Propaganda is most impactful when people don't think it's propaganda, and most decisive when it's censorship you never knew happened. When we imagine that the U.S. military only occasionally and slightly influences U.S. movies, we are extremely badly deceived.
In the original script for the first Iron Man movie, the hero went up against the evil weapons dealers. The U.S. military rewrote it so that he was a heroic weapons dealer who explicitly argued for more military funding.
Which is about where I stopped reading. If this is true, then the military saved the movie. Iron Man was originally written as an alcoholic, billionaire, weapons dealer. Stan Lee created him as a totally unlikable character
Iron Man debuted in Tales of Suspense #39, introduced as a billionaire weapons dealer who turned into a hero after forging his own armor that led to his freedom from capture. At face value, Tony Stark doesn’t seem like someone readers would grow an immediate attachment to, as he was a self-absorbed industrialist who sold extremely dangerous weapons to the highest bidders. Initially, Stark was a selfish egotist who rarely thought about the consequences of his actions.
In an interview from 2013, Lee admitted he intentionally created Tony Stark to be unlikable as a dare to make readers love someone who wasn’t a good guy. He said that readers weren’t exactly fans of war and the military when Iron Man was created during the midst of the Cold War. In response, he made a hero who represented all of the bad things about war. Lee said he shoved Stark down readers’ throats to make them like him - and it worked.
Well, there was this…
Which is about where I stopped reading. If this is true, then the military saved the movie. Iron Man was originally written as an alcoholic, billionaire, weapons dealer. Stan Lee created him as a totally unlikable character
This is an Iron post.