Comics / Cult Favorite

Maturing Tastes

By Philip Schweier
February 22, 2010 - 04:47

When I was a small child, I have very specific ideas about what made a good comic book. It had to have a super-hero, and that hero had to have a costume, and if that costume came with a cape, it was definite plus. One of my favorite characters from those days Star Boy of the Legion of Super-Heroes in his old purple and yellow outfit.

But as a person grows older, he begins to think differently. I recognized that there was plenty of room in the comic book world for Nick Fury, Jonah Hex and the Warlord. And it was about this time that my reading tastes began to develop. I had picked up Doc Savage, and Tarzan and Conan weren’t far behind. By the time I was 14, I had read all the Edgar Rice Burroughs I could get my hands on.

Some years back I tried rereading Tarzan of the Apes, and I found myself quite bored. Maybe, at a later time, I will revisit the worlds Edgar Rice Burroughs created, but not anytime soon.

Jonathan Pryce in BRazil

In 1985, I saw the film Brazil. Its Kafa-esque themes confused me, but not so much that I hated the movie. I knew it had something to offer, I just wasn’t sure what. So I continued to watch it whenever it showed up on TV. After about five viewings, I finally began to appreciate it, and I became a fan of director Terry Gilliam.

I have enjoyed Gilliam’s work, especially the movies The Fisher King (1991) and 12 Monkeys (1995). But those are not films he wrote. His more personal works, such as The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1989), are what he is most often remembered.

At Dragon-Con 2009, I missed the opportunity to meet Gilliam, and I was surprised I was not as disappointed as I thought I should have been. I had once thought myself to be a devotee of his work.

When I saw The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus (2009), I couldn’t help but feel it was another of his personal works. In the film, Parnassus operates an archaic traveling carnival show, but nobody seems to care. It is viewed as a woefully out-of-date oddity, and nobody is remotely interested in the stories Parnassus tells.

I kind of saw a bit of a parallel with Gilliam’s own work, in that many of the films he has written and directed have been under-appreciated by the Hollywood studios and the mainstream movie-going public. In fact, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus played on what was probably Savannah, GA’s smallest screen for all of a week before being replaced.

Heath Ledger in The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus

The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus was a bit of a disappointment to me, but I don’t see that as Gilliam’s fault. The fact that Heath Ledger, one of its stars, tragically died before filming was completed required some massive reinvention of the part of the filmmaker, and the publicity surrounding Ledger’s death over-shadowed the film’s merits in the eyes of much of its potential audience.

But I had to ask myself: If I’m such a fan of Gilliam’s, why am I not more emotionally invested in his success and failure?

To answer this, I went back and watched Time Bandits (1982), Brazil (1985) and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.

I found them to be long drawn-out films, that failed to stir in me any of the excitement that I once knew. Perhaps I’ve seen them too many times, but I don’t think so. I think I just recognized through them a change in my own interests regarding art and film.

When The Adventures of Baron Munchausen was released in 1989, the British interview program The South Bank Show did a feature on Terry Gilliam – his history, his animation, his work as a filmmaker. In the course of the feature, fellow Monty Python alum Michael Palin expressed an almost disappointment in Gilliam, in that much of what he might see on the screen has been seen in other films by Gilliam.

For instance, in an early scene in Time Bandits, a knight on horseback suddenly and dramatically bursts out of wardrobe. In Brazil, military commandos burst into an apartment via the window. In The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, the Baron bursts through a wall on horseback.

This same image being repeated over and over in Gilliam’s films is reminiscent of seeing a marvelous magic trick once, and then seeing it done in subsequent performances, and after two or three performances, it’s no longer magic. You may not be able to recognize how the trick is done, but the magic is long gone.

I still regard myself to be a fan of Gilliam’s work, and I am very much inclined to see other films he may do in the future. But I am less inclined to hail him as the creative genius I once thought.

But that is the nature of growing and maturing and witnessing and acknowledging a change in personal tastes. It’s not that the films and music and art that we once appreciated is no longer good. That hasn’t changed.

What has changed is our response to it, and the psychological reaction we derive from it. It’s a truthful, artistic version of the old, “It’s not you, it’s me” speech.

My point is to not be afraid or concerned as our tastes change and mature and become less responsive one some level. Because undoubtedly, if the laws of physics are to be believed, we will have an equal and opposite reaction to some other song or film or stimulus.

Praise and adulation? Scorn and ridicule? E-Mail me at philip@comicbookbin.com

Last Updated: November 29, 2025 - 16:51