El Gostro said:
Bob's incapacity at comprehending a mindset and conception of the world outside Planet America (not the continent,the planet) is made painfully obvious in this video.
How, exactly? He makes a great point about Captain America, who really isn't as blindly patriotic and exclusively relevant to Americans as most people assume he is, especially in comparison to some other heroes. What Bob should have said, rather than implied, (just to make the point perfectly clear) is that if they could turn Iron Man into a movie hero that pretty much everyone could enjoy, then doing the same with Captain America should be little problem, as long as they can get people to look past the name. The fact of the matter is that most people hear his name and make their assumptions then and there with no real knowledge of his character - most people in this movie's target demo have never been exposed to this hero beyond being "made aware" of him, and given the highly suggestive name (which could even be ironic, for all they know) they just assume that he's mostly just a patriotic "America, fuck yeah!" figure, when he certainly could be (indeed, already has been) so much more. The really unfortunate thing here is that Captain America is probably going to fall victim of the prejudices of foreign audiences. It'll probably take at least a little bit of a hit in the box office purely because some people won't give it a chance based only on its name.
As for the whole fighting idea, I love that. Sadly, until we're in a situation where every state is on roughly the same level economically and militarily, that probably just won't happen. Even if it's not settling what would have otherwise been a war - even if it's being used to just get some catharsis after a minor diplomatic dispute, the states that have the ability to just push around smaller ones right now would never willingly put themselves in a position where they're at serious risk of being humiliated in an official diplomatic capacity by a "lesser" state. The World Cup, where there's nothing really at stake besides pride, is as close as we're going to get to that for some time, and even that's not all that great an example - only a small list of countries can actually field a team that has a legitimate chance of winning, regardless of who all participates, so it's not an even field, pardon the pun. Though I suppose just winning a match may be therapy enough, at times, regardless of where you end up finishing, but even then, good luck if anyone ever has a beef they want to settle with one of the countries that do put out the star teams. Just look at a list of past World Cup Finalists to see who the new most powerful countries in the world would be, lol. Fighting would probably be a more fair match up for everyone, because even if you don't have the money to maintain a top-ranked football team, I'd wager that even the smallest countries could hold try-outs and then train up ONE fighter, replacing him as needed. Again, though, there's no way the US, China, Russia, most of Western Europe, Japan, ect... would ever consent to participating in a for-stakes contest where they may be beat by less powerful countries... sadly.
