I’m a person who likes to put movies into categories. This doesn’t mean a genre. The genre or genres in which a movie falls might have some influence on the categories, but the categories themselves are much more specific. They might come down to an actor’s work. They might involve a theme that a director or writer likes to put into their work. There might be some story beats involved. I like to dig into these smaller similarities between movies and see how many fit into these more specific categories. I find it interesting. Follow me as I go down a rabbit-hole for one of these smaller subcategories of movies.
Let’s start from the outside and work our way in. People like to generalize movies into different genres. That’s where I’m going to start. Most of the movies involved in this category are part of the action genre. It basically comes with the category. Digging a little deeper, the action genre can split off down many avenues. This category will take the superhero avenue. Superhero movies can branch off into a few other things. Getting a little deeper, I’m going to be taking a look at superhero teams. And, to branch down one level deeper, I want to look at superhero team movies where the heroes are children and/or teenagers learning to use their abilities for good. Got that? Good. Let’s go.
The logical place to begin with a discussion of teaching a superhero team would be the most famous example. The X-Men came into existence thanks to Jack Kirby and Stan Lee in the early 1960s. They would see their popularity rise through the 1970s and eventually get the feature film treatment in 2000. One of the primary settings of the X-Men comics and movies is the X-Mansion, a school for mutant children, run by Charles Xavier. It was essentially a training facility for mutants to become part of a superhero team.
Most of the focus through the first trilogy of X-Men films was on the adult characters. They were teachers at the school. Characters like Wolverine, Cyclops, Jean Grey, and Beast taught the growing mutants how to harness their powers for better, while also travelling around and saving the world from evil. They were mostly saving the world from Magneto. Some of the notable students in the films were Rogue, Kitty Pryde, and Iceman. The team was already a thing, though, so these movies didn’t quite feel as much a part of the category as some others that will be coming up.
That all changed with X-Men: First Class. Sure, the focus of the film was the relationship between Xavier, Magneto, and Mystique. But the idea behind the movie was that they were putting together a team of mutants. They were going to teach and train the mutants to be a superhero team to take down the Hellfire Club, a group of bad mutants. It shifted the focus away from the teachers and put it more onto everyone working together to become the first true X-Men team. It was a bunch of superhero teens learning to use their abilities for the greater good.
One thing that makes the X-Men characters stand out above other teenage superhero teams is their mutant abilities. Many stories about superhero teams feature a mixture of superpowers that feel very tired and cliché. The X-Men tend to have more unique powers, if only because of how many X-Men there have been throughout the franchise’s history. Some can teleport or have telekinesis, while others have bones that protrude from their hands into claws or drain people’s powers through touch. They get more specific, which makes them more interesting.
A few years earlier, a couple other movies came out that featured a similar concept. The first of the two was Sky High, which came out in 2005. The premise was fairly straight forward. A high school was set up for superhero teens. If there was any chance of the teens becoming superheroes, they were sent to the high school to hone their skills. Some of them would be sent into a curriculum to be heroes, while others would be sent into a curriculum to become sidekicks. It was through this sidekick track that the team was formed. They worked together to take down the supervillain terrorizing the school.
Sky High fell victim to many of the standard superhero powers that befall the superhero movies not based on Marvel or DC properties. The main character had super strength and could fly. His father had super strength. His mother could fly. There was a guy who could create fire. There was a shapeshifter. There was someone who had an elastic body, and someone else who could run fast. None of them seemed all that unique or rare. Aside from the popsicle boy, I guess. Someone who can melt into a fluid is an interesting power.
The other movie from around that same time was Zoom. Jack Shepard (Tim Allen) was a superhero when he was younger. He was a speedy guy known as Zoom. When the military discovered an incoming supervillain threat by the name of Concussion (Kevin Zegers), psychologist Dr. Marsha Holloway (Courteney Cox) was tasked with getting Jack to head a new superhero team called the Zenith Project. They trained Dylan West (Michael Cassidy), Summer Jones (Kate Mara), Tucker Williams (Spencer Breslin), and Cindy Collins (Ryan Whitney) to use their superpowers to stop Concussion from attacking the world.
Zoom was very much a movie about a team of superhero children or teens being trained to use their powers for good. The main difference between it and the other movies was that the schooling wasn’t an official school. In the X-Men movies, the X-Mansion was also referred to as a school for gifted children. The older mutants were teachers for the younger ones in official classes and such things. Sky High was about a school for superheroes and their sidekicks. It was a school. There was a school bus driver. With Zoom, the school, if it could be called that, was a military experiment that found four children/teens with superpowers and helped them harness it. They were being trained by a mentor. But there wasn’t a curriculum. There wasn’t an agenda that they were being taught. They were simply being taught to strengthen their powers. It was more like an intensive gym session than a school. Especially when the kids went back to their normal schooling after the Concussion situation.
Jack Shepard became the mentor to all the kids. He taught them what it meant to be a superhero after starting his tenure as their mentor by not caring at all about them. His past kept him from caring. Jack was part of a teenage superhero team in his younger years. The government did things a little differently back then. The present day team was being trained to use their powers. The older team had been hit with gamma radiation to accelerate their power growth curve. Jack didn’t want to train the newer team because he was worried the government was going to do the same thing. And they tried to. Jack, instead, took them into the field to fight the bad guy as they were. X-Men: First Class featured mentors who wanted to train the new heroes. Sky High featured a bunch of official teachers. Zoom was about a man reluctant to bring new heroes into the world of superheroes because of his past. It twisted things in a different way.
Different wasn’t apparent in the superpowers, themselves, though. The superpowers in Zoom had no real originality to them. Jack Shepard had super-speed. Cindy was strong. Summer could control things with her mind. Dylan could turn himself invisible. It wasn’t anything out of the ordinary when it came to superhero team powers. If anything, it lacked any originality at all. The most original superpower was Tucker’s, where he could inflate whatever part of his body he wanted. That originality couldn’t save the others from feeling tired, though.
There are probably a few other movies where children and/or teenagers were trained to be heroes with superpowers. The Umbrella Academy would probably fit into this category if the focus wasn’t on the adult versions of the characters, and if it was a movie. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children could maybe slip into here, but I haven’t seen it, so I wouldn’t have too much to say about it. Others might exist as well.
I like to categorize movies like this. I like to boil them down to specific story elements, perhaps including the people involved. It’s interesting to me. Those categories don’t define the movies so much as the movies define them. Each movie throughout this post fit into a specific category, but they tackled those ideas in different ways. They stood on their own instead of being derivative due to the similar story. The story of the children/teens being taught to become a superhero team was only one element of each movie. It wasn’t all that the movies were. That’s why there can be good and bad within the category. None of the movies did the same thing.
People like to define movies and categorize them into little boxes that they don’t let the movies out of. A horror movie is a horror movie and can’t be anything else. Stuff like that. I’m a little more fluid in my categories. It’s interesting to see the elements that movies share, but it’s also interesting to see how they do different things with those elements. No two movies are exactly the same. To categorize them as exactly the same doesn’t do them justice. Categories are fun to look at, but they aren’t everything when it comes to a movie. That’s what makes movies fun.
A little less fun, but still interesting to look at, are these notes:
- Chevy Chase made his fourth Sunday “Bad” Movies appearance in Zoom, after appearing in Nothing but Trouble (week 267), The Karate Dog (week 281), and Not Another Not Another Movie (week 402).
- Matthew Wood has now appeared in three Sunday “Bad” Movies. They were The Emoji Movie (week 373), Star Wars: The Clone Wars (week 377), and Zoom.
- Zoom also saw the third appearance of Willie Garson, who was previously seen in Sex and the City (week 370) and Sex and the City 2 (week 370).
- Nick Baga was in Jack and Jill (week 101) and Zoom.
- John Watson returned from Gooby (week 166) to appear in Zoom.
- Zoom wasn’t the only superhero team movie to feature Kate Mara. She was also in Fant4stic (week 172).
- Spencer Breslin was in Zoom and one of my favourite Sunday “Bad” Movies, The Happening (week 185).
- Ryan Whitney was in Zoom, and then grew up to be in Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No! (week 190).
- Sadey Paige Nifong appeared in both Jem and the Holograms (week 238) and Zoom.
- Finally, Thomas F. Wilson made a quick turnaround, showing up in both Zoom and Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector (week 455).
- Have you seen Zoom? What did you think of it? What do you think of movies where children and/or children are trained to be superheroes? Are there others that I haven’t mentioned? Let me know in the comments or find me on Twitter to discuss it.
- Twitter and the comments are good places to let me know what movies I should be checking out for Sunday “Bad” Movies. If there’s one that you think would fit, hit me up.
- Make sure to head over to Sunday “Bad” Movies on Instagram to check out more bad movie fun.
- Next week, I’m going a little foreign. By that, I mean I’ll be checking out a foreign film. I’ll be going to Hong Kong for the flick Five Element Ninjas. Come on back in a week to see what I thought. See you then.
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