dudes in armor

trying to figure out how to get a thousand years back to their own time. Thank you, man. What? Then, you know, there's really good Dr. Doom and Spider-Man stories. There's really good Dr. Doom and Captain America stories. But, you know, demon in a bottle. is also really good. Like, it's a really, actually holds up pretty well, given the time.

And that, too, explain that. That is the story where it is the story of Iron Man being, or Tony Stark being an alcoholic and kind of getting drunk and putting on the armor and going and doing stuff, that he probably, like, you should not have nuclear-powered laser armor when you are inebriated. But even that, I think, becomes a touchstone for the character that is often treated. strangely. Like, we always joke about Tony Stark going down in his basement and locking the door for 12 hours, building himself a new set of Iron Man armor, and he's done being an alcoholic, you know? And it's not until relatively recently that a lot of that stuff has come back and been like, you know, Tony's in recovery.

You know, he is, he is an addict and is part of his character. But there are these really, really good individual Iron Man stories, but they're spaced out. So there's not like a lot of consistency in the way that Mark Grunwald was on Captain. America for 10 years, or Jerry Comway was on Spider-Man for so long, or Wall Simonson on Thor for so long, or John Byrne and Chris Claremont on, you know, Chris Claremont on X-Men for 17 years. Iron Man doesn't have that. He's got characters that are strongly associated with him, like Bob Leighton and David

Michelaney, but not those, not those grand sweeping epics, those long runs that defined Marvel Comics for so long. And then you get into the 90s, and it's very close. clear that they're trying to figure out how to make Iron Man work, which is how you get Teen Tony. Can I talk about Teen Tony? Yes, talk about Teen Tony, and then we'll talk about the movie and the games. Okay, so there's this story called The Crossing that is like 17 parts long. It's, I think we're far enough removed from it that I can say it's not very good.

But one of the things that happens in it is that it is revealed that I think it's the controller. Maybe it's Kang. It's one of them has been controlling. Tony Stark and making him kill people. So Tony Stark dies. And the way that they... The clone saga, basically. Yeah.

The way that they defeat Tony Stark is by getting Tony Stark from an alternate dimension where he's 16 years old. And then Iron Man's 16 years old for about a year. And then the entire non-X-Men part of the Marvel Universe gets rebooted to get rid of that. Wow. That's a big mistake. Yeah. Teen Tony.

I mean, like, I thought Christoph was kind of bad, but this is like... Christop on Doom? Yeah, Christophevondeu. What year is the teen Tony saga? It's before Heroes Reborn, so it's like 94-95. That's like, that must be when I stopped. Yeah, it should be. Because that was like, I was a subscriber to Iron Man in the early 90s.

You know, they mailed them to me. Yeah. So then I just stopped. And then you get Spider-Man and Hulk. I got this. Then you get the Heroes Reborn stuff. And then when it comes back with the Heroes Return stuff, it's actually pretty solid. And that was one of the books that Joe Casado.

was writing at the time when he was kind of transitioning from being the editor of the Marvel Knights imprint to being Marvel Comics editor-in-chief for so long. And, you know, he's still like, I think he's publisher now or president, something like that. I feel like 94 is when the Marvel started losing its way. Well, that's when you get Age of Apocalypse and that's when you get Heroes of Born. Age Apocalypse was good. That was actually why I stopped reading comics for a long time. Well, pretty much I stopped reading Marvel comics because I was like, wow, having a self-contained story with the beginning and end is really cool. And now, I don't really care about X-Men continuity.

Well, there's, that's also around the time that, like, Marvel's trying new things right before they declare bankruptcy. So, like, things are getting wild. And then they kind of, everything gets a really big back-to-basics approach. And then in 98, you get the launch of Marvel Knights under Casada and Palmiotti with Daredevil Black Panther, Daredevil by Kevin Smith and Joe Kasada, Black Panther by Christopher Priest and J.G. Jones. you get Angel Punisher is one of those books,

which then quickly becomes the Garthanas Punisher. And then in 2000, you get Ultimate and Marvel's kind of back on the, on the upswing. This man knows entirely too much about comics. It's literally all I've done. It could fill that is why he's here. A thousand houses. Yeah, through that entire time, Iron Man is very,

he's there. Yeah, Green Arrow is kind of the perfect character to liken him to. Because you want Green Arrow around. You don't want to get rid of Green Arrow. People like him. There's been good Green Arrow stories. But he's nobody but Benj's favorite character. And apologies to anybody out there who is a big Iron Man fan.

Who is nobody but been just thinking? Iron Man? Yeah. I thought Iron Man was awesome and popular and everybody loved him. He really wasn't. And to me, to point this out, we're going to look at Iron Man games. So Marvel Comics, these characters lent themselves to video games pretty much from the beginning. You look at Spider-Man, that is one of the very first licensed video games.

ever. You look at things like the Quest Probe series. You have guys like... Superman was the first, I think. That's yes, but, you know, I'm saying Marvel was right up there. So you look at thanks. You're nitpicking what made me lose my train of thought. Sorry. Appreciate it.

Marvel Comics characters lived themselves well to video games. Yes. So, yeah, so you have the Quest Probe series where you have stories about Hulk. I think Dr. Strange? Like, Dr. Strange got a video game before Iron Man got a video game. Iron Man does not show up in video games until the 90s that I could find.

He might have, you know, like a random appearance or something here and there. But it was pretty much, you know, Spider-Man, X-Men, Wolverine, Dr. Strange, the Hulk. Punisher had a game before Iron Man. There's all these other characters before Iron Man. And that's so weird because Iron Man seems so perfect for a video game character. put him in like a side-scrolling shooter or something where he's blasting things with those repulsors? It could have been trans bot on the super

and the master system. Yes, it could have stuck a, could have been a license, Iron Man. There's literally like an upgrade tree built into the comic book idea of Iron Man. Like it makes sense for him to collect things and add on his own. This is before upgrade trees were invented. They got to that finally in 2008

to tie into the video game. But if you look at Iron Man's appearances in video games before this, they're like, he's always a secondary character and, and, you know, if when, and the, the rare occasions where he shows up is the lead hero, you're like, I don't want to play this game. He was just like this, not even a second stringer in video games. He was almost completely forgotten, like third stringer, like, oh, yeah, there's this character. I guess we should throw some money at Marvel and include him in this video game. It's, it's really, really kind of remarkable to look back at his past. I mean, you look back at DC's Pantheon. I guess did Wonder Woman had a video? have a video game? Was that one of those sexist video games industry things? I don't believe there was a Wonder Woman game. She appears in that Justice League Task Force fighting game, but beyond that, I think it's not a lot. So, yeah, so I guess Iron Man is kind of the Wonder Woman of Marvel comics in terms of video games. Like, it seems like a perfect match for a video game, and yet where is he? Do you disagree, Venge? No. But, you know, this is blow on my mind, because I always thought

Iron Man. Like, I lived in an alternate reality where Iron Man was awesome and popular, but then it's like, you're making me realize yeah, there weren't any games about him. And I guess I was probably frustrated about it back in the day. Like, there's no NES. We can probably find a Usenet post by you talking about how you do it. Everyone else.

You guys. Well, again, I don't want to dismiss the fact that you like Iron Man. Because, you know, there are super good Iron Man stories. Yeah. And clearly, he was a Marvel mainstay for decades. I thought he's a top tier Marvel guy. Like, you know, Spider-Man, Iron Man. he was like a he was a pivotal character to their to their drama but like iron man was never you know a top character in the like the popularity in the magazine sales or anything yeah oh that's must be why i hated x-men in the 90s because they got all the attention that's because people were buying the comics they were very popular this x-man this man that

yeah well i love the x-men in the 90s ex-man i'll give you my pulse jet boop boop bo whatever it's you currently available in paperback yeah now i know the writer of x-men If you look back at I didn't put the years on here But if you look back The very first video game To give Iron Man A prominent role

Is Captain America and the Avengers Even there Even there he is not in the title Captain America The guy whose only ability is like Being very acrobatic And throwing a shield impossibly Like he gets to be the top character

Whereas Iron Man Who flies around in Invincible In the title right there, invincible suit of armor, blasting things with sci-fi rays and keeping his own body running with his sheer genius brain. He's like, oh, yeah, you could be him or you could be Hawkeye. Wow. Wow. Talk about a diss. Like, you're putting Iron Man on par with Hawkeye guys. I found that game. I mean, they even cast Jeremy Renner as Hawkeye. Like, how much of an insult? Like, how scrubbed here can you get? You just insulted that man.

Jeremy Renner is like Hollywood wants so hard You know he listens to Retron I bet Hollywood wants so much for Jeremy Renner to be a major star And he just It doesn't No it doesn't

I know what you mean He was good in tag though He was really funny because he was like a complete asshole Like kind of playing off his personality But anyway I don't want to get into like the why Jeremy Rinner is not a good action star That game just

There was a huge letdown Captain America and the Avengers I found it so unsatisfying And remember renting it with excitement. This is a Super Nintendo game, right? Well, it started out in the arcades. But the arcade game looks like a Super NES game, which is not a good look for an arcade game of 1991.

That's brilliant. What? That's brilliant for the same reason that if you watch Power Rangers, all the weapons and robots look like toys, because when you go to the store to buy the toys, they look exactly like they do on the show. I don't think that was the intention here. I think it was just like,

because the arcade game is a four-player simultaneous game, which you can't do on Super NES. So clearly they weren't going. for like a straight conversion it's just not an impressive looking game it's it's up against stuff like ninja turtles and time and final fight and so forth like but but this game has like these tiny characters and the action is very dull yeah i i i remember playing the arcade game now and i thought it was kind of cool but i didn't spend all day on it but i just feel like the the home version wasn't that good that's my memory of the arcade version wasn't that good okay

I actually really like the look of the game. Really? Maybe it's just from a nostalgia standpoint. I like the sprites. I think the sprites are like really cool little versions of those characters. It's also very, very evocative of a very specific time in Marvel comics. Like you can tell... Kind of like how the X-Men game is very specifically like,

that's what X-Men was like in 1989. Yes. The Iron Man's armor is very specific. The Avengers riding around in their sky cycles in the, I think, like second or third level like that's very specifically of that time vision and iron man get to fly on their own vision yeah yeah vision vision having the all white look is very uh like very much that time uh which i think it's worth noting that the avengers as a whole like as a team are very much like iron man on a macro scale in that they were around from very close to the

beginning but they were never really the team at marvel they were never the headlining team Yeah, I never wanted to read Avengers comics, and then they gave us West Coast Avengers. The first Avengers that I liked were the Great Lakes Adventures. What does that tell you? You like comedy books. Great Lakes Lake Adventures are great. Yeah, there's plenty of great Avengers stories. Like, one of my all-time favorite stories is Under Siege, where the Masters of Evil attack the Avengers Mansion.

It's a super great story. But they're not the team at Marvel until, like, 2005. Like, they really start pushing them. And then when the movies happened, obviously it's all Avengers at Marvel. Like the Avengers are the core of the Marvel universe in the movies and in the comics. How much of that has to do with the film rights and the ancillary rights to X-Men and that sort of thing? Because for the longest time, X-Men were the thing. And then, you know, Marvel started getting its designs on film and they didn't have the rights.

I think, like I don't really know because I, you know, like a lot of creatives, I have no head for business. But I feel like if you look at the history of Marvel, Marvel Comics, it's, there's a very cyclical aspect of it. Like, it's always Spider-Man. Like, Spider-Man's the guy who was on the paychecks. You know, he's the flagship character. Spider-Man was popular from 1963 to today with very little variation in popularity. Always a top-tier Marvel character.

But in the 60s, like, from 1961 to 1975, the Fantastic Four is the Marvel book you got to read. Because that's the Stanley Jack Kirby book for 100 issues. That's, you know, they would, that was the only book that had a letters page for a while. So people were writing into Fantastic Four to talk about Spider-Man before Spider-Man got a letters page. Like, this is back in, like, the early 60s. That's cool. But, like, that's the Marvel book. That sets the tone. And then in 75, it becomes the X-Men. And it's the X-Men for a very long time. Like 20 years. It's the X-Men for 20

years. And then after it's the X-Men, because, you know, like... And then on-slaught happens and everyone's like, oh, so long X-Men. You can't really maintain... The fact that that popularity was maintained for so long is an incredible feat. But then, you know, the X-Men kept expanding, expanding, expanding, and Claremont leaves, and then a bunch of new people come in, but it's still, you know, expanding and getting bigger, and people are still liking it. And then around the time that there is a necessary industry contraction, a lot of those, you know, 15, 16 X-Men-related titles go away.

And then it becomes Spider-Man again, especially with, you know, it's the Marvel Knights books for a couple years. And then it's ultimate Spider-Man kind of pushes Spider-Man back to spotlight. Which is the only one that really kind of survived because it was the only one that didn't get totally screwed over. Yeah. And then Avengers. Like, Avengers disassembled happens. And that kind of propels Avengers into being the top-tier book.

And honestly, that happened a little bit in the late 90s with Bucic and Perez. Right. So when do in humans get their moment in the sun? Oh, one day. One day. It'll happen. After the apocalypse. And I don't mean the apocalypse character.

I mean, like the end of humanity. and sub a nerd. to celebrities, magicians, and other entertainers about whatever he wants. Past guests include Phil Rosenthal, Dr. Joel Furman, and writer and director Kevin Smith. So check out Pins Sunday School, weekly on Podcast One, or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. Geico presents eyewitness interviews with inanimate objects. This is Brian Bruno live on the scene of a recent windstorm here to describe the event

a chest of drawers. There's a storm howling outside, so I thought I'd stay in and watch a rom-com. Five minutes into the flick. branch slams to the window. Were you hurt? I just got a scratch on my chest. Your chest of drawers can't help you in a windstorm, but the Geico Insurance Agency can help you get covered for personal property damage. Call Geico to see how affordable homeowners insurance can be. Captain America and the Avengers featuring Iron Man and Captain and Vision and Hawkeye. I do like the fact that this game has a lot of character cameos, like, you know,

Wasp and Wonder Man of all people show up as kind of like a little partner characters who help you out occasionally. And there's a really, really super random rogues gallery, which I guess is unavoidable when you have an Avengers game because you have, you know, all these characters of like very, very different power level. I mean, you have, you know, Thor and you have Hawkeye. So they have very different enemies to fight, but you still got Iron Man fighting, you know, crossbones, which seems kind of unfair, but Crossbones managed to hold his own, okay? What about Brock Romlo? Yes, that guy. I love Crossbones. Okay.

But I'm saying, like, maybe he doesn't have what it takes to fight Iron Man. But because this is a video game, everyone's kind of put on the same power. Well, I think one of the problems with Iron Man, you think about all those big Iron Man stories that I was talking about. Like, my favorite Iron Man stories, none of them really involve Iron Man villains. Because Iron Man does not have a... Iron Man is his own antagonist. Like, demon in a bottle is a man versus self story. The King Arthur story has got Dr. Duminate, who's arguably the best villain in comic books.

You look at Iron Man's villains, and he doesn't have a strong rogue's gallery beyond... The Crimson Dynamo. Jeremy didn't know who Crimson Dynamo was I don't know who Crimson Dynamo is I know the Mandarin and I know Ironmonger Only because of the movie I'm just like that guy with the spinning sawblades on his arms That is I think that's Metalman

Dr. Wiley Robot number 13 That's that's Gladiator Gladiator Yeah he fights Daredevil Yeah But you know you look at the Mandarin And the Mandarin is Problematic

Boy And I appreciate the way they handled him in the movie By being like Yeah actually No, he's not real. Yeah. Actually, the Mandarin was made up by a white dude. Yeah. Very, I love Iron Man 3.

It's a great movie. It's a great movie. But I think the Mandarin in the comics is a very, very strong character who's been at the center of a lot of really good stories. But there is an aspect of the Mandarin that's very problematic and very much rooted in what I think Iron Man as a whole is rooted in, which is he is a pulp character. There aren't a lot of Marvel characters who feel like they descend directly from the pulps in the way that Superman and Batman and Wonder Woman do.

You know, you can draw that straight line. It's Scarlet Pimpernel to Zorro to the Shadow to Batman. Like, arrow straight. You can't get rid of it. Iron Man feels like one of those characters, you know, oh, he built himself a robot suit. And now he fights this, you know, the mandarin. But there's not a lot of Edwardian precedent for Spider-Man or The Thing. Like Spider-Man and the FF and the Hulk especially, to a lesser extent, Thor.

but, like, they are all characters who descend from a combination of superhero comics and horror comics. Like, if you read the Marvel Monster comics that were coming on in the late 50s and early 60s, every early Marvel comic reads like those, except the good guys continue being good guys at the end. Like, Spider-Man's story is an ironic, EC-style horror comic about, oh, no, I got my uncle killed. But then there's another Spider-Man story afterwards, so we get to see it keep going like a superhero comic. Iron Man doesn't feel like that You should write a book about this You're a genius

A history genius I'm so super impressed I think a lot about comic history But yeah like I think Iron Man kind of descends from a different tradition And you can see that in his villains Or all of his villains are either evil versions of him Like Crimson Dynamo Titanaman Ironmonger

Or like weird Like kind of not quite genre cross-genre villains like the Mandarin, I think. Yeah, he feels like a detective comic holdover, like a smoky room with Asian mysticism and whatever. That's like somebody you would have seen in the shadow for sure. It's very easy to imagine like a 1940s Iron Man story about... Or Flash Gordon even. Yeah, they should do that.

They should like do a retro reboot of Iron Man in the 40s or something. They have. They have. Yeah, the whole series of them. It's called Gothen by Gasolate. Really? The Marvel ones are called Noir, so the Spider-Man Noir. Oh, yeah, yeah, I've heard of those.

The X-Men Noir, which are actually pretty good. But I think those were kind of inspired by the Gothen by Gaslight. Probably so. Because that was a great story. I like Gotham by Gaslight. Well, actually, I haven't read it in a long time. Maybe it's problematic now. It's, I mean, it's got some Jack the Ripper stuff going on.

So now that I think about it, maybe I'd be like, but it certainly impressed me at the time. It's got Mike Minnola art. Yeah. Mike Levinola Art makes everything better. Yeah. Okay, so anyway, back to Captain America and the Avengers, there's not really too much more to say about this game? I do appreciate the fact that each character does play differently. Like, I don't know how well it works for the game balance, but like Iron Man spends a lot of time

hovering and like shooting down at a 45 degree angle, which is something Captain America does not do and Hawkeye does not do. So there are like tangible differences with these characters, even more so than in like TMNT or something. So I feel like they did put some thought into Captain America and the Avengers, but still it feels like sort of the second tier of four-player brawlers of the era, which is a perfect place for Iron Man at the time. This seems interesting. Captain America and the Avengers was developed by Data East

in 91. Yep. And my favorite X-Men arcade game is Konami in 92 according to this thing I'm reading over here. And there's no developer relation between the two, but somehow I had flipped

them around my mind. I thought the X-Men game came first. I actually did too. I was thinking like and like the other one was like a spin I mean, it's because the X-Men game is good, and the Avengers one feels like a knock-off. Yeah, I guess so. There comes in. Plus, there were ports coming out later, probably after 92 on the home console. So we may have seen.

I don't think that X-Men game ever got a port. Oh, you mean the, the, I mean the Avengers game. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think the Super N-E-S version was 94, maybe 93. Yeah, so maybe that's why I think it's later or something. But it was still an okay game. I don't think I can really say the same for the first game that had a, Iron Man's name on the box, which is not the kind of thing you want to put on your CD.

That one is Iron Man and X-O Mano War in Heavy Metal, a PlayStation 1 game that plays and looks so much like all the other comic book games of the era, which is to say, extremely bad pre-rendered graphics, crappy gameplay, terrible controls, just a joyless slog through sheer human misery. I don't know, Chris, maybe you have a feeling so much. Oh, no, it's quite bad. I never played this It is a fascinating story You look at the same time You have stuff like Batman Returns

You have or Batman Forever, whatever You have like that Fantastic Four game That Acclaim put together There were a bunch of these And they were just crap Have you ever played that Fantastic Four game? Just enough to hate life Okay, it's not good

The soundtrack is wild Go back to it and listen It's all like weird poppy jazz That makes no sense I love the soundtrack of that game Okay Maybe it was like taken from the Rodger Corman movie or something.

Well, here's what's weird about this game. It's the first game. We're talking about Iron Man and X-O-Man-O-Man-Wore. It's the first game with Iron Man in the title, and it's an intercompany crossover where he has equal billing with a character who debuted about three years before this game came out. Who remember is Exo Man of War? Mano War.

I do. Besides you, Chris. Well, Valiant Comics did come back in 2011, 2012, and they're very, very good. if you want to read some like genuinely good comics. Yeah, the new ones are great good. What about the ones in the 90s? Like, I feel like Valiant was what happened after Jim Shooter was like, you don't like my new universe?

Well, fine, I'm going to take my toys and go make another company. That is literally exactly what happened. But those comics are probably better than you remember. Oh, I didn't read those. They look very, they look very 90s, but they're all based around really interesting high concepts. I'm a big fan of Ninjack, who is, who is what if Batman, was James Bond, and also snake eyes, which is very, very good. That's a lot of alpha male in one character.

Yes, it is. Yes, it is. But Exo Manor, do you know anything about Exo? No, actually, I want you to tell me why he deserved to be in a game with Iron Man. Unless the whole point is that it was just such a bad game that they all kind of sunk to the bottom together. Well, here's the high concept of Exo Man at War. He's a Visigoth Barbarian King who gets a suit of Iron Man Arir. armor from aliens and then comes to the future.

And so he's basically Conan and Iron Man armor, which is an amazing high concept. I'm having trouble with this one. So why? Why would someone give a Visagoth king armor? And then instead of just like saying, go have fun, you know, fighting the Huns or Romans? The Romans. Sure. Couldn't remember where the Visigoths were.

Why then bring him into the future and say, now go have fun with this crazy technology in a world you never created? Oh, because of relativity. Because they take him out to space at near light speed. And so he's only out in space for a very short time, but a thousand years passes on Earth. Got it. And then he comes back to Earth in his Iron Man hour. Okay.

And he has a sword made of lightning. It's a very good idea. So why is he in a video game with Iron Man? Here's why. Because Valiant was successful enough that it was bought by Acclaim. And it became Acclaimed Comics slash Valiant. That was how they were marketed. The company name was Acclaim Comics.

The imprint name was still Valiant. They relaunched everything, and it was essentially being used as an IP farm for Acclaim. And this was... How come we never got a Quirk comic? I wish I could tell you. Well, it's honestly, it's because this failed. So if this had been a success, we would have seen, like, the Acclaim Power Team as a video game? I think we definitely would have seen...

Like a Smash Brothers-style game with the arch-rivals dude fighting against Cooros and Quirk? I think what we would have seen is more valiant characters in video games that in the same way that like Warner Brothers for so long was using DC properties as an IP farm for movies and television. You know, which continues to today. I mean, obviously, like, look, it is no secret. Comic book companies, parent companies,

make a lot more money off a billion people going to see Avengers than they do off of X-Men 92, for instance. Available now in paperback. But I think that was the idea behind a claim making this game. And I know none of this, but my theory is they wanted to make a game. They had a pre-existing relationship with Marvel from before they bought Valiant, and they thought that they could pair their character up with an established Marvel character who made sense to have them paired with in a game

because they're very comparable in terms of how they function. You know, one guy's got Iron Man armor. The other guy has fake Iron Man armor. And see how that worked. And it was a cross-media event. It was very, like, this was the time of cross-media events. Shadows of the Empire was around the same time. I mean, X-Men and Star Trek the next generation.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. But they never did a video game on that one. No, they should have. I wish. But then this game came out and it's awful. And it failed. And it also came out, this is what, 95, 96?

I think it was later than that, actually. Well, it's coming out. PS1 launched at the end of 95 in the U.S. So, and there was no, like, big box version of X-Men versus, or X-Men X-O-Man-O-W. 96. There's a port to DOS. So if it's coming out in 96, that's right when the comics industry is collapsing or contracting, I guess. And, like, sales on those comics that acclaim just.

spent a lot of money to buy are plummeting because people just aren't going to co-cores anymore. Because the bubble had been so artificially inflated. And then that's all contributing factors, not the least of which is that this game sucks, that

kind of tank at all. And make me think that a claim makes bad games for like the next 20 years. Until the present? No, actually, they went out of business in like 2003. If they were still around, they still would be making bank games. But they published the NeverSoft Spider-Man game, right?

Did a claim? Or do I have that wrong? I don't know. Because I, maybe I'm making that up. I feel like they had an existing working relationship with Marvel on somewhat level. I could not say, but I do know, well, I mean, you know, they had LJN and they did that X-Men game for NES, so there's that. But anyway, the point is, this is terrible and was misbegotten. and turned out just as badly than the truth.

Yeah. I feel like Iron Man's next starring role was a little better, and that was Invincible Iron Man for Game Boy Advance, which is okay. It's maybe like, you know, you have that sort of mid-tier licensed action game that's competent but not inspiring in any way. This is very much the definition of that. There's some weird things about it, like the animation for Iron Man, he's always very hunched over.

I don't think of Iron Man as being, like, hunched. I think of him as being very sort of upright and tall and, you know, like, I'm a shining golden knight or whatever kind of thing. But here he's kind of like hunched over and sort of like his armor is huge. It's more like the earlier Iron Man armors. Chris, do you have something to say about that? Well, I thought that about the armor as well. And then I went back and looked at the Iron Man comics from the early 2000s.

And in the comics of the time, he was wearing a very retro styled armor. I think because this might have been after, but I believe the Iron Man armor had gotten so advance that it became sentient and then tried to murder Iron Man. As one does. It's like thin like cloth at like a nano suit at one point in the late 90s. I remember. Well, that's what, um, funky looking. That's what Bob Layton said he always wanted to be.

He said he hated it when they would redesign Iron Man armor and it would be bulkier. Like, be like the football pants, Iron Man armor from the 90s. But I mean, that was so 90s because everything was about padding and bulk and enormity. And in the 90s, there was no such thing as sleek in 90s comics. Yeah. So Tony Stark had gone back to this older style of armor at the time, which is weird to see something like that, again, that pinned to a specific time in comics, that accurate. I love the sprite in this game. It's because it's cute.

And it's also doing that side-scrolling brawler thing where everybody's always like bouncing up and down, breathing really hard. Right. I love it. Which makes sense because of the Iron Man armor. I don't know. Anyway, yeah, there is one element I like in this game, and that is that Iron Man's abilities all operate off of a common meter. You have like a power meter and you use that for flight. So you can fly around a little bit, but you also use that for your repulsors. So if you fly too much, then you have to wait

for it to recharge before you can attack. So it's, you know, you have to kind of balance like, do I want to maneuver or do I want to defend myself? I don't feel like the game design actually takes advantage of that. It's a more interesting idea than the game supports. But the idea itself, the concept is pretty solid. I'd like to levy a complaint against video games about super heroes in general, which is what I've always found. There might be some modern ones that have fixed this problem, but they just aren't fun because

you're not really using their strengths and powers. Like some of those early games, you're Wolverine or something, people are just shooting you and you die, you know, or you're Spider-Man or Superman, and you just get hit, you fly into a wall and you die. It's no fun. It should be all about freedom of being extremely powerful and

obliterating everything all around you. And that's why Crackdown was the first great superhero game. I think there are recent games that do a better job of that, but I feel like that's a lot harder to do with a character like Superman, who has never been in a good video game than it is for Spider-Man who has been in several very, very good video games that feel like Spider-Man. I've heard about it.

I haven't played the new ones, but I haven't played it yet, but everyone has been rating about it, and I am willing to believe that it is great. I was going to hold off on buying it, and then I found out there's a Jay Jenner-Jamison podcast that you can listen to in the game, and now I really want it. But I feel like... I'm surprised you didn't. write that podcast. Hey, if anybody wants

hiring me to write some video game stuff, I am available. Yeah. Hire this man. I do think a weird thing about this Game Boy Advance game is that it comes out in 2002, which is arguably like the low point for Iron Man. Like,

this is a time when Iron Man is not even like Well, the license must have been crazy cheap. Yeah. That, I mean, that would have to be it. Yeah. What I'd like to see, this is a complete aside, is a crossover between Darth Vader and Iron Man

because they're both supported by a mechanical suit. Wouldn't that be cool? He was just talking about Dr. Doom. That's the same thing. Wouldn't that be cool? It could happen. Yeah.

All in but the same thing could happen. It could happen. I mean, you could actually get like a movie with that at this point. That's cool. Yeah. It's going to happen in our lifetimes. So yeah,

like looking over the Rokes Gallery and Invincible Iron Man for Game Boy Advance. It's like, wow, who are these characters? Blizzard, Crimson Dynamo, Morgan Stark, like, I read a lot of comic books as a kid, but boy, I sure never heard of any of these characters. I had to look up Morgan Stark.

I mean, this is like super deep cut stuff, but, I mean, there's so many characters named Blizzard. There was a G.I. Joe character named Blizzard. Who is Blizzard? It's like a Derrick Queen. It's a company. They make, they make, they make Warcraft. It's a D. What if we went to DQ right now? That's all for Ironman, everybody. Let's go get, let's go get to. Let's blow this joint. I'm going to pass on that one. So I would say the first decent, good game that Iron Man was in was perhaps not surprisingly tied to the movie. And that was a Sega developed or Sega published Iron Man game from 2008, launched right around the same time that the movie came out and was very much based around the movie. And for the first time, it really felt like, oh, this is Iron Man in a video game.

And it does, you know, you said Iron Man lends himself to upgrade trees. There's not really so much of an upgrade tree in this. But there is, like, the progressive sense of Iron Man's suits of armor getting better as you play through the game. Like, you start out in the cave in Afghanistan or whatever as the clunky, like, welded together Iron Man suit. And over the course of the game, you get better and better armors until finally you're kind of where Robert Downey Jr. was at the end of the movie, fighting the Ironmonger. And there's, you know, all kinds of extra stuff in the game to kind of pat out the fact that a movie plot, which runs, you know, two hours, does not sustain a 15. to 20-hour video games. So you get lots of extra characters in there that

I don't really care about, but you know, it's extra dudes to fight with Iron Man, so that's good. Anyway, yeah, it's an okay game. It feels very much like a game of its period. It's a third-person shooter Xbox 360

PS3, so it's kind of monochrome and sort of ugly by comparison to current games because people for a while we're like, well, we've got all these pixels, let's not use them for any colors whatsoever. Yeah, the muddy. Yeah.

But, I mean, you know, a quake effect. Even taking into account that it is a product of its time, and it's a little bit clumsy and very, very dull looking. It's okay. Like, you have freedom of movement to fly around and really make use of Iron Man's powers as opposed to being on, like, a super limited time charge where you can only fly for, like, two seconds,

and then you have to get grounded. Yeah, that's frustrating. Yeah, you spend a lot of this game in the air So it's kind of like a It's not a third-person shooter like Gears of War It's much more, there's more aerial to it It's kind of somewhere between Gears of War And Zone of the Enders almost

So that's, I feel like that's a pretty decent endorsement for it I'm not a huge fan of it but I played a bit of it And I was like, well, okay, it's okay I've never played it The question I think is, do you think it's worth going back to More than any other game from 2008? Yeah, should I go try it? More than any other game from 2008?

No, 2007 and 2008 were amazing years for video games but if you are wanting a good Iron Man game, what has there been since then? A good point. Like Iron Man shows up in games, but he's still not like the starring character in anything. Like this is the Iron Man game pretty much. So, Benj, this is it for you.

I'm sorry, Iron Man. I'm sorry. Your old friend. So it is worth mentioning that the game that Sega published was tied to the movie. And the movie was a much bigger deal than I think anyone expected it to be. And we'll end this podcast by just talking, you know, about this movie that came out 10 years ago. and pretty much changed how the movie industry works. Sort of, I don't know.

It changed how Disney's business works anyway. I don't know about anyone else because lots of other people are trying to do the Marvel Cinematic Universe thing. And so far, no one has even come close to succeeding. You don't think the Dark Universe and it's three fall starts? Hey, we got the Mummy Demastered out of it. So that's okay.

I like that game, but everything else is bad. That tied into that? I have no idea. Well, it's probably for the best. Okay, good. I was working in a comic book. I wouldn't have played that if I knew it was tied into it. Well, I mean, the mummy herself, the spray is based on Sophia Batali, Batal.

I can't remember her last name. But you wouldn't even recognize it to see her because she's like a tiny, yeah. Sorry, Chris, what were you saying? I was working in a comic book store in 2008 when this movie came out. And it came out the first Friday in May, which I know because it was the Friday before, free comic book day. which, for those of you who don't know, has been going for at least 15 years or so now. And it's the first Saturday in May. You can go to your local comic book store if they're participating in almost every comic store in America does.

And you can get free comics. All of them. Not all of them. That is something I had to explain every year. But it was designed to get people into comic book stores. And they always made it the first Saturday in May because there would generally be a superhero movie released around that time. In the year since, every year.

This year was Infinity War. Was originally meant to come out first Friday in May, but then ended up coming out at the end of April instead. Which surprisingly did not hurt Infinity War at all. It still did quite well. They had also, Marvel had just launched a second title for Iron Man that was specifically meant to be a movie-friendly title. It was by Matt Fraction and Soptero of the Rock. It was called Invincible Iron Man. And I know this because I've talked to Fraction about it, that they thought they were going to be the movie tie-in book that would run for eight issues or six issues or whatever, an end.

What happened was that people went to see Iron Man and loved it and actually went to comic book stores and actually bought the book that had characters that kind of looked like Robert Downey Jr. and armor that kind of looked like the armor he wore in that movie and invincible Iron Man kind of became the main Iron Man book as the established Iron Man title ended. None of us were expecting any of that.

The movies, the Marvel movies that had come out previous to Iron Man like directly previous were... Punisher? Hulk. Hulk? Hulk? Well, there was a Hulk after and a Hulk before. Yeah, there was Angley's Hulk. There was Punisher.

There was Blade 3. And then I... Iron Man 2? in and and I think Spider-Man 3 came out before and then I think if you go back to 2003 Daredevil which is not I like Spider-Man 3 I think that Punisher movie has one or two good moments but that is not a good trust-building exercise when people are aware that the Dark Night which also came out in 2008 is from the competing film studio slash comic company People loved Iron Man.

And I think it's very easy to see why, because in a lot of ways, Iron Man was ahead of his time as a character. Because I think it is easier to relate to a fan, or to understand, if not relate, to a fantastically wealthy technologist who has no idea how to solve problems other than doing the one thing he's good at, than it is in 2018. You have Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. in armor. And at least this guy's using his money to help people. So, I feel like the past hour now that we've been talking gives context for why this movie was remarkable

because you have this character that was never like a headliner in a video game. His comics sold okay, but they were never the number one comics. He was very much sort of like, oh yeah, that one guy with the armor, okay. Right, the guy with the alcoholism story. Right, yeah.

Like, the thing is, Marvel didn't have any of their characters. They're all their all their heavy hitters. X-Men was owned by Fox. Spider-Man was owned by Sony. Who the hell a Fox has Fantastic Four? Uh, so yeah, like you, you look at all of these major Marvel franchises and they were in someone else's hands. Iron Man was through Paramount. It was just a, like, it was through Paramount and it was kind of, like, the beginning of Marvel Studios. Um, and yeah, like, it was basically this kind of, it seemed almost desperate. Like, well, we're going to make a movie about Iron Man. And it's going to have this guy that was a big actor in the 80s. And then he got in a lot of trouble and washed up and no one cares

about him anymore. Like, Robert Downey Jr. was not a star in 2008. It's perfect casting. It is. Like, it's amazing because his character arc is pretty much like his real life arc is his character arc. Yeah. Like when, yeah, I mean, it turned out to be just kismet. But I don't think anyone knew that at the time. But the thing is, they took a very light touch to this movie. I mean, compare this to Batman Begins.

It's night and day. Oh my goodness. Night with a K. Yeah. That was such a serious movie, so dark and so grim and so somber and so violent. And, you know, you have this voice and everything. And Iron Man is not that. It is a kind of goofy guy who is

socially awkward and kind of up his own butt, but not in like a, in a very charming way, I guess. Yeah. He's the smartest guy in the room, but he's still a guy who, you know, comes back from this ordeal and you see him shoving Burger King into his face, which is Marvel Heroes in a nutshell. You know, it's a very fantastic thing. Going out for falafel. A couple with, Shorma, couple with a very relatable thing. Yeah, I think it's, I think it was a combination of lowered expectations.

from, you know, like, oh, it's an Iron Man movie? Okay, sure. Why not? And Iron Man being a character, I've thought a lot about the way superhero movies aren't action movies in the traditional sense. Iron Man is the perfect character to bridge the gap between the traditional diehard style action movie. You know, the Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, action movie, and superhero movies, which are a different genre. No other movie bridged them that well. Like, it's why you get weird stuff in Batman Begins, like Batman's saying, I'm not going to kill you.

I'm just going to leave you to die, which doesn't make sense even in the context of that movie. But, like, Iron Man is about a guy who learns to stop being so selfish. And the first thing he does once he gets home is he builds a better suit so he can go take revenge. Right. Well, and, you know, you look at his character as an arms dealer, and that makes a whole lot more sense as like a private military, military. contractor in this century than it did in the 60s. Like, that is much more of a thing. He is, he is Halliburton.

I'd like to say, he brought up a great point. It touches on that, which is that we can now identify with these new billionaire industrialists that are here. We haven't had that since the Gilded Age in the 1890s. And I think that the old wealthy industrialist model as the villain probably came from living memory of people who had grown up since, you know, 1890s to 1940s or one generation separated from that. And then, yeah, you had this whole period where no one alive knew anybody who was that, like, the, like, what's the oil barren guy?

What's the Rockefellers and the, you know, the media titans and everything of the, I think there's an element in this movie of catharsis for people who saw what was happening, what America was doing in Afghanistan in Iraq, and heard stories, horror stories about Halliburton and so forth. And Iron Man is basically, like, he starts out as Halliburton, but he is the Halliburton. that grows a conscience. It's like, what if Dick Cheney were actually not a lizard man from space and he had a soul? And at some point, he said, wait a minute, the things I'm doing are wrong. This is bad. I need to not do this. Yeah, I need to build a suit and fly around George Bush. Well, he's a character for the era in a way that I don't think, you know, Jack Kirby and Stan Lee could have predicted in the 1960s. Wait a minute. That's what he was doing in that undisclosed location.

So yeah, the world Yeah, the world caught up to Iron Man in a really interesting way. And I think then you see that movie, like, it's fascinating that Iron Man, I referred to Infinity War as, or the movie that's coming after Infinity War, I keep referring to as Untitled 19th Iron Man sequel. Because all those movies are based, like, Iron Man is the foundation. And I think seeing Tony Stark's character as a guy who at the start of that movie more or less lives in a realistic, you know, Halliburton, Afghanistan, style world that's very much rooted in 21st century politics, and he builds a superhero suit. He builds a piece of sci-fi technology. There are no superheroes in his world at the time of Iron Man, and now, you know, you've got

everything like Thanos, end of the world kind of stuff. Yeah, and then the world explodes around him with all this stuff. And so you see the guy who was always the smartest guy in the room whose solution to every problem was to just build a bigger gun and then eventually become the gun himself, trying to keep up with everything that's going on around him. It's why his, like, the Robert Toney Jr., Tony Stark, and the Chris Evans, Captain America, the interplay between them is really good if you watch those movies as a whole. It's why, like, the Rody stuff is really good.

I think, I really like the way that character has woven through all those movies. I agree. It's why Spider-Man Homecoming is so good because you see Peter rejecting every choice that Tony would have made at his age. And, yeah, like, I feel another thing that makes the Iron Man, especially the first one work is that you know you have this guy who is the smartest man in the room like you keep saying

and he can create anything he wants and he insists on kind of putting himself with the center of it but he's not really that great at it like the way he flies around he's always like trying to keep his balance with his repulsors he's a very sort of shaky like figuring out everything as he goes along he hurts himself like he's not

you know the effortless hero he's not okay so like Batman begins Batman hurts himself, Bruce Wayne hurts himself a little bit, trying to figure things out, and then he's like, well, I've got to get new masks. But that's pretty much it. Whereas Tony Stark is just like one colossal screw up after the other. And that's almost like that's the entire point of Age of Ultron is that, whoops, he made some really bad decisions there. Yeah. And like that's built into the character from the beginning. And they've really built around that. You know, like I said earlier, the proclamation at the end, I am Iron Man, really sort of set the tone for the series. But, But, you know, having him be this sort of imperfect flawed character, they got the Marvel heart of what Iron Man was in a way that I don't know the comics necessarily ever did. I think that the comics have in certain points, but I don't think there's any more economical example of it. It's all boiled down and concentrated in one place. Even the alcoholism thing, that's like a scene in Iron Man, too, where he gets drunk off his ass and pretty much trashes his manner. But it's not like a big deal.

And he's much more about dealing with the PTSD of having delivered that nuke into space at the end of the Avengers. Like that's the through line that screws him up in every movie after. Yeah. Because he, because again, I hate that the Avengers movie ends with Tony Stark nuking the aliens. I think that's a weird, like a very weird ending. But I like that the movies that have come after have dealt with the fact that he got the biggest gun he could. And now what does he do? Now what does he do if it doesn't stop?

But I love that scene in the first Iron. men where Jeff Bridges is yelling at Peter Billingsley, which if you don't know, Jeff Bridges, Obadiah Stain's assistant in that movie is the kid from a Christmas story, if you didn't know that, where he's yelling at him, and he, he, he's, they're trying to recreate the arch reactor and he goes, Tony Stark built this in a cave. And Peter Billingsley's character goes, I'm not Tony Stark. And we see that contrasted with him, like, you know, accidentally knocking himself out with his rocket fists or whatever.

Like, yeah, he can build all this fantastic stuff. He is a capital M, capital C, capital S, Marvel Comics, Super Scientist, but he's still a guy. There's two S's. M.C.S. Okay. That's all I got to add to this. I can't even match it. Anyway, I like an Iron Man fan.

What do you love about the movie? You said it was brilliant, but you haven't really... It was so sad. You haven't seen it since I went to the theater on opening day in 2008. And I remember going with my wife, and it was really great. I mean, I was so excited. And I loved how it hit on all of the things that made Iron Man good, which is his weaknesses. And I like the, you know, the flippant character that makes mistakes and he's, you know, conceded, but he's powerful.

And, you know, and just the tone of it, it had some comedy, it had lots of action. And it was just so concisely well-directed and well-acted and well-cast, well-written. I mean, it was the perfect comic book movie in my opinion. And I remember at the end when he said, I'm Iron Man or whatever he says. I was like, it was like cheering like inside my heart. You weren't like, that's not how the comics were. No, it's like, man, that's awesome. Because you expect him not to say it.

But the way Robert Denny Jr. delivers it is so incredible. It's like, was that improvised by him? If I, I feel like I read an oral history about the movie where that wasn't in the script and he just kind of threw it in. I don't know. Okay. I haven't read it. If you did, then I don't know. I mean, if that's the case, like, that's such a big moment.

that has such ramifications throughout this multi-billion dollar film franchise. The comics had ditched the secret entity by that point. So it was following from the comics of the comics of the movie. They could have milked it for a couple of movies,

but they didn't. But again, I think that works for his character so much. Like, that movie in the Dark Night are both movies about escalation. Like, Batman begins in 2005, ends with Jim Gordon giving Batman a very, very serious speech about escalation, which then leads directly into the Joker

showing up in, in Dark Night. And Tony Stark as a character who thinks that he can just be like, yeah, what's up? I'm a superhero. And then nothing bad is going to happen. There will be no consequences of that action is a perfect character beat, especially when you then go into Iron Man, too.

Yeah, well, I love the, I was just thinking, I love the fact that that character in the movie is reckless in terms of taking risks. He just jumps into it. And sometimes it works out great. Sometimes it fails. And he's just impulsive and sort of reckless, but ultimately has a good conscience and, you know, is a good person, even though he's, you know, steered by weird. His problem ultimately is, like, he has a good conscience, but he's not good about being democratic about it. He just makes unilateral decisions for everyone.

And that's where a lot of... I don't know what happens in the later movies. I just saw the first two. Yeah. In Avengers, maybe. Iron 3 is great. It is? Iron 3 is actually really, really good.

It's a Shane Black movie. So anyway, just to kind of wrap here, and we are way over this being a micro. I think I'm just going to ditch the micro moniker. I need to check with Bob about that. But I feel like micro is just a mistake at this point. So to bring this... It should be like alternate. Retronauts east coast.

It could just be Retronauts. So to bring this back around to video games, why do video games not have something like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, like a shared... saga between... It's called Super Mario Brothers. No. I was going to make the same chance. Like a bunch of different properties that are all kind of pooled together, all related,

tell their own stories, do their own things, but then ultimately kind of feed into like a central universe. The closest thing, I guess, is Smash Brothers, which is a standalone thing. The Street Fighter universe technically includes like rival schools and final fight, which are loosely related. But there's no real... Yeah, the fighting games and Mario Kart are the only ones that pull all the characters together. Yeah, but they don't have a story.

And there's no, there's no real narrative through line. There's no narrative through line to speak of in the street fighter final fight universe. It's like each game just kind of happens and has its own little fragment of a story. But Cody went to jail. Yeah. Couldn't stop fighting. But they're not, they're not

working toward an end. That's the thing that really impresses me about the Marvel Cinematic universe is that they've taken the comic book model and somehow applied it to multi-million dollar movies. Like when when Sam Jackson shows up at the end of the first Iron Man is like, let me tell you about the Avengers initiative. That was the most amazing thing in the movie to me because I was like,

are they really going to do that? They can't do that. They can't make an Avengers movie. That's just too expensive and too crazy. There's never going to get all these characters together. This is going to be a huge flop. And then like four years later, there's the Avengers. Yep.

I don't know. I think no one has had that foresight and planning to actually sit down and do it because the whims of the video game industry are so, ridiculous and flighty and temporary and teams get turned over every game, you know. That's hard to say, have someone like a czar of an IP that just guides it all the way through, you know, like you could think of somebody like the Metal Gear series and stuff or Castlevania where a lot of them are done by this Auteur kind of guy produced by him and then they fire him or something.

You know, I don't know. So that's all I can think of. It would take, like, a, like, a Kojima or a Suda 5-1 or something. Yeah, I don't think they want to be tied to that, though. Yeah, but I think also we've had the conversation before about how, and this is not a slight against video games, but for a long time, video games were not story-driven. They're interactivity driven and should be. And technology-driven. Yeah, they should be experiences that you get to control, which makes juggling a story very difficult and something that's only really come about relatively recently.

in the, you know, truly like story-driven video games where your choices matter and you are part of the story are a pretty recent invention. So I think there's that, whereas comics have been narrative-driven and sequentially driven from day one. Like, a game is supposed to have a satisfying ending, even if it's part of a franchise. A comic is not really supposed to end ever. If it ends, something has gone wrong and no one's reading it. So comics are meant to go on. And when you get to the concept of, like, shared universes, which really only comes about in the 60s, I think a lot of that happens because you have a very small, both geographically and, like, membership-wise group of creators. And you also have stuff that's relatively quick to produce.

It does not take longer to make a comic than it does to make a movie, you know, or to make a TV show or to make a video game for sure. Okay. So Marvel Comics launched in 1963, Iron Man. 61. Okay. FF. Number one. Iron Man was 2008. So that is 47 years. So Pong debuted in 1972. So 40, what did I say, 47 years from that? That is 2019. So I think the time is right for the video games industry to sit down and like some publisher to say we have a stable of characters, they can all feed into some bigger concept. It doesn't have to be exactly like the MCU, but something where they're all kind of, you know, like existing in tandem and yet separately from one another. Pac-Man, I want to talk to you about joining the pong initiative.

The only, the only, well, here we go. The only thing we've ever seen along those lines that I can think of is Namcoe with its Mr. Driller, Dig-Dug, et cetera, universe that ties into Gallagher and all kinds of kinds of stuff. There's like this massive, shared universe. Actually, I think it might be two universes. Doesn't Sega have that going on with some of those games? Not really. There's the weird Wolfenstein Doom

connection. Yeah, but that's still, that's just like one or two things. Yeah. But the Namco thing, that's much bigger. And I feel like that is a great segue into our next podcast, which is going to be another look at the history of Namco

games. So thank you. I am creating the MCU podcast right here by drawing a through line. Let me tell you about the Namco History Initiative. Anyway, this has been Nick Fury, and I'm signing off for Retronauts. Guys, tell us about yourselves and where you can find you online. I'm Tony Stark. I'm a millionaire, industrialist. Millionaire, right? I'm 60s style. I'm actually Ben Edwards. You can find me on Twitter at Ben Jedwards, where I'm building joysticks for the whole world to see. And also at vintagecomputing.com. My blog and Chris. I'm Chris Sims, and I make you feel that I'm

the cool exec with the heart of steel. And you can find all of my stuff by going to THE-ISB.com, including comic books that I write occasionally for Marvel Comics. So if I said anything bad about Iron Man, I did not mean it. He's great. Yeah. I love him.

So check those out. T-H-E-I-SB.com. And finally, I'm Jeremy Parrish. And Retronauts is, of course, a podcast that you can listen to for free every week on iTunes or at the podcast One Network at Retronuts.com. Or if you want, you can listen to episode. a week in advance. You have to pay $3 a month for the privilege, but you get them in a higher bit rate and without advertisements. And also, it allows me to eat food and have a roof over my head.

So go to patreon.com slash retronauts and you can support us. Even if you don't support us, tell your friends about us and say, hey, you like old video games and sometimes things that are sort of tangential to video games. Well, you should listen to Retronauts because that's what we do. That's what we talk about, video games. And I think we do a pretty good job of it. So anyway, this has been Jeremy Parrish signing off. By the way, I am Iron Man. He won't get so

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The Mueller report. I'm Edonoghue with an AP News Minute. President Trump was asked at the White House if special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town. I guess, from what I understand, that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Maine Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving of President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it.

In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officer started shooting at a robbery suspect last week. Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear knowing that your choices will directly affect. the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do. The robbery suspect in a man, police say acted as his lookout, have been charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.