My generation grew up with games, comics and cartoons that, for one reason or another, remained important in our hearts even in adulthood. It was more of a pastime or an hour of relaxation away from homework, it was a sacred moment in which we could have fun and pretend to be ourselves inside those fantastic worlds.
How many afternoons have we spent trying to have fun with mutant turtles, blue hedgehogs and yellow faces running away from ghosts. Often it was a matter of a few minutes of television, games or a few pages, nevertheless, for us they represented the world and it was enough for us.
Now that we have grown up we try to share those old passions with our children, even if their interests often turn to completely different things. Or over time we have changed and we have begun to focus on new passions or "adult things" that no longer leave us much time to explore those fantasy worlds into which we once escaped. Some of us still do it, for passion or for work, but not with that same childish serenity.
But it happens that every now and then, someone decides to make that child re-emerge in us with something special.
How many of you as a child wondered what it would be like to see your heroes in the real world, or at least learn more about their origins?
Hollywood, from this point of view, made sure to answer these questions.
Turning childhood icons into movie stars is a big milestone for fans, even for those who haven't picked up a joystick or comic anymore. Just think of the recent release of the trailer for the upcoming Super Mario movie, produced by Illumination. Many people are thrilled to finally see the mustachioed plumber on the big screen, after a thousand titles on Nintendo platforms and even a cartoon (there would also be the live action film, but that's another story).
This kind of excitement repeats itself every time such a product is taken and reworked for those kids now grown up.
We have seen this happen with Sonic, Silent Hill, Pokemon and many other products.
It is strange to get excited about what is nothing more than a different way of representing a pastime from our past ... yet it is precisely seeing it interact with more freedom, or as if they were really in reality, that drives us crazy.
Taking as an example the latest Pokemon film - Detective Pikachu, seeing real people interacting with collectible monsters was a kind of dream come true for many players of the series, who as children imagined themselves in those realistic guises.
Exploiting this idea is not as recent as it may seem.
The cinematographic transposition of this genre starts around the 1940s-1950s using comics as a starting point.
Flash Gordon, Batman, Dennis the Menace… so many works for different young and adult viewers become a great source of inspiration, even those created as newspaper strips were considered as, for example, the Addams family.
There was already plenty of material to create films and even TV series and even the genres vary from science fiction to mystery, satisfying everyone's tastes. Noting the positive reaction of the public, with the passage of time and with the change of fashions we have always tried to choose the right subject to be transposed on the screen, projects that can also be achieved thanks to the technologies that have made it possible to create scenarios otherwise too complex to erect.
A very interesting little curiosity: the first superhero film ever, also elected as such by the Guinness World Record committee, is The Adventures of Captain Marvel, centered on the DC character now known as Shazam. The film was released in theaters as a film serial in 1941, nearly 70 years before Zachary Levi took on the role of Shazam in the eponymous cinecomic DC Films.
But what were the film serials? As the name suggests, these are the ancestors of today's television series, which were screened in cinemas before the global spread of TV: the work was made in its entirety but distributed in the room episode by episode, each of which remained on the bill. week before being replaced by the next episode. Typically, each episode was meant to end on a cliffhanger, prompting the viewer to come back for the next episode and find out how the story would continue.
Over time they disappeared, permanently replaced by feature films, but they contributed to the history of cinema: among the most important we remember Fantomas, Flash Gordon, Dick Tracy, The Mask of Zorro, Mandrake and Batman, which arrived in 1943, two years after Captain Marvel.
[everyeye.it/what is the first cinecomic in the history of cinema?]
Hollywood still has a lot of nostalgic products to turn into blockbusters (or nearly so).
It is true that the key point of these projects is to make money ... but we must not ignore that behind us we also find a team of people who loved those characters as much as we do and who spend hours and hours of stressful work to complete a job that they themselves want it to be perfect. And you can see from the end result, when this effort works.
After Mario and Sonic, but also Superman and Spiderman, I wonder who will be the next subject to land on the big screen to drive the crowds crazy.
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