By BILLY MURPHY
Laugh Lines

All of us have had our superheroes. Mine was Spiderman.

I am not sure how cool it was to worship at the feet of a leotarded guy whose powers were contingent on sticking to walls with the ferocity of a wad of chewing gum, yet all I wanted to do was wear a mask and shoot thread from my wrists. I must have been entranced by the genius lyrics of the theme song: Spiderman, Spiderman does whatever a spider can. Wow, deep.

When I was growing up, superheroes had all the complexity of a squirrel staring at itself in a plate glass window. Whether coming from a strange, exploding planet or being accidently doused in radioactive goo, the original role models readily accepted their circumstance and moved forward. This was the best lesson they could teach us.

I wonder what difference this, soft, PC generation could have made for the fabulous crime fighters of yesterday. Could the Incredible Hulk have benefitted from anger management? Would Superman have been quite as violent and strong with the crooks? If only he could have flown around the earth at the speed of light, turned back time and helped these bad guys through their troubled childhoods.

No doubt Wonder Woman would have had to watch all her captives be set free because when extracting the truth from them with her magic rope, she failed to read them their Miranda rights. It would have been enough to make her bust her bustier.

Where in olden days we were naive enough to dream about patterning our lives after cartoons, today kids seem more interested in emulating pop stars and sports stars and generally any too-young millionaire with bad manners

While superheros of old would change into Spandex in a tollbooth, today's superhero just phones it in on the way to a Spandex endorsement. The Batmobile has been replaced by a limousine. Where a cape was once the sign of the invincible, now it's a Nike logo.

Yet, in all the confusion there is one stalwart fixture on the influence of youth of the ages: the parent. Girls still rate their mothers as the person they are most likely to pattern their life after. And teens say that they seek to please their parents more than any other group.

So, in the end it's never the superhero that makes the difference. In the end, dreams are just fantasy and real is real.

Back to Opinion Home Page | Back to the top of the page