Marvel Kangaroos (2 of 2)
More fun with MARVEL's coMpARatiVELy great tendency toward this wordplay.
Last time out, I floated the idea of movies with “kangaroo subtitles”: titles that could be hidden inside their own subtitles, like “ANT-MAN” inside “QUANTUMANIA.” But in a strict sense, the Ant-Man movie doesn’t qualify as a kangaroo/joey pair. Its full title is Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Are there any other movies that do?
To answer that question, I looked at Wikipedia’s list of film titles, then at 46,337 movies. Of those, 8,462 had subtitles. Searching those, and discounting expanded abbreviations like D.O.A.: Dead on Arrival…I found two.
And one of them is another Marvel movie!
Borat! Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan has a comically long subtitle that gets around to including B-O-R-A-T after its first seven words. Thor: The Dark World is a lot more efficient.
Can a kangaroo’s joey be a single letter? I don’t see why not…although I think it only counts as interesting if there’s a little surprise to it.
Consider these titles, from yet another Marvel property (produced by Fox) and two films in a Disney sports franchise. All three of them boil their franchise name down to one letter and attach a numeral to it as the main title, with the full franchise in the subtitle:
Even if we discount the numerals, the letters aren’t really hiding in “X-Men United” or “The Mighty Ducks.” This is more like an acronym than a game of hide-and-find. It’s the same reason I’m not counting DOA: Dead on Arrival.
But X-Men comics stories do seem to use “x” words conspicuously often, even when they’re not obvious about it. E is for Extinction, The Phalanx Covenant, and the filmed Dark Phoenix Saga, for three. The X was also highlighted in the X-movies’ FOX logos.
And in at least one Marvel release, a kangaroo word (with a single-letter joey) figures into the plot.
Several key scenes in The Avengers take place in Stark Tower, a monument to clean power…and a monument to the monumental ego of Tony Stark, Iron Man. When the tower’s logo lights up for the first time, Tony describes it as “Like Christmas, but with more…me.”
Some of Tony’s self-regard gets stripped away over the course of the film: he goes from mocking the idea of self-sacrifice to making such a sacrifice. (He winds up not dying in that film, but he expected to.)
The letters of the STARK logo also get stripped away…all but one.
And the remaining “A” appears in the final shot before the credits. It is now no longer part of Tony Stark’s name, but the initial for the team that he serves.
I don’t know what it is about Marvel that makes this kind of wordplay keep coming up. Something about comics’ flexibility in their use of language, since the images do so much of the storytelling? The tradition of one-letter superhero symbols that goes back to Superman? Or is there something in the very creative DNA of Marvel that resonates with it?
It’s too bad all Marvel’s founding fathers are no longer with us. I’d love to pose that question to Stanley Lieber…
…er, sorry. That was his birth name. I meant Stan Lee.