Friday, January 29, 2016

Why Does The US Has So Many Superheroes?

Recently, I had been to the Tata Steel Kalam Kolkata Literary Fest 2016 where I came across a session with Imtiaz Ali and Aditya Vikram Sengupta. It was quite an interesting discussion but I won't be going into that today (maybe in some future post). In this discussion, I came across an interesting hypothesis which I would like to share today in here.

There was a question from the audience to the panel that why hasn't Bollywood explored the superhero arena much whereas Hollywood has done so much in there which proved to be quite successful as well. To this, Aditya answered that the Hollywood is doing it and Indians are more than happy with them, so why does Bollywood need to do it too. The requirement is meet by Hollywood superhero films. I personally felt that point to be very lame because just because Hollywood is doing it doesn't mean we won't. And if it is so, then shouldn't we just give up doing films Bollywood because I know Hollywood and the regional films will fulfill all the needs of the audience.But that besides the point. After this reply, Aditya went on to point out why there is an abundance of superheroes in USA.

Like most other countries of the world, USA does not have a rich mythological background. It was inhabited by colonists mostly from England but also from the rest of Europe in the 1600s. Though native Americans inhabited the lands before the colonists but they are only a small part of the main population. So, USA can be said to be a fairly new country and thus it is obvious that it has no mythological stories associated with it. Thus, to compensate for that, Americans started creating superheroes with super powers like all the characters of mythology.

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