Helium Party Balloons

We hear a lot from the villain’s point of view these days, it seems. Megamind, for instance, is another misunderstood supervillain battling a strong but not-so-bright superhero. Before that we had Dr. Horrible (and the strangely similar picture book Baron von Baddie and the Ice Ray Incident). And before that, one of my favorite supervillain point-of-view books: Soon I Will be Invincible.

There’s a new evil mastermind on the block.

Archvillain by Barry Lyga is the first book in a new series for middle-grade kids, and while it (like many of the others) relies on a lot of comic book superhero tropes, it’s still a fun read and does a pretty good job on the origin story of an archvillain.

Kyle Camden has a big secret. He was the only resident of Bouring (“The U Makes It Exciting!”) who was present when the strange plasma curtain fell on the middle school football field. He’s the only one who knows that Mike, the amnesiac kid who was found wandering around the field later, isn’t from anywhere around here. And when Mike suddenly exhibits superpowers, gets the nickname “Mighty Mike” and becomes the darling of the town — including his best friend Mairi — Kyle wants to tell everyone the truth.

Of course, he can’t — because the reason he was out on the football field was to set up a big prank.

Kyle’s other secret, though, is that the same plasma energies that brought Mike to earth also gave Kyle some interesting abilities. He doesn’t have all of Mighty Mike’s powers, but he can fly, he has speed and strength and his already keen intellect got a bit of a boost.

In order to expose Mighty Mike for the alien fraud that he is, Kyle makes himself into the Azure Avenger (wearing a cape because everyone knows that capes are ridiculous and Kyle would never be seen in one) and concocts a clever plan. Unfortunately, things go wrong. The town of Bouring thinks Kyle is the bad guy. Worse yet, they start calling him the Blue Freak.

What sets Archvillain apart is that—at least in this first book — Kyle never thinks of himself as the bad guy. He doesn’t get his powers and think, hey, I could become a supervillain. The whole time, he thinks he’s doing something that needs to be done—and it’s only because people can’t see things from his perspective that they think he’s some criminal mastermind. There are some scenes that are like a comedy of errors, particularly the climactic battle towards the end of the book.

Like I said, the book borrows a lot from other sources—Mighty Mike is certainly an analog of Superman; Kyle himself might be a bit like Lex Luthor, but with powers. And, in true Stan Lee fashion, nearly everyone in Bouring has a double-M name: Mairi MacTaggert, Maxwell Monroe, Melissa Masterson.

Archvillain is intended for around ages 10-13, and I think kids who are into superheroes would probably get a kick out of it, and if you’re trying to encourage a comic-book reader to also read some more prose, this might be a good place to start. Lyga is certainly playing to the geek crowd: Kyle is not only the smartest kid in school but—until the arrival of Mighty Mike—was also the most popular. I will say that it’s easy to see what’s going to happen in some places long before you get there, and older teens may find it a bit too predictable. It’s not a very long book, either.

But for the right audience, I think Archvillain sets up the series nicely and it’ll be fun to see where Lyga takes Kyle and Mighty Mike next.

Wired: A misunderstood middle-schooler with a boosted intellect = lots of fun hearing from the villain’s point of view.

Tired: The book clearly states that his costume has a mask to cover his face. Why couldn’t they get the cover art right?

Disclosure: GeekDad received a review copy of the book.

Sometimes it can be hard to see the messages a movie teaches, especially if they’re unintentional. The best way to see a movie’s messages, the bad ones in particular, is to be a parent watching the movie with your kids. Suddenly you find yourself talking to your kids after you leave the theater or after the video finishes playing at home, just to see if they picked up on the bad messages. Then, if they did, you can try to do some damage control.

Quality doesn’t generally come into play when it comes to messages: There are plenty of bad movies whose messages are perfectly benign, and plenty of good movies that have messages you definitely wouldn’t want your kids to take to heart. It is this latter category with which this list is concerned. Here then is a countdown of the top 10 bad messages in good (and at least somewhat geeky) movies:

Image copyright © The Walt Disney Co.

10. If you’re not born with special abilities, you’re never going to be any good at some things, no matter how hard you try (from the Harry Potter movies, and, of course, books). In the world of Harry Potter, there are those who are born with magical abilities, and those who aren’t. There’s even a word, “squib,” for people born to wizarding families who can’t do magic. It’s made very clear in the stories that, if you’re unlucky enough to be born without magical talent, you’re never going to amount to anything in that world and might as well not try.

9. No matter how appallingly bad conditions on Earth get, so long as there is one tiny plant on the planet, it can still be restored to its former beauty and sustainability (from WALL-E). In WALL-E, Earth is depicted as essentially one big desolate, deteriorated waste dump. Then WALL-E finds one tiny little green plant, and that is evidently enough to constitute proof that the planet can be reclaimed. That’s one small plant in the midst of millions of square miles of garbage and lifeless expanse. It kind of flies in the face of the desired message behind the film to imply that, no matter how badly we screw things up, one dinky little leafy green thing will constitute hope for all of humanity.

8. Technology is fundamentally evil (from lots of movies, including the The Lord of the Rings trilogy). This message comes pretty much unchanged from the books, but it’s much easier to see it in the movies. You see the orcs destroying trees, building fires and operating machinery both to produce more orcs and to assist them in combat. By contrast, the various forces of good rely on intellect, magic, swordsmanship, archery and a fair helping of luck. Can there be a doubt about the message there?

Image copyright © CBS Studios, Inc.

7. Arrogance, brash self-confidence and having had a heroic father are much more indicative of a competent leader than are experience and knowledge (from the 2009 Star Trek movie). Jim Kirk rises from a cadet with a disciplinary hearing hanging over his head to captain of the Enterprise in a matter of days, maybe even hours. This is due partly to his making an astonishingly unlikely connection between the report on the Romulan miner ship and what he remembers reading about the encounter when his father died. But it’s mostly due to Captain Pike’s experience working with Kirk’s father and the fact that Kirk acts like an arrogant jackass that he gets bumped up to First Officer so rapidly. Never mind the fact there have to be dozens, if not hundreds, of far more experienced officers (even if they’re not on the Enterprise) who would be better-suited to the captain’s chair than the alternate Kirk as presented in the film. So, even if Kirk did manage to become the ship’s captain towards the end of that adventure, how could he hope to keep the job (other than, of course, that it’s his destiny)?

6. Kissing sleeping women you don’t know will wake them up and lead to them falling in love with you (from Sleeping Beauty and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs). We don’t really need to explain this one further than that, do we? I mean, we all know the stories.

Image copyright © The Walt Disney Co.

5. If you’re a really good person, but in a lousy situation, simply wait around and eventually good things will just happen to you (from Cinderella). Cinderella ends up living happily ever after, but not because of anything she did. If the Fairy Godmother (a deus ex machina if ever there was one) hadn’t appeared, it’s a sure thing Cinderella wouldn’t have done anything on her own to get out of the house. Yes, her stepmother and stepsisters treated her terribly, and one could argue that she deserves a Fairy Godmother. But — stop me if you’ve heard this before — life isn’t fair, so why should she get something just because karma says she deserves it?

4. Unconventional creative play is very, very wrong (from Toy Story). Sid, the kid next door, is portrayed as basically evil. The movie makes him out this way because he pulls toys apart and reassembles them in strange ways, and likes to blow things up. In other words, he’s a geek. If the toys weren’t alive — and Sid can surely be forgiven for not realizing that they were — his behavior would be perhaps a little extreme, but not in any way wrong, especially for a kid his age.

3. Even tough women who aren’t afraid to fight aren’t as important as the men they fight alongside (from the Star Wars movies). – Princess Leia, despite being very comfortable giving orders and shooting at stormtroopers, always hands off the really important jobs to men. Luke tells her that she’s his sister and Darth Vader is their father, and by the way he’s going off to confront daddy to try to turn him back to being a good guy, and she doesn’t insist on coming with him or joining him later. On Hoth, Luke and Han are out scouting on Tauntauns, but she’s back at the base where it’s nice and warm. And then there’s Padme, who kicks a fair bit of butt, but only until she and Anakin get secretly married, at which point she essentially vanishes except to talk about her pregnancy and her worries about her husband. As we know, of course, pregnant women are incapable of doing anything except sitting around worrying, right?

Image © The Walt Disney Co.

2. It’s OK to completely change your physical appearance and way of life for the person you love, even if he makes no sacrifices at all (from The Little Mermaid). This movie has the single most appalling ending of any Disney movie ever made, which is a shame because, apart from that, it’s a decent film. I just cannot comprehend how anyone could make a movie in the late 1980s with this message, which is not exactly subtle: Ariel gives up her home, her family, and BEING A MERMAID because she loves Eric so. And he gives up … nothing. Yeah, that marriage is off to a great start.

1. If you’re not a member of the elite, you’re basically inconsequential, even if you die heroically trying to save your people and your way of life (from the Star Wars movies). This crops up time and time again in the series, but nowhere is it more clearly demonstrated in the assault on the first Death Star. We mentioned it a few months ago, but here it is again: There are somewhere between 20 and 30 one-man fighters in the assault, right? And of all of those guys, only Luke, Wedge and some guy in a Y-wing make it back (and Han and Chewie, of course, but they weren’t part of the original team). So that means that in this fight, despite its amazing success, the rebels lost somewhere between 17 and 27 of their very best, bravest pilots. Yet all they can do is cheer as Luke descends the ladder of his X-wing. Luke cheers, too, hugs Leia, and is absolutely ecstatic … until he realizes that R2-D2 got badly damaged in the fight, at which point he is nearly distraught. Losing fellow human beings, including a good friend of his, that doesn’t matter; possibly losing a cute but replaceable machine, now that’s sad. And of course then there’s the whole matter of Vader being redeemed because he saved his own son’s life, never mind the thousands of people whose deaths he was responsible for.

Any other good (bad) ones? Please leave a comment.

[Note: A version of this article was published on GeekDad in November of 2009.]

If you’re a Harry Potter fan but haven’t been able to make it to Universal Orlando for The Wizarding World of Harry Potter, you can now at least bring a bit of it to you. Just in time for the penultimate movie’s release today, much of the attraction’s exclusive merchandise is being made available for purchase online.

When I visited the attraction back in August, I marveled at how many amazing souvenirs, collectibles, toys, etc. could be bought there that I had never seen before because they simply weren’t sold anywhere else. Of course, I didn’t have enough available money to buy everything my kids, my wife and I might have wanted to — nor did I relish the idea of trying to fit a lot of merchandise into our suitcases for the flight home. So I was excited this morning to find a package on my doorstep from the folks at Universal Orlando, containing an official resin (not cheap plastic) replica of Harry’s wand and a note telling me about the online store opening.

This is great news for Potter fans everywhere, if perhaps not such great news for our wallets. While the selection is still somewhat limited (though it will be expanded soon, they’ve said), you can still get such cool items as a riding broom with fiber optic “magic” effects, any one of 25 different wands, or silly things like a Pygmy Puff or a multicolor light-up hairbrush called Comb-A-Chameleon (which must be hard to keep on the shelves, as it comes and goes*).

I have a feeling my kids will be getting a few things from this store for the holidays. And maybe their parents will, too.

* – For those readers too young to remember 1983, this will explain the joke.