Tuesday, September 17, 2019

Razorfist Presents: The Shadowcast #2 - THE SHADOW/GREEN HORNET: Dark Nights

It's time again for Razorfist's podcast on The Shadow. Description reads as follows: In our continuing exploration of The Birth of a Dark Legend, we discuss two other prominent firsts: The Shadow's first-ever crossover with THE GREEN HORNET in DARK KNIGHTS (2013) and his first encounter with BATMAN in BATMAN #253! For some reason embedding is not enabled, so the link is here.

The episode's focus on crossover treatments by someone other than original scribe Walter B. Gibson reveals the problem with corporate ownership of intellectual property, where we see incompetent, maleducated writers and publishers treat valuable property with all the care they would a roll of toilet paper. While some works are better than others, the overall trend remains a bad one and as such I have to question the wisdom of allowing anyone but the creator to own the creation.

And we're going to see more of this as Razorfist continues his focus upon this topic, something that even the 1994 film ran afoul of, as he goes over other crossover stories and other works by someone other than Gibson. Much like the case with Robert E. Howard and his creations, few that attempt to write The Shadow grok The Shadow- and even fewer attempt to try. The media adaptations across the generations show just how badly this comprehension is to successfully executing any Shadow story, meaning that what we see with Mouse Wars is not unusual in the least- and Disney certainly made his fortune off of fan fiction of others' properties long before the Devil Mouse arose.

The Futurians, their fellow travelers, and their inheritors have much to answer for.

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