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Gifted and Giving

I was watching "The Gifted" and musing about the decision to use the Strucker name for the main family. In the Marvel comics that serve as loose basis for the show, the name is owned by an old Nazi ally and his children, Andreas and Andrea. Like the show's Strucker kids, they're mutants. But the show's quite free of Nazis. These televised Struckers are just basic, affluent suburbanites. But then they turn out to be suburbanites whose genetic makeup exposes them to a world outside their sheltered existence. And this is a world against which their father's profession places him in direct opposition.

 

Unlike previous antagonists to Marvel's mutants, like the similarly named Stryker, the Strucker patriarch seems to hold little in the way of ideological hatred for the mutant race. He's just doing his job. A job that happens to involve persecution of  an underprivileged minority.
Incidentally, the Strucker siblings of the comics did eventually realise that wallowing in their socioeconomic superiority to the detriment of the rest of the world wasn't really the way to go, and they made some attempt to get out and do some good. The show's kids seem to be on a similar path.


So. This show. It's like "X-Men" without X-Men. It also features Nazi descendants without any actual hint of Nazism. But as the themes the X-Men characters bring don't require a team by that name to be present, the show does a fairly elegant job of displaying the deleterious effect of a chauvinist worldview in the absence of any organisation that explicitly espouses it.
Basically, we get to see the X-Men fight Hydra on television without a whole mess of rights issues.

 

Bonus Question!


Is "Nightmare Before Christmas" a Halloween film or a Christmas one?
Since its plot revolves around the protagonist's journey to understand the meaning of Christmas, I've always taken the latter position. But in its country of origin, I could see a compromise. It starts at Halloween and goes towards Christmas. Maybe that makes it an ideal Thanksgiving movie. That's a pretty underserved market.

Copyright © 2011, Jaymes Buckman and David Aaron Cohen. All rights reserved. In a good way.