animals, Fantasy, gardening, Movies, Mysteries, Nature, TV

Bad to Good?

30 Comments

The first real day of gardening for me includes attacking my creeping charlie.  While I was working, I remembered the Godzilla comparison I wrote about a couple of years ago.  But since getting rid of creeping Charlie is a good thing in my world, how could I be Godzilla, a horrible, scary, destructive monster.

I was thinking through all the Godzilla movies (yes, I’ve seen them all, even the Matthew Broderick) and it occurred to me that in the Japanese films, Godzilla went through a “nice-ification” over the years.  In a few of the movies, Godzilla actually comes to the rescue by fighting off worse monsters (Mothra, Ghidorah, Gigan, Megalon, etc.)   When Godzilla became a father in Son of Godzilla, he really mellowed.

This is a more common occurrence than you realize.  I can think of a lot of characters who morph from the bad guys to good guys.  M.A.S.H. is the best example; although Frank Burns never redeemed himself, Colonel Blake started off as a lame head of the unit before he sobered up and became beloved of this staff, then Charles started off as a pain-in-the-patoot and gradually became just one of the guys.  Diagnosis Murder had a string of hospital administrators who started out as impediments and eventually became supporters of Dr. Sloan.  Hamilton Berger, the DA on the first Perry Mason series eventually toned down his attitude and even asked Perry to represent a friend of his at one point.  Lots of long-standing series went through this.

I’m glad I can still be Godzilla in my creeping Charlie battles without feeling guilty for destroying Tokyo!

Any bad guys that you actually like? Or morphed into someone you could like?

30 thoughts on “Bad to Good?”

  2. keith richards, comes to mind
    I remember the interview on 60 minutes where they were asking keith what his life was like now that he had quit smoking, drinking and doing drugs and did he miss any of it, and he kind of rolled his eyes and looked up towards the sky in the said…heroin sure was nice.

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  4. Rise and Shine, Baboons,

    I am thinking about the series “The Sopranos”. The entire cast of characters were mostly bad guys I came to love through a filter of being horrified by their conduct. But these characters never morphed into “good guys.” Tony was a dangerous and unpredictable gangster, often betrayed by his “friends.” His wife was complicit because she liked the money and power. Tony’s mother was unstable and abusive. I never came to see her as a “good guy” despite the fact that she probably had her own story of maltreatment. Her character was just so easy to hate, much like her daughter, Janice. The writing, character development, and acting on that series was superb. And the writers had the depth to develop the characters with mental health conditions and learning disabilities that hobbled them.

    I was engaged for 7 seasons. They were horrible. They were wonderful.

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  5. As it happens, we watched “A Man Called Otto” with Tom Hanks last night. It was a completely unnecessary remake of “A Man Called Ove” but a classic example of an unlikeable protagonist who becomes sympathetic in the end.

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        1. Or Earle Stanley Gardner who spent his early career, I just read, creating an agency to defend Mexican and other immigrants who were wrongly imprisoned. Very interesting man. He wrote masses of pulp fiction under many names.

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    1. The terminator was always a good guy. He was the guardian for the equivalent of the Dalai Lama, and a protector from the evil sources that were trying to kill him.

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  14. I choose to hang out with a more adventuresome Rusche growing up. They usually were older kids that did things that were not felony, but we’re certainly not what the good children were supposed to be doing. It was a lot more exciting that way, and I generally miss hanging out with kids that were three or four years older than me and I was allowed in as the kid with a good brain are trying to figure out how to do fun stuff in a way that we can get us all in super severe trouble. I thought fun projects, I thought of ways to do other peoples projects and basically make sure that every moment we spend was fun stuff. It drove me crazy when I watched my sons groups of guys try and figure out what to do. It was like the floundered, and couldn’t figure out how to make a move. We never had that problem. There was always something cooking and it was exciting and fun , I see those guys from time to time and the memories are great. Some of them turned out to be liters. Most of them turned out to be in trouble.

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    1. I have never understood the mindset that getting in trouble was fun. Somehow I managed to have lot of fun as kid without doing anything that was destructive to other people’s property, hurting animals, or doing really stupid stuff. I must say, that after fourteen years at the alternative school, where the vast majority of our students were in perpetual trouble with the law, I still don’t see the charm of it. Call me a wet blanket, so be it; I don’t think it’s admirable, interesting or fun.

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      1. Well, there is “good trouble” and the not-so-good kind. When the law is not consistently on the side we perceive as good, it isn’t always easy to sort out which kinds of trouble are good, bad, or just the kind of stuff that ordinary life is made up of.

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