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That is a very good point Don.
There is the theory between the Dark/Light cycle with Superheroes every decade or so. From Christopher Reeve's Superman in the late seventies, to Michael Keaton's Dark Batman in the late eighties, Spiderman around the millenium, back to another Dark Batman recently so quickly it gives us whiplash. Not quite a clean cycle in the past decade since you might have The Tick, and Batman and Robin signaling a theoretical end to a "generation" of superhero genre, only to have X-Men immediately begin a new round launched by advances in CG (and blowing the Dark/Light theory out of the water).
It's Pirates that I find fascinating. Particularly since you have Alan Moore supositioning in Watchmen that the genre would have been a likely replacement in the stead of Superheroes in the eighties. Which actually has some real merit given the fact that the previous two cycles of Pirates took place between wars... in the twenties and fifties. They were due for a resurgence post-Vietnam (as was the Western, but even that only blipped on a tiny scale with the cycle consisting of Silverado/Lonesome Dove/Pale Rider/Unforgiven), although the cultural climate didn't quite fit the conditions that a lawless/frontiers oriented genre like Pirates needed to thrive... arguably that didn't happen until post 9/11.
And Zombies came back twenty years later much much stronger than the first time, but I think that has quite a lot to do with current underlying fears of biological warfare/SARS/Bird Flu/H1N1/natural disasters etc. whereas the first one was kicked off by social themes/class structure. Although I guess what both have in common is their own metaphorical resonance in the disruption of the civil structure status quo.
There is the theory between the Dark/Light cycle with Superheroes every decade or so. From Christopher Reeve's Superman in the late seventies, to Michael Keaton's Dark Batman in the late eighties, Spiderman around the millenium, back to another Dark Batman recently so quickly it gives us whiplash. Not quite a clean cycle in the past decade since you might have The Tick, and Batman and Robin signaling a theoretical end to a "generation" of superhero genre, only to have X-Men immediately begin a new round launched by advances in CG (and blowing the Dark/Light theory out of the water).
It's Pirates that I find fascinating. Particularly since you have Alan Moore supositioning in Watchmen that the genre would have been a likely replacement in the stead of Superheroes in the eighties. Which actually has some real merit given the fact that the previous two cycles of Pirates took place between wars... in the twenties and fifties. They were due for a resurgence post-Vietnam (as was the Western, but even that only blipped on a tiny scale with the cycle consisting of Silverado/Lonesome Dove/Pale Rider/Unforgiven), although the cultural climate didn't quite fit the conditions that a lawless/frontiers oriented genre like Pirates needed to thrive... arguably that didn't happen until post 9/11.
And Zombies came back twenty years later much much stronger than the first time, but I think that has quite a lot to do with current underlying fears of biological warfare/SARS/Bird Flu/H1N1/natural disasters etc. whereas the first one was kicked off by social themes/class structure. Although I guess what both have in common is their own metaphorical resonance in the disruption of the civil structure status quo.
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