We're men, we're men in tights

From the 1930s to about the 1960s, westerns were a pretty big deal. I’m still trying to figure out why; best I can tell, movies about cowboys tend to drag, featuring long passages with minimal dialogue, and extended close-ups of ugly men hawking globs of tobacco into spittoons. If you have a weird fetish for stubbly old cranks, then I could sort of see the appeal. Of course, if you have a weird fetish for stubbly old cranks, you probably don’t make it to the cinema very often. A basement and a reliable Internet connection are probably your best friends.

We associate westerns with a certain era because at a certain point, Hollywood pretty much stopped making them. You see one trickle out occasionally, but half the time they have some incongruous modern twist, like robot dinosaurs that the cowboys kill with bazookas. Save for the odd throwback here and there, westerns are a dead genre.

Perhaps the same fate will befall the superhero movie.

The two genres don’t have a lot in common at face value. Westerns are slow and sparse; hero flicks are speedy and overstuffed. Westerns are cheap to produce; hero flicks cost more than the gross domestic product of Tanzania. Westerns feature macho outlaws dressed in ridiculous outfits; hero flicks … okay, so they have something in common.

But the main quality they share is that they saturated the market. Since westerns could be cranked out on shoestring budgets, the local cineplex was silly with tales of jug-hatted desperados making a go of it in the rough-and-tumble plains. You couldn’t escape them. They were the cinematic equivalent of mosquitos, only you couldn’t get rid of them with incense and cartons of Virginia Slims.

Superhero movies are complex, big-budget affairs, but they’re prevalent because they make their money back and then some. Google the 50 top-grossing films of all time and a shocking number of them feature protagonists who wear underwear on the outside of their pants. And that’s not even taking into account teenage wizards, lusty vampires or giant blue hominids in loincloths. Assemble all of these odd characters in one room and it’s like the hallucinatory dreams I used to have during puberty.

Full disclosure: I love superheroes. I was a huge comic book nerd when I was a kid, which meant I spent a lot of time indoors and didn’t know any girls. Comics were a window into a giddily absurd fantasyland, awash with primary colors and soap-style melodrama. The good guys got to wear Halloween costumes every day of the year, and the bad guys had absurd names like “Dr. Doom” and “Killer Croc.” Everything was exaggerated and distorted. This is a medium ostensibly run by adults, but clearly their creative imaginations are deeply rooted in childhood; how else do you explain metal claws popping out of someone’s hands, or a man who turns into a big green beast whenever he gets mad? Desert wanderers succumbing to heatstroke have had less vivid visions.

The glut of comic book films over the past decade-plus are tailor-made for people of my generation -- unabashed geeks who crave an adult spin on their childhood indulgences. A lot of these movies actually work, and they owe their success to computers; with digital animation you can take an absurd concept, like Spider-Man tussling with a masked goblin on a flying surfboard, and make it look as real as someone’s front porch.

This is in stark contrast to anything made prior to 1989. I remember watching a Captain America movie that was produced sometime during the early 1980s, and it was like seeing home footage of a mentally disturbed man having a very public nervous breakdown. His supposedly “indestructible” shield bent in the wind like an oversized Frisbee, and his costume seemed stitched together from the full-body onesies favored by small children with Kool-Aid mustaches. In the modern iteration, he comes across as remotely plausible, at the very least inspiring you to suspend your disbelief. Thirty-five years ago, he was a walking, talking cry for help.

Westerns had a pretty good run -- their peak lasted around 30, 35 years, give or take, equivalent to the lifespan of an average sea urchin. If superhero movies are in for a similar reign, then they’ve still got a long way to go. That’s good news for anyone itching to watch Superman and Batman beat the everloving snot out of each other, bad news for those who feel a cape is only appropriate on a magician.

Either way, I’ve got to believe they’ll come a day when these films reach the point of oversaturation. They’re not there yet, given the box office numbers, but there’s only so many times you can tell the story of the Caped Crusader before the audience collectively yawns and starts shopping for garden gnomes on Amazon. Hollywood has become addicted to “rebooting” these franchises -- scrapping continuity, enlisting new writers, casting new actors, and approaching the stories with a fresh angle -- and that’s fine, for now. But there may come a day when even die-hards like me say, “You know what? I’d love to plunk down fifteen bucks to see ‘Batman Adopts a Puppy,’ but maybe I should watch a nice historical drama instead. Is ‘Churchill Eats a Crumpet’ streaming on Netflix yet?”

The day is coming. When it does, who knows? Maybe westerns will be back in vogue by then; like fashion, there’s a chance these things are cyclical. Or maybe genre mash-ups will be the order of the day. Just imagine: cowboys wearing capes and skin-tight leotards. Hide your children, folks.