So, a woman in our neighborhood recently became the legal guardian of her six-year-old grandson. Unfortunately, she doesn’t have much money. Christmas was looking bleak.
In response, folks in our neighborhood are pitching in with some wrapped gifts for the little guy for Christmas. I took this as an opportunity to put the young man on the right path and set out to get him some super heroic stocking stuffers.
When I was a kid my heroes were Spider-Man and Captain America.
Due to the Spider-Man and Avengers movies, Target was full of action figures and toys of both characters. Unfortunately, every Captain America figure I found also came with…a gun. (Insert sad horn noise here)
Listen…when I was a kid I played with G.I. Joes that carried machine guns and bazookas. And even though they shot laser beams in the cartoons…they were guns.
Hell, I had toy guns that made real gun noises.
I also realize that the recent movie depiction of Cap with a gun is more realistic than the Mark Gruenwald “Cap never uses a gun – and he didn’t even use one in WWII!” version of the character with which I grew up.
Ed Brubaker, my favorite Captain America writer, had Cap and sidekick Bucky use guns not just during WWII but in the modern era.
I get all that.
But after the events of the last week…I just couldn’t give this six-year-old kid a Red, White and Blue super hero who was packing a gun. I couldn’t.
Luckily, the fine fellows at Acme Comics had my back.
There I was able to find this Marvel MiniMates version of Cap which comes with a shield, but no gun.
Thanks, guys.
I’m sure there are versions of Cap available in large chain stores that don’t have guns…just couldn’t find any tonight. Which bothered me more than it would have two weeks ago.
Here’s some of the other loot I picked up for the future Marvel maniac:
Good on you, and on your neighborhood.
G.I. Joes were weird like that – looking at the figures now, I realize how super-realistic a lot of the weapons were. They modeled those little chunks of solid-colored plastic on real guns… and yet, in the cartoon, they shot lasers.
Ironically, the first American kid’s cartoon I recall showing real gunfire was Batman: The Animated Series… a show that made Batman’s refusal to use and outright disdain for guns a central part of several stories. I think that was the better approach, honestly – depicting guns as something only villains use.
As for Cap using a gun… yeah, I get how realistically that makes sense for a WWII-era super-soldier, but I still prefer him punching Nazis in the face rather than shooting them, much as i prefer the writers that treat Cap as “What America Should Be” rather than “What America Is.”
Reblogged this on Collecty.net.
G.I. Joe is one of those cartoons from our childhood that really doesn’t hold up. The glossing over of war violence by rarely showing anyone hurt and never (as far as I can remember) showing anyone killed in battle — that’s something that jumps out at you as an adult when you see so much violence driving the thing.
I’d be interested to hear how parents are dealing with issues like these now, in the wake of Newtown — if it’s making anybody re-think that toy gun, that action figure with the M-16.
You know, I swore that Duke died in the original G.I. Joe movie, but I just looked that up on Wikipedia: “Duke’s original fate in the movie was to die at the hands of Serpentor. However, due to fan backlash regarding the death of Optimus Prime in The Transformers: The Movie, Hasbro asked for a re-edit, so Duke would merely fall into a coma following Serpentor’s venomous attack, and a later edit added dialogue near the end of the movie, indicating Duke recovers from his injuries.”
But at the time, and FOR 20 YEARS, I thought he just died. It was one of my first “Oh, people can die” moments. You did it, Hasbro. Gold star.