Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Android | RSS
In which we were on public radio; it’s probably best just to ignore Romulus; Miles still hasn’t seen the Prisoner and should be very ashamed of himself; toy licensing is the stuff of nightmares; you can upgrade your bloodbath for an additional $1.25; Jay may or may not have family ties to Weapon X; we are suckers for die-cut covers; Wolverine knows how to commit to a gag; and you have some pretty remarkable dreams.
X-PLAINED:
- Wolverine’s CIA contacts
- Murder-related birthday traditions
- Wolverine #48-50
- The ship Righteous Indignation and the ‘ship Righteous Indignation
- Wolverine size creep
- Injudicious footwear
- Serial sidekicks
- Miles’s continual failure to watch The Prisoner
- The Summers Crash model of flashbacks
- Panties and/or grenades
- Several varyingly reliable flashbacks
- How memory works
- Mastodon
- Andre
- How memory doesn’t really work
- Kids’ toy licensing
- Quasimodo’s hangout
- Women in Refrigerators
- Secret agent skills
- The Dalton school of argument
- A legitimately cool cover gimmick
- Wolverine vs. the Helicarrier
- Adamantium handicrafts
- Shiva (but not that one)
- Silver Fox (again) (kind of)
- A cataclysmic memory backlash
- Antarctic X-Hijinks
- Jay & Miles’s adventures in YOUR DREAMS
NEXT EPISODE: Centaurs of Texas
CORRECTION: Kyle Rayner’s girlfriend was the source of the Women In Refrigerator’s trope–not Hal Jordan’s, as Jay stated in this episode.
You can find the visual companion to this episode on our blog.
Find us on iTunes or Stitcher!
Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men is 100% ad-free and listener supported. If you want to help support the podcast–and unlock more cool stuff–you can do that right here!
We’re in the process of migrating our official shop to TeePublic! Click over to check it out! (You can still find the designs we haven’t moved yet at Redbubble.)
For the record: Vole’s identity DOES get revealed later. He developed the memory implants for Weapon X. I don’t think Wildcat ever gets shown, though.
That Wolverine #25 die-cut cover is pretty awesome and I love it. And Logan riding a motorcycle onto the Helicarrier is easily one of my favourite Logan moments, just for how ridiculous that whole scene is.
Additional Antarctica moment: In AvX, Logan was dropped into Antarctica, and somehow found a polar bear skin to keep him warm. I am still angry about that.
Well, that’s only because because it would have tasks him FOREVER to get enough penguin pelts to make a decent outfit. 😉
If Logan had done so, however, it would most likely turn out to be a tuxedo.
I haven’t read anything with Logan in Antarctica, but I think I might have something worth a No-Prize. If Logan had been dropped into Antarctica near a former research site, he could have found the polar bear skin because it was imported there before the site was abandoned. The pelt would not have been recovered by people without superhuman senses because it was white. Now, why would this site have been abandoned? As it turns out, fires are a big problem when you’re on the driest continent on Earth. Water is scarce enough that, past a certain point, a fire will be allowed to consume an entire building, and buildings are built far enough apart so a fire shouldn’t be able to spread to multiple. Still, entire research stations have been lost to fire in Antarctica. Dry chemicals are available for modern firefighting, but the original Brown Station was apparently burned down in 1984 by someone who didn’t want to spend another winter there.
Alternatively, there’s a sequence missing in which Logan meets up with an old friend who lives as a a hermit in the Antarctic, a person that we’ve never seen before but is one of Logan’s infinitely large number of “few people that I call friends” that he has known for ever.
(Seriously, if they’re going to bring him back – and the bastards are – I want a Logan story that begins “Once upon a time, there was a very old man with a genius for friendship.”)
Sam and Tabitha is a good choice for the Righteous Indignation ‘ship, but my first thought was Scott and Emma.
I second this.
I Third this.
Good news: Hasbro has been the manufacturer of Play-Doh since 1991 when they swallowed up Kenner in an early phase of the toy industry’s mega mergers. So the Master Mold Fun Factory would be hypothetically possible.
I’m going to preface this by saying that I am by no means an expert in toy licensing, but I do know just enough about it to be dangerous:
Hasbro does own Play-Doh and they do have the Marvel license, but it would depend on what all is included in that license. Hasbro can make action figures based on Marvel properties, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they can make any kind of toy. Lego, for example, also has a license that allows them to make building sets of Marvel properties, something that Hasbro was not licensed to do when it was trying to break into that territory a few years ago with its Kreo line. The possibility of a Play-Doh Sentinel factory would depend a lot on what’s covered by the specific license that Hasbro has, as well as Marvel’s willingness to sign off on the product (and Marvel has been notably reluctant to authorize any X-Men merchandise for the last few years, although that may be changing soon).
Either way, I’d personally prefer it if the Sentinel-pooping Sentinel toy was used to mix together gummy candies instead of Play-Doh.
Alexandra DeWitt, Green Lantern Kyle Rayner’s girlfriend, was killed by Major Force and shoved in Kyle’s refrigerator. She is the Women in Refrigerators trope namer.
Delivered without contempt, without “Um, actually…” Simply want it to be correct.
I kind of want a claymation adaptation of the Proteus saga now.
Only if we can alsi get an Aardman animation featuring their take on Apocalypse and Sinister
If Aadrman Animations is to be involved, I would want Apocalypse to be revealed as Feathers McGraw in a pair of Techno-Organic Trousers.
You win the interwebs for the day for THAT one! 😀
I have got to say if my husband wanted to move to Antarctica I would be worried that he’d end up in the savage land in a sexier version of his normal costume and fall in love with Magneto.
That is the best thing I’ve read all day and a valid concern.
So, on the CountZeroOR Contextualizes Comics through Anime thing – after I watched Berserk for the first time, I e-mailed Gail Simone (though I had no idea who she was at the time), through the Women in Refrigerators site, because there were no anime characters on the site, and I thought that what happened to Casca in Berserk was pretty crappy and attention should be called to that. However, by that point Gail had stopped updating the site so I never got a response.
Additionally, I appreciate your restraint at avoiding the “Right to Arm Bears” joke.
Also, my personal version of the ‘ship Righteous Indignation would be either Shirou Emiya & Rin Tohsaka (the canon ship) or Saber/Arturia Pendragon & Rin Tohsaka (the less canon ship) from Fate/Stay Night. Shirou & Saber are Righteous, and Rin is Indig- (off-screen: “Gandr Shot!”) {`+#$%{`&+#{@$`%+NO CARRIER
20 years later, it looks like Casca is going to get her marbles back. Then hopefully there’s going to be a nice revenge storyline.
I really hope so. Frankly, I’d rather Casca gets the killing blow on Griffith/Femto over Guts. She was with the Band of the Hawk far longer than Guts was.
But seriously – as far as a narrative justification for Guts to want to go as roaring rampage of revenge goes – Griffith/Femto sold the Band of the Hawk out to freaking Demons. That’s motivation enough. You don’t need what happened to Casca (which I won’t describe – the events of The Eclipse are pretty triggery for pretty much every trigger no matter what form they are depicted – TV series, Films, and the original Manga) to give Guts the motivation he needs to go on his revenge quest – and I would rather Casca have been an equal partner in his quest than in a passive catatonic state.
I was so excited about the idea and aesthetics of Berserk – and then I found out what happens to Casca.
NOPE HARD PASS
🙁
I have to admit that I have never made it past the third or fourth episode of The Prisoner.
I know many of the memes and tropes and catchphrases it created, and I’m happy to accord it’s place in history as a ground breaking piece of experimental television, but I felt much the same way about it as I know some people feel about Grant Morrison. It spent so much time being clever about itself that I felt less like a viewer of a televised drama and more like an observer of a very talented bunch of creative people being terribly arch towards each other.
I recall one popular SciFi magazine in the UK arranging a binge watch of it amongst their staff, and by the time they got to the last episode the survivors were wondering who would still be advertising on this show. Best suggestion was “The TV station, promising to show something less determinedly cryptic”.
That being said it did give rise to that truly bizarre tribute/homage episode of ReBoot
The Prisoner was also one of the pieces of common ground shared by Alex Wilder and Nico Minoru. I haven’t seen the Hulu adaptation of Runaways, so I don’t know if they kept that detail.
Yeah, Miles, you really only need to watch like one episode to get most of the tropes, then you can decide if you’re up for more.
I love Larry Hama’s Wolverine run. But because it’s a solo title you have to accept that competent adults will act stupid to make Logan look good.
My favorite part of Hama’s run is after Logan loose his adamantium.
Oh just wait til Cannonball becomes his sidekick. Sam is essentially mentally retarded in the Wolverine comic.
If I remember correctly, Sam suddenly develops a lot of daddy issues out of nowhere.
Also, I think Iceman’s depressing going away party is in an issue of Wolverine, where Logan tries to give him advice fails and Ororo has to step in.
Seriously, Hama’s run is completely bat shit crazy, and I love it, despite his odd characterization choices.
Um… maybe this is the wrong place, but could you pick a different word, please? I mean for the future – I know you can’t edit the post now.
I weighed it up before posting, but I figured it was okay because I was using it in a literal sense. The character is portrayed as having very low intelligence to the point of having trouble saying polysyllabic words.
My genuine apologies if this offended.
Thank you for the apology. That term hasn’t been used in the official nomenclature for at least 20 years, possibly longer. It’s not even a word that I’ve seen people with disabilities try to reclaim.
I will admit, I legit thought Jay was being their usual sarcastic, (rightfully) calling-Xavier(and by proxy, the patriarchy)-out-on-his-shit self when reading what ended up being the actual dialogue.
Righteous Indignation?
Xavier and Magneto?
Dr. Strange and Namor?
Reed and Victor.
Why do I feel like Strange/Namor is exactly what it would take to make either of those characters palatable to me?
1) I have an uncertain memory of The Shiva Scenario being renamed because Hindus complained. Western people tend to take Indian mythology on par with ancient Greek religion, forgetting that there’s millions of people who define their lives by that religion. Imagine if the killer robot was named Virgin Mary.
2) What if the Professor actually had Alien Hand Syndrome, and inserted scenes of himself having his unwanted hand amputated in people’s brains as a means of dealing with it. Finally he found a doctor that would safely remove the hand on advice from a psychiatrist, and the Professor has been much happier since. Which is why he also has steel hooks rather than a full bionic replacement, to which he would have ready access. I think this qualifies for either a No Prize or a very concerned look.
Re: #1 – I can imagine that, but only because I was super into Neon Genesis Evangelion for a while.
Oh yeah, it’s doable. Just maybe not in a Marvel superhero book that’s just interested in a cool sounding name.
I am also sad that Miles has not yet watched the Prisoner. Jay, you keep on him about that, dammit.
Also, given his comments about actual wolverines, I suspect he has forgotten to like Jonathan. Which is wrong.
At least, until we see what Jonathan the Unstoppable says, once the writer remembers that Rocket donated a universal translator. I’m guessing “Orphans of X” was just written before that storyline, rather than deciding this Jonathan should take a page from Jonothon Starsmore’s book and not talk for many issues because he has nothing to say.
I had a coworker explain The Prisoner to me, and it sounded pretty neat.
Maybe this indicates that I am too far down the rabbit hole of Marvel comics, but that cold open was one of the least “WHAT!!”-worthy I have heard on this show.
Related to this, and also some of the other licenses that Marvel did comics for, and which interacted with the main Marvel universe (ROM Space Knight, Transformers, Team America, Godzilla) – I’ve been hoping that the X-Men somehow interacted with the Shogun Warriors, so they could do a cold-open about Raideen, Combatra, and Dangard Ace’s interactions with the Marvel Universe.
This, and the fact that the Studio Madhouse Marvel anime series have included Iron Man, have made me really, really wish that there’d be a Marvel crossover in a future Super Robot Wars game.
There’s an all-purpose WHAT?! that would go as follows. You explain some piece of Marvel continuity from the pre-Silver Age. (Jimmy Wu, say.).
Then you finish on “And Logan never met him/her/it/them as part of his backstory.”
Egad, I hated The Prisoner. I gave up after… 6? episodes. Patrick McGoohan needs range. “I’m angry. I’m seething. I’m angry. I’m seething. I’m angry.” And I care about this unlikeable character why, again? The mystery never felt like it was going anywhere, just a story engine that completely failed to grab me. I’m actually surprised to learn it was a 10 episode limited series. I might have finished it if I’d known. As it was, I just felt like I was staring down the barrel of season after season of suffering just to get a punch on my nerd card, and I didn’t want it badly enough to keep slogging through it.
Two things you may want to keep in mind regarding the British approach to television are, first, there are licenses for which citizens pay to receive radio and television broadcasts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_United_Kingdom
Second, series were and are created by significantly fewer people when compared to American television series.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BritishBrevity
Ok, so, lots of things to say on this one, and one thing that is irrellevent, but nice.
First off, Righteous Indignation is totally Scott and Emma. He’s Righteous, she’s Indignation. That might just be because I recently read Whedon’s run, though.
Next, rollerblades for offroad travel. I would like to point you at the Monster Rancher anime for prime insanity, and maximum off-road rollerblading. Seriously, just youtube “Monster Rancher Rollerblades.”
Related to above, a fun college anecdote:
A buddy of mine got really into the idea of optimizing his life. Like, he was always the guy with the crazy builds rolling far too many dice in Shadowrun, so optimizing has always been His Thing, and no one really thought the beginning of the process was that wierd. He started rollerblading, partly for exercise, partly to speed up his travel times in the most portable way. Makes sense. Then he went about 3 months wearing the rollerblades everywhere, and single-handedly lead to a new rule banning rollerblades from being worn indoors. Eventually we talked some sense into him, and discovered that he now had trouble walking, because he had been rollerblading as his primary locomotion so long some of his helper muscles atrophied. He now walks fine, and still resents the school’s ban on rollerblades indoors, but has acknowledged that maybe he went a little too far with it. Especially after his ankles got so weak.
Lastly, for Miles: James from my local TFAW recently got promoted to Corporate Something, and I was hoping you could pass on a message from a kid who spent over twenty years growing up in that shop from way back when it was Pegasus. Tell him thanks for everything. Thanks for making sure that Magic nights there were more interesting than Always Standard, thanks especially for Vintage Pauper Block Constructed, and thanks for putting up with the loud kid who went from getting Sonic the Hedgehog on his dad’s shelf to a slightly less loud adult who still gets his christmas presents from an aunt who asks James for his recommendations every year. Christmas won’t be the same without him, and I have no idea what she’ll do without him.
Passed along!
I really wanted to use rollerblades that way when I was in junior high. It worked on TV, after all – even before Monster Rancher! Real life, well…
Who wouldn’t at least briefly desire to rollerblade everywhere after being exposed to the movie Hackers and the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive video game Skitchin’?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skitchin%27
I’m a wee bit younger than Miles, and was never much of a roller-anything kid, but now I’m gonna go find a copy of Skitchin’ and be sad that none of my Genesis friends had it.
I still haven’t seen Hackers. Or The Prisoner.
Although my dad did think he bought The Prisoner on DVD once, but it turned out he only bought a single episode of it. I didn’t know they did that anymore.
Thank you!
In defense of the opinion some people might see Wolverine as a greater mentor to/guardian of Kitty Pryde, from 2008 to 2010 Marvel did publish an on-going titled Wolverine: First Class. I only had the 1st issue, but there were 21 issues of Logan and Kitty. The cover to the 6th issue looks intriguing.
I think it’s also that Logan and Kitty’s relationship is Logan and Kitty’s mentor-mentee relationship.
While with Jubilee, ithe mentor-mentee relationship exists because of the previous Logan-Kitty mentor-mentee relationship. It’s the point at which it ceases to be a particular detail about two characters and instead becomes a defining motif of Logan’s character. This involves a certain downgrading of the other character as “the teenage girl mentee,” always secondary to Logan as the main character in a way that Kitty Pryde was not. (This becomes still more extreme with Armor.)
Note that one can actually look at Kitty’s mentor-mentee relationship with Logan as being part of a coming-of-age story in which she is the main character and Logan is the secondary character. I sense some kind of reading coming on in which it really matters that Kitty has been allowed to grow up in a normal way (and have recognizably normal adult romantic relationships) — while Jubilee becoming an adult has been associated with depowering, acquiring a random baby in a way that does not involve a relationship, and becoming a vampire. Although she did get to have charming adventures with Patsy Walker.
There’s a lot of the character’s publication history I don’t know, but to me Kitty seems like she was pushed in some odd ways to be older. I haven’t read Mekanix, and perhaps it smooths things out before her appearance in Astonishing X-Men, but I liked the idea that she was going to be allowed to retire from super heroism and finish a full college curriculum after spreading Colossus’ ashes. Largely because it could occur off-panel and details of her getting a little more mature could be filled in later. It hadn’t been that long after “the six month gap” for X-books when Colossus sacrificed himself for the Legacy Virus cure.
I see Jubilee’s vampirism as an attempt to keep her forever young. It does, however, have interesting consequences. In Christina Strain’s Generation X, Shogo was just freaked out by seeing her feeding from Chamber. She’s also a nearly-indestructable and at times animalistic guardian for her students, which I would argue is further reason we don’t need Logan back at the Xavier Institute, currently.
Out of curiosity, how does feeding on someone who doesn’t seem to have a working physiology (having blown out his upper torso including his heart) actually work?
Jubilee doesn’t feed on Jonothon’s blood. She feeds on the excess o’s in his name. It makes his name enough like the word “blood,” with its double-o, that magickally it’s the same, because of the power of names.
But only if you spell “magick” with a k. That’s very important.
This is exactly the sort of quality geekery I come here for! 🙂
Well, Miles did suggest once that Peter Corbeau is always with us because he’s actually inside our bodies via tiny machines. Perhaps he is assisting Chamber with his significantly lacking cardiopulmonary system.
But suppose Jubilee accidentally drank some of the Corbeau-mites in the process! I doubt a vampires system could cope with that much awesomeness.
But most vampires are less awesome than Jubilee.
Generation X also had Jubilee make a blood smoothie. Which really makes her vampiric transformation entirely worth it, for that scene alone.
Issue list for next episode?
Having Mastodon and Sabertooth on a team just makes me think of Power Rangers.
Karl Lykos is the Pink Ranger, but with a mutant energy-fueled transformation into the pterodactyl zord.
Ok, so that’s three of the original rangers, anyone have a triceratops? I know TMNT had one, at least in the old cartoon. Is there a T-Rex?
Droog, former pet of the Gremlin, was a triceratops-based genetically engineered being that the Gremlin created to be his friend (“Droog” meaning “friend” in Russian). He also talked in rhyme, which is cute.
And Devil Dinosaur would be a T-Rex (Or reasonable approximation thereof) perhaps?
Now, do we get Fin Fang Foom or White Tiger to be the 6th ranger?
Re: Antarctica: Don’t forget Belasco! He hung out in the Savage Land, too!
So games like Shadowrun, Demons Crest, Harvest Moon, Actraiser, Ogre Battle, Breath of Fire, Evo, Mystical Ninja, the Super Star Wars games, XMen Mutant Apocalypse, several great Disney platformers, Lost Vikings, Prince of Persia or Battletoads Battlemaniacs don’t make the list, but TWO Mortal Kombat do, despite being highly overrated gimmicky and terrible fighters and being gimped on the SNES compared to their arcade counterparts?! Also, what’s with the lack of SHMUPs?