I remember sitting in my bedroom in Inglewood, CA in my teens reading yet another awesome issue of The Amazing Spider-Man. The early '90s: some would say that this was the apex of the golden years for Marvels marquee character. Howard Mackie and Tom DeFalco (who must have been under mind control or something) were waiting in the wings to ruin everything, but I digress. This article is about comic book movies. Back in those days there was already talk about Marvel taking the movie business seriously, up until that point they relied on studios like Troma Films (Toxic Avenger) to handle their films, which as you might imagine produced less than stellar results (Dolph Lundgren as Punisher, Reb Brown as Captain America and the immediately and mercifully killed original Fantastic Four film starring who cares honestly). Their cross town rivals had the luxury of being owned by Warner Bros. and had to that point been able to make successful films about Superman and Batman, two slam dunk no-brainers who were household names going back decades. I remember Spider-Man joking in the book about the real life news that a movie was in the works, my reaction:
oh God no. The last thing I wanted to do was see a live action version of my favorite hero being completely ruined in a story that gave me information I already knew, my imagination had been doing a fine job to that point. This was before the Internet was common place, and Ive often wondered what the reaction would have been on the net to this news then. Fast forward a decade or so and Marvel, after the Blade experiment, had finally thrown their hat in the ring of movie magic in earnest, by introducing us to a group of jerks who laughably called themselves the X-Men. Yeah, it took a while to get the training wheels off, but film goers made it clear that they could be convinced to eat bowls of crap if Halle Berry was serving it and Hugh Jackman took his shirt off while they choked it down. Spider-Man made things better after that but the whole deal was hit or miss from then on. Meanwhile, Warner Bros. decided to experiment with making seemingly intentionally crappy movies setting the stage for Marvel to overtake them in an arena they had utterly dominated since the late '70s. We eventually get to Iron Man, and the Marvel Comics successful cinema coup. Now Iron Man has finished its third movie and it did not disappoint, unless you havent been paying attention to say, the last 30+ years of comic book history. Which brings us to the three points surrounding the issue the title of this article addresses, The Mandarin. Here are three reasons The Mandarin was perfect in Iron Man 3...