LogFAQs > #914846872

Dikitain posted...

If anything, the popularity of Punisher in the 70's is what led to the oversaturation of him in the 80's and the complete abortion that was Punisher in the 90's. He didn't even start showing up in Captain America and Daredevil until the early 80's. Then Marvel decided to just go nuts and put him everywhere.

He didn't even get his first comic series until 1986, and his "oversaturation" was very much a product of the 90s.

As for the 70s, he was originally created as a paper-thin rip-off of a popular book character (the Mack Bolan "Executioner" novels that were very popular in the 70s), and only ever really guest-starred in Spider-Man (as a blatant antagonist readers were NOT meant to sympathize with) for the first six years. He appeared all of maybe a half-dozen times in those six years, at no point a hero, at no point a character the audience really cared about at all (at least not in a positive sense).

His first appearance as an antagonist in Daredevil and Captain America WAS in 1980, true, but he didn't really become popular - with readers wanting to see more of him as an actual protagonist or outright hero - until 84-85 or so (keeping in mind that, up to this point, he'd still only been in like a dozen stories, tops).

The 80s action movie boom you yourself already mentioned and the rise of the ultra-masculine action hero who shoots all the bad guys was a large part of what helped propel the Punisher into popularity in the first place. Much like Wolverine, he owes almost ALL of his later success and popularity to the 80s, not the 70s.

Almost the entirety of what makes the Punisher a character that people know or care about in any way comes from the 80s. Even whatever stories you might like from later periods only exist because of the groundwork laid in the 80s.

If all anyone knew about the character was what was directly established in the 1970s and nothing else, he'd be about on par with the Rocket Racer or Big Wheel in terms of recognizability or popularity.



Dikitain posted...

And that is the problem: People think of it only as a Marvel movie. Think of it like just a typical 80's action film and it is pretty fun, not that far removed from something like Cobra, Commando, or Predator.

Because it WAS essentially a Marvel movie. Or, at least, a movie deliberately attempting to base its identity on the existing Marvel character and its popularity, in order to cash in on that character. Like it or not, it was a comic book movie, and it failed spectacularly at being one.

But even as stereotypical "80s action movie", it was still a relatively bad movie. It was produced by New World Pictures (a studio notorious for terrible B-movies and exploitation films), and its parent company are actually the ones who bought Marvel in the mid-80s, and basically helped drive it into near-bankruptcy in the late 80s and 90s before they sold it off to even worse masters. It's the sort of movie people get together and watch to make fun of, not one that anyone would enjoy unironically in the same way people enjoyed Cobra or Commando or Rambo or even Death Wish.

Again, it was a movie fans were going to hate from the very start, but which also wasn't even remotely going to win over non fans.


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