Hard Economic Times Breed Superheroes

It is not by chance that there is a spade of superheroes hitting the large and small screens of entertainment at this time. Unemployment remains at or above 9 percent across the nation, people continue to lose their homes in foreclosure at record numbers, the rich get richer on Wall Street and there is precious little to suggest any significant change for the better in the foreseeable future.

So let’s create some superheroes to take our minds off of reality for awhile. That’s what happened in the 1930s, when, at the height of the Great Depression, characters like Superman, Batman and the Green Hornet lit up the skies in comic books, over radio and on the silver screen, doing battle and winning the day against larger-than-life villains.

It was 1936 when the Green Hornet and his masked sidekick, Kato, first roared onto the air waves in their futuristic car, the Black Beauty, to fight crime. There have been several manifestations on a variety of media of the mild-mannered newspaper publisher, Britt Reid, by day, who transforms himself into the Green Hornet at night to bring evil-doers to justice with his superior intelligence and martial arts skills. Kids would literally watch the radio, fixated by the theme music, the classical “Flight of the Bumblebee,” which was often their first introduction to the music of masters like Nikolai Rimsky-Kosakov.

More important, the Green Hornet and other similar radio shows provided an escape into fantasy from the harsh reality of bread lines, Roosevelt’s fireside chats and the dust bowl that swept across the previously fertile heartland of America.

Not surprisingly, The Green Hornet is now a major motion picture, playing in theaters across America at this moment, when the scares of the Great Recession still burn, the unemployed are faced with a jobless recovery and global economic turmoil is the new reality.

Escape from Reality

The escape from reality also is reaching into our homes via TV series, such as “The Cape” on NBC. The series depicts an honest cop who is framed by a corrupt private police force, headed by a billionaire seeking to control the fictional Palm City, California.The billionaire is himself the arch villain, Chess, who is behind the crime wave terrorizing Palm City, until the honest cop darns the all-powerful cape that enables him to take on the bad guys.

Another fictitious California town, Pacific Bay, is the setting for “No Ordinary Family,” a comic sci-fi drama on ABC that traces the extraordinary powers of an otherwise seemingly average family of four. They, of course, use their powers, gained after surviving a plane crash in Brazil, to vanquish evil and champion good.

The father is beefy and bald, but he can jump really high and he now possesses Herculean strength, which enables him to foil criminals in the act, while his scientific researcher wife can rush around really fast, making peoples’ heads spin. Why that’s a super power is hard to comprehend, but combined with the daughter, who reads peoples’ thoughts and the son, who figures everything out with his super brain that sees intricate equations and formula in his minds’ eye, they support the bumbling father as he brings super human justice into our homes.

It’s easy to appreciate why both series are set in California. The state has, thus far, come closest to going down the tubes in debt. Jerry Brown, the “new” retrofit governor, should be able to fall back on fictional super heroes as he seeks a way out of near bankruptcy. The rest of the country can blame over-heated liberals and look to the Tea Party for salvation.

Brown’s California is the most debt-ridden state in the union. Its massive deficit is pegged at $25.4 billion through the upcoming budget year.
The many states, in general, face a collective budget gap of $175 billion through 2013, even after closing gaps totaling $230 billion over the past two years, the National Governors Association reported, according to the Reuters news agency.

Brown, a Democrat, wants to fill the gap with a combination of $12.5 billion in spending cuts and $12 billion in tax hikes, and will ask voters for approval, the news agency says. He is no stranger to tax fights. In 1978, during his earlier stint as governor, California voters passed Proposition 13, which constrained the state's ability to impose new taxes.

Failing new revenue sources it looks like we’ll all have to wait for the new Superman movie to get lost in the world of the original super hero once again. “Superman: The Man of Steel,” will be played by British actor, Henry Cavill, who is reported to be a “hottie.” The movie is slated for release in December 2012 and, alas, we’ll probably still need the escape from our lingering economic troubles.

And That’s That…