Commenter Dirk mentioned on Twitter that he’s always wanted a Disco Dazzler movie, which is really all the excuse I need to post a link to what Meredith Woerner accurately describes as “the insane Dazzler script starring Cher and Robin Williams.” It is awesome great, by which I means it sounds like a terrible trainwreck with hilarious possibilities:
Peter finds himself tumbling through sub-space, falling down a seemingly endless tunnel-like vortex. He doesn’t know what’s going on or where he’s going, but he figures that he’d be better off facing this as Spider-Man. He doffs his outer clothes, pulls on his mask and kathump! Suddenly lands back in reality. He appears to be in Manhattan, and yet, something isn’t right about it. Before he has time to ponder, though, the sounds of battle catch his attention. Not far away he sees the Avengers and Disco Dazzler fighting weirdly-garbed horsemen mounted on very weird lizard-like steeds! The Avengers and the Dazzler appear to be protecting a guy in a regular business suit, Cheetham, who’s standing nearby, looking rather uncomfortable in his typical Rodney Dangerfield way.
Spider-Man enters the fray, and quickly, the mounted soldiers are put to rout. The heroes then gather around Cheetham and begin asking a dozen questions at once.
Cheetham thanks them for their kind intervention and assures them that they’re in no danger of being sued. Cheetham speaks in a strange sort of legalese. “Where are we?” Spider-Man asks. “Manhattan,” Cheetham replies. Actually, he explains, they’re between Upper Hatten and Lower Hatten…in the Demilitarized Zone, where all the fighting goes on. He thinks it was once called Central Park. In response to other questions, Cheetham explains, in his somewhat obfuscatory manner, that this is the future, that all history officially ended with the coming of the Great Disaster. He’s not to sure what that was, since no one kept a history of it. He thinks it had something to do with casino gambling and frozen yogurt.
The pitch raises a larger point that I think is valuable, though. The idea with Marvel’s expanding lattice of movies is that by the time we get to The Avengers, mass audiences will be well-acquainted with all the characters and their backstories. I think the considerable risk is that folks will get burned out on origin stories and wonder why they should go see yet another superhero movie, even though it’s when we start seeing superheroes working together that interesting stuff starts to happen and a vastly greater diversity of storylines come into play.
Also, I really want an apocalyptic movie about how humanity’s downfall was caused by casino gambling and frozen yogurt. That’s some Canticle for Leibowitz stuff, especially in the details.