Listen, Bud, he's got radioactive blood!

 In A Zen Master in Oz and The Martian Invasion of Oz we meet Captain Pug, who explores the multiverse from the helm of his reality hopping steam ship, The Laughing Tortoise.
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Another hero has been in the news lately on account of doing his own leaping from one reality to the next.

Our hero!

The internet has been whipped its collective self into a tizzy over the news that Spiderman will be appearing in the superhero blockbusters produced by Marvel/Disney. Prior to the announcement this week by Sony Pictures and Marvel that the Web Head will be hanging out with Captain America and the Black Widow on screen, such a prospect was a pipe dream for fans of the Marvel comic books and films.
The path towards this announcement is pretty twisty (as I supposed any journey from one universe to another should be). It starts in about 1984, when legendary low-budget film maker Roger Corman was able to secure the film rights for Spiderman from Marvel Comics. Unable to get his web slinger flick off the ground, Corman let the rights to the property lapse.

Corman says "hi".

In 1985, mid-budget studio Cannon Films, headed up by shlock peddling Israeli cousins Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus (if those are not the names for a couple of super villians, what is?), secured the rights to Spiderman, with the understanding that if a film did not appear by 1990, the rights would revert back to Marvel.

Golan/Globus have some time shares they want to sell you.

The cousins did not have a clue about the character and thought they were going to make a horror film. So, they hired legendary horror director Tobe Hooper (Texas Chainsaw Massacre1-2 and Poltergeist to name a few). Hiring Hooper seems to be about the only good idea Cannon Films managed to have. Golan/Globus commissioned a script in which Peter Parker gets the ability to transform into an eight-armed spider mutant and spends the film fighting an army of other animal themed mutant monsters. 


Freaked out by what was about to happen to his most famous creation on the big screen, Stan Lee stepped in and forced a new script to be commissioned that would more faithfully adapt the comic book character. Golan/Globus had a new script that now featured a much more familiar Peter Parker in college gaining his powers in the same accident that gives Doctor Octopus his. While this sounds like it might be on the right track, the fact that low-rent action hack Joe Zito was hired on as director is evidence that this would have been a pretty bad movie.

This is the kind of magic Joe Zito creates!

That bullet was dodged by all Spiderman fans when the budget for the proposed Zito-helmed flick was cut significantly due to Cannon losing a fortune on the failures of Superman IV and Masters of the Universe (a movie that we here at the Emerald City Zen Center have a great deal of undue affection for). This caused Zito to leave the project, making room for the king of modern day low-budget crap cinema, Albert Pyun.

This is Pyun's really terrible Captain America. What atrocity would he have inflicted on Spidey?

Before what could have been the worst superhero movie ever could be made, Cannon went bankrupt I 1989 and Golan/Globus split up. As part of the split, the company that bought Cannon gave Golan 21st Century Film Corporation and the movie rights to Spider-Man and Captain America.


Wanting to make good on this really excellent severance, Golan continued his efforts to get a Spider-Man picture made. In 1990 he managed to bring together up and coming independent film studio Carolco Pictures and big Hollywood studio Columbia  Pictures for a big budget adaptation of the comics, to be written and directed by James Cameron, that would have featured some seriously PG-13 language and a steamy sex scene between Peter Parker and Mary Jane. Carolco was so jazzed about the proposed film that in 1992 they paid Marvel to extend Golan's film rights for Spider-Man character up to 1996.

James Cameron also knows where Jesus is buried. For real!

It looked like smooth sailing, but everything was derailed in the courts. As part of his contract, Cameron had the right to determine who received credit on his movie and he did not want Golan's name on it. In retaliation, Golan sued Carolco and Columbia. 20th Century Fox got into the game by suing Carolco and Columbia for using Cameron, because they believed he had an exclusive agreement with them. 21st Century Films and Carolco went bankrupt. MGM bought the assets of 21st Century Films and sued Viacom (who had bought Carolco's assets) and Marvel. Needless to say, no movie got made and in 1998 the courts gave the film rights to Spiderman back to Marvel.


In 1999, Marvel sold the film rights to Spiderman to Columbia, now owned by Sony. MGM intervened and threatened legal action, since it still considered itself the legal owner to the film rights. MGM and Sony then cut a deal in which Sony would give up its attempts to make its own James Bond film series and MGM would lay off its Spider-Man claims.

Admit it, you totally thought this was kind of hot when you first saw it.

With the legal wrangling out of the way, Sony pushed forward with its movies and finally, in 2002 (18 years after this saga began) Sam Raimi's pretty much excellent Spider-Man was released to huge box office returns. This was followed by Raimi's awesome Spider-Man II (2004) and the not-really-all-that great-at-all, but not as bad as some people make out, Spider-Man III (2007).

Yeah, the Green Goblin in these movies does look pretty goofy.

Meanwhile, Marvel set up its own film studio and got out of the business of licensing its characters to other studios. The first film it released, Iron Man (2008), was way better than anyone could have anticipated and laid the ground work for a series of faithful adaptions of Marvel characters to the screen, all of which occurring in the same shared universe, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Each film put out by Marvel has been pretty damned good, except for Iron Man II, which is really problematic.

They turned this into cinematic gold, what can they do with Peter Parker?

Marvel was striking gold for itself with films about Thor, Captain America, Iron Man and The Hulk, Sony was fumbling the ball pretty badly. In 2010, the cancelled Sam Raimi's proposed Spider-Man IV and announced that they were going to reboot the franchise with the aim of creating an expansive universe based around Spider-Man and his supporting cast, with spinoffs etc. coming to a theatre near you in order to emulate the MCU.

Are they about to kiss? Now, that would be an interesting movie!

The result of this was 2012's thoroughly forgettable The Amazing Spider-Man, perhaps only notable for its excellent casting. While not as successful as the previous Raimi films, Sony remained optimistic and brought back director Marc Webb to make the universally panned The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and announced plans for a spinoff film starring the Spider-Man villains The Sinister Six. Unfortunately for Sony, the second Amazing Spider-Man film did not generate the money anticipated, throwing all of the studio's Spider-Man Cinematic Universe plans into chaos.

This is why you get to watch a movie with Spider-Man joining The Avengers!

Meawhile, Sony was producing another movie titled The Interview (2014), starring James Franco (who played Harry Osborn in the Raimi Spider-Man movies) and Seth Rogen, who was also the co-director and writer. The premise of the film is that two goofball American journalist get enlisted by the CIA to kill North Korean despot Kim Jung-un. When North Korea's Supreme Leader heard about the movie, he lost his shit. He saw the fact that a Japanese company funding an American film about his assassination as an act of war. In retaliation he had hackers break into Sony Pictures' computers and leak all sorts of information about the goings on of the studio onto the internet. In retaliation for an attack on an American film studio, The American government used its own hackers to shut down access to the internet in all of North Korea.

"Tell everyone on Ain't It Cool News that Set Rogen is so gay!"

What was revealed was that Sony Pictures was completely in panic mode over the less than stellar performance of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and were now discussing bringing back Sam Raimi to save the franchise with a new trilogy. It was also revealed that the studio heads had been in talks with Marvel/Disney (who had purchased Marvel Comics) to bring Spider-Man into the highly coveted MCU family of films. But, negotiations were stopped by Sony Pictures heads that did not want cede any creative control to Marvel.


When the heads of the Sony Corporation in Japan got word of this, they were plenty pissed. Why would a studio haemorrhaging money not want to partner up with the undisputed kinds of making superhero movies?  The email leaks were in December 2014 and the announcement that Sony and Marvel/Disney were now going to partner up to make Spider-Man's cinematic outings came in early February 2015, shortly after some serious shake ups at Sony Pictures. Seems like somebody came from Japan and made heads role in Hollywood.


The plan is now for Spider-Man to appear in Marvel/Disney produced films set in the MCU and for Sony to make Spider-Man solo films set in the MCU. It also means that all of the continuity that Sony was building up for its proposed Spider-Man Cinematic Universe will be scrapped, with the strange caveat that The Sinister Six movie is still in the pipeline, only to be delayed.


So, we are going to get new directors and new actors but Spider-Man will still be Spider-Man. It's a heck of a long way to go to get form one universe to the other, but at least he made it all in one piece. We hope.

Let's talk politics - Libertarianism and perpetual adolesences.

In The Martian Invasion of Oz, the Parliament of Oz's committee on lunches is stuck in a stalemate over whether to serve parliament's lunches buffet or family style. The reason for this is the philosophical disdain Prince Rand of Pauland has for family style dining. The Prince comes from a nation of small, anthropomorphic, naked mole rat people that live according to a Libertarian philosophy that dictates doing anything for anyone else demeans the person having the thing done for them and steals from the person doing that thing, since it should not be anyone's responsibility to do anything for anyone else. Of course, the other members of the committee, being right-thinking Ozites, are opposed to Prince Rand's selfish world view.

Prince Rand of Pauland?

The King of Pauland!

Prince Rand is modelled after the American senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. Senator Paul is the son of former congressman Ron Paul of Texas and to understand the son you first need to understand the old man.

Ayn Rand - Advocate for open marriages and rape

Ron Paul was a doctor in Texas seriously enamoured with the writings of Ayn Rand, who espoused her philosophy of Objectivism through her work, most famously in the novels Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. Objectivism basically states that there is nothing more important than the individual and that the purpose of life was to pursue your own individual happiness and any systems that impede achieving this happiness are immoral, this includes any political systems that focus on the collective of whole of humanity, such as socialism, communism or any kind of political restraint or oversight. Rand and her philosophy venerate unfettered capitalism as the ultimate system to allow people to achieve their individual greatness. Any closer look at this belief system reveals that it is codified selfishness but it appeals to a lot of people.



Rand's philosophy is especially appealing to adolescent boys who feel that they are being held back by their schools, parents, society etc. from being really bitching and awesome. If only everyone would just get off their backs, they'd show everyone how amazing they are! One day, when they get out of their folks' house, you'll see.


Luckily, most of us grow out of this state of mind. We realize that we need the rest of society to help us achieve happiness and that a lot of the things that we were getting so pissed off about were really there to help us develop into decent human beings and not sociopathic jerks. In other words, we grow up.

Not all of us do though. Some people never leave that perpetually agitated and selfish adolescent state of mind. One of these poor developmentally arrested folks was comic book legend Steve Ditko (co-creator of Spiderman), who created the characters The Question and Mr A to embody Objectivists philosophy in the superhero world. It's no surprise that a person who spends their life writing about men who buck the limiting laws of society to implement justice at a level governments can not would be drawn to Objectivism. Mr Ditko never got over his love affair with Ayn Rand's thinking, but thankfully the comics industry did. In the 1980s, DC Comics transformed The Question's violent Objectivism to a more mystical Zen-influenced outlook.

Mr A. - Ron Paul's secret identity.

Ron Paul is another person stuck in perpetual adolescent angst and holds tightly on to Rand's wish fulfilment narrative. When Richard Nixon ended the dollars' direct association with gold, mild mannered obstetrician Ron Paul decided he was the one who had fight a gallant crusade to defend holy Capitalism from destruction. After a couple of defeats, he entered the House of Representatives in 1976. From 1976-1985, Paul became closely associated with fellow Rand devotees, the billionaire capitalists Koch Brothers and their organization Citizens for a Sound Economy, which pretty much created the whole anti-Obama, pro-angry white man Tea Party movement.

The Koch Brothers - Beware!

In 1985, Ron Paul lost his bid for a senate seat. Not one to sit on his laurels, he began publishing his Objectivist/Libertarian newsletters, The Ron Paul Report and Ron Paul Survival Report, through which numerous homophobic and racist articles were printed. In 1988 Dr Paul joined the Libertarian Party and for President, ostensibly to promote his Objectivists ideals on a bigger stage. In 1992 he opted to stay out of the Presidential elections and instead through his support behind former Nixon speech writer/TV personality/Holocaust denier Pat Buchanan's failed effort to challenge George Bush the Elder in the Republican primaries.


Paul returned to the House of Representatives in 1997 as a Republican and served until stepping down from office in 2013. In 2008, he decided to have another go at the White House and this time he hit pay dirt. The guy became an internet sensation with angry white guys obsessed with 9/11 conspiracies and pot heads who ignored all of the horrible things he wanted to do, like end social security etc, because he would end The War on Drugs. He became a kind of icon to the stoned and paranoid set and gave GOP frontrunner John McCain quite a lot of grief and exposed the alleged war hero as the weak national candidate he really was, setting up Obama for his victory in the general election.


Having planted the seeds of Rand inspired political selfishness, Paul made another bid for president in 2012.  Again, he made life miserable for another weak Republican front-runner, this time the hapless Mitt Romney. Of course, he loss and Romney wobbled into the general election to be clobbered by Obama. But the damage has been done. The senior Paul left the national political scene with the stage set for a new generation of Objectivist demagogue in the form of his son, Randall "Rand" Paul.

Social Security, Mocial Mecurity, he will legalize weeeeeeeeeed!!!!!

The younger Paul was raised in his father's cauldron of White privilege, greed, self-aggrandizement and moral self-righteousness. A doctor like his old man, Rand Paul became popular with his father's followers while giving speeches on the campaign trail in 2008. He was embraced and in turn embraced the Koch Brothers' Tea Party madness and was elected as a Senator for Kentucky in 2010.


Combining his father's Objectivist influenced philosophy with the more socially conservative mindset of the Tea Party base, Rand Paul has become a hot item in Republican circles. He is intent on ending all restrictions on Capitalism; such as the EPA, FDA, gun control and basically any oversights on how business is conducted in the United States of America. At the same time, being the politically astute heir to his father's throne, his Objectivism ends when it comes to the government intervening in a woman's reproductive rights and supports legislation to outlaw abortions. Likewise, the right of an individual to achieve happiness ends when it comes to Gay people marrying. Rand Paul is opposed to legalizing Gay Marriage, because you know, its icky or something.

With the 2016 presidential elections looming, Rand Paul is being spoken about as a serious contender for the Republican nomination. He is sure to appeal to a lot of those angry white guys worked up over conspiracies about 9/11 and false flag operations at school shootings while they listen to Rush and smoke bowls full of low grade weed bought off of their neighbor's stepson. I just hope the rest of the nation does not get sucked into his con.