Star Wars: The Acolyte Is Teasing a Major The Rise of Skywalker Connection

This article contains spoilers for Star Wars: The Acolyte through episode 3. We’re heading somewhere new in the galaxy far, far away as Leslye Headland’s The Acolyte takes fans to the High Republic era. Taking place 100 years before the events of The Phantom Menace, this is arguably the most accessible Disney+ series for those […]

The post Star Wars: The Acolyte Is Teasing a Major The Rise of Skywalker Connection appeared first on Den of Geek.

While both fans and detractors speak of superhero cinema like it began yesterday—or about a decade ago when the Marvel Cinematic Universe came into being—the truth is masked do-gooders are virtually as old as the movies themselves. One of the silver screen’s first great adventurers, Douglas Fairbanks in The Mark of Zorro (1924), was a major influence on Bob Kane and Bill Finger when they created Batman.

As long as there’s been source material with heroes doing daring deeds, there have been producers willing to take a gamble on putting them on the screen. For better or worse that process found its peak synthesis (or corporatized formula) in the 21st century. Yet there was a period just before then—ahead of folks figuring out they should adapt currently popular ‘90s comic book characters like Spider-Man, the X-Men, and the Hulk—where the studios went all in on resurrecting something older and, to ‘90s kids, truly ancient.

Yep, we’re talking about the pulp hero movie boom of the 1990s. This was the era when following the success of Tim Burton’s cultural atom bomb, Batman (1989), studio executives across Tinseltown got it into their heads that the appeal of Bruce Wayne wasn’t the character’s still thriving comic book series—which was beloved across multiple generations, from children to grandparents—but rather the retro mid-20th century Never Never Land Burton and production designer Anton Furst called Gotham City. The tortured but brilliant Furst won an Oscar for that movie, and Burton changed the idea of Gotham forever in the popular imagination while fusing the 1930s and ‘40s pulp stylings of Batman’s earliest years with ‘80s blockbuster excess and his own Gothic sensibilities.

In the aftermath, there was a flood of heroes that either sought to recreate that same kind of heightened artifice, or which wished to resurrect other once-popular relics of 1930s pop culture. Some of these were based on stories older than the Dark Knight, and others were modern attempts to reinterpret and revitalize that aesthetic. Almost all of them failed. And yet, somehow, they together form a weird little trend that’s become its own kind of nostalgic relic for a different Hollywood. These are the heroes that brought sexy art deco back.

Dick Tracy (1990)

The various attempts to get Dick Tracy off the ground preceded Burton’s Batman by nearly a decade. But if you don’t think Disney had Bat-Dollar signs in their eyes during the summer of 1990—when Dick Tracy had its own toy line, a tie-in album with Madonna, and even a McDonald’s “CrimeStoppers” sponsorship campaign (see the video abov