It’s Tuesday, so it’s blog time. I’d like to get a little plug out of the way first. I started this blog because I enjoy writing, I enjoy movies, and I wanted to do something a little more different than just an average movie review blog, so I picked comic books and superheroes as a specific genre that’s become a lot more popular, yet doesn’t seem to garner as much attention from movie bloggers from what I can tell. As someone who’s never really blogged before, or even read that many movie reviews before, I kinda dove headfirst into the blogging community to see what else is out there, and to make my name known in the process. One of the things I found is a community of movie reviewers called the LAMB, which stands for Large Association of Movie Blogs. It’s a really great community for movie blogs with a ton of members and I will hopefully soon be one of them. So if you’re interested in reading or writing movie blogs, click the link on my sidebar which I did tweak a little bit to fit this site better and check them out. I’ll be doing my first review inspired by one of their features next week. They are featuring Sam Raimi the director, so I’ll be watching his first superhero movie on my list, Darkman, since I’d prefer to watch his Spiderman movies a bit closer to the release of the new Spiderman movie.

Another brief update of an idea that I had recently for another feature for this blog. Starting this Saturday I’ll be running a new weekly series of reviews of YouTube short fims featuring superheroes. Most of them will be parodies since that’s the easiest to find, but I will try to cover as wide a range of videos as I can. It’s called Superhero Shorts, and I’m pretty excited by it. I’m a big YouTube fan and love parodies, and as far as I know, there’s not really a big market of people reviewing YouTube shorts. To add a little something extra, I thought it would be great to add interviews with the creators, so I started trying to get a hold of them. Things started out pretty positively with a couple initial responses, but since then I haven’t had any full replies yet. Time will tell if that part works out before Saturday or not. If you know of any good superhero shorts on YouTube, especially any serious ones, leave a comment and let me know about them.

So this month, I was initially going to watch movies led by female superheroes. But when there weren’t enough of them to last more than two weeks, I decided to watch kid-friendly movies instead. February had a lot of R rated and inappropriate movies for Jena and I wanted to be able to include her a little bit more in these reviews, even if it’s only a couple sentences. I’m halfway through the month already and it’s been a fun ride. I watched the 60’s Batman movie for the first time and had a blast, the review will be up sometime next week. Watching the Turtles movie brought back a lot of memories, and I was glad I was able to share that with my daughter too. There can never be enough Turtle Power in the world.

Another blog that I follow is called Reel Girl, which focuses on gender inequalities in everyday life. Like the fact that there are dozens of cereals for kids, but not a single female mascot among them. And many other things along those lines. Superheroes are typically marketed towards boys, and yet my daughter loves Batman just as much as any 5 year old boy out there. So why is it that if she wants a superhero toy that feels like it’s for her, her choices are Wonder Woman wearing basically a bikini or a short skirt, or Harley Quinn, who’s pretty much a villain. Things are slowly starting to change, like the fact that in Tangled, Rapunzel was a strong female lead, and Brave is coming out soon.

I’ve said before that I wanted to include my daughter in watching more movies this month, and I’ve talked about violence in superhero movies before, but one thing I haven’t really realized before now, is that there is no such thing as a G rated superhero movie. The lowest rating for any superhero movie is PG, even for movies that are aimed towards younger kids like Bolt or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. But aside from that, it seems that more and more movies that are rated PG-13 are still marketed towards younger kids. I know I didn’t really have any reservations about watching Captain America with my daughter even though it was rated PG-13, and yet how many kids meals had Captain America toys inside them? I mean, there’s even lego minifigs featuring DC heroes including Harley Quinn, and there’s a toy line and cartoon featuring Marvel’s heroes that are aimed directly towards young kids called Superhero Squad with well known Marvel heroes, drawn much more childlike and cartoonish. Heck, there’s even one of the Punisher which is definitely not a kid-friendly hero.

I feel like I’ve kinda lost direction here in today’s blog, I didn’t have a real topic in mind so I went a bit more stream of consciousness. If you have a topic about Superheroes you’d like me to discuss in a future blog, be sure to leave a comment and tell me about it. And since I’m doing things so differently today, I feel like putting a poll up with today’s post. What’s your favorite kid-friendly movie? Thursday finishes up the Turtles trilogy, and next week will be Darkman and Batman: The Movie though I’m not sure which order yet. Until next time, this has been Bubbawheat for Flights, Tights, and Movie Nights.