Patrick Duffy is summoning us...

[hedrap]

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/liv...Top+Stories%29

Duffy also expresses interest in returning to his amphibious roots.

“Going back to The Man From Atlantis, it would be interesting to play that character 40 years later,” he says of the 1977 sci-fi show. “Not trying to be a superhero, but to be a sage voice of that kind of sci-fi thing… I would be the Obi Wan of The Man From Atlantis at that point. That would be fun.”

What strikes me as quite odd, is this is a WB-produced property. How they haven't merged this into the Aquaman mythos, is head-shaking.

[johnnystorm]

They could reveal that the new Dallas is just Mark Harris dreaming he was Bobby Ewing...

[ctc]

>How they haven't merged this into the Aquaman mythos, is head-shaking.

Well.... they're both pretty similar, so there's probably no real value tying one into the other.

Don C.

[hedrap]

Not a tie-in. Merge.

Aquaman's name became a branding joke post-Superfriends but especially in the 90's thanks to Family Guy, Adult Swim, etc... It's why WB gave up trying to resuscitate it for film or TV. The post-modern take in New 52 is an admission of how badly damaged its become.

The WB Smallville "spinoff" pilot wasn't really a spinoff, it just had the same producers. WB felt that team might have a template to make Aquaman sellable, so the working title in production was "Tempest Keys" then "Mercy Reef". Only when it was passed on and released for iTunes, did it become "Aquaman".

The problem is a similar to what Marvel has with Sub-Mariner/Namor. They gave up pushing "Sub-Mariner" as the main trademark brand because they found the further you got from WW2, kids didn't know how to pronounce it and the less meaning it had.

But, Marvel had the fallback trademark of "Namor". With Aquaman, they can't fall back on the character identity, because Arthur Curry can't be trademarked since it's a generic name, unlike "Namor"

So, with "Man From Atlantis", they have a valuable title going unused that could make Aquaman a working brand again and MFA has a much better setup to make Aquaman something that stands out from Namor.

[ctc]

>with "Man From Atlantis", they have a valuable title going unused that could make Aquaman a working brand again

It's an interesting idea, but I'm wondering if they're afraid it'd conjure up images of Pattrick Duffy in a speedo.... which might not help. The title "Man From Atlantis" is kinda generic too, which might limit it's usefulness. It's possible among fans that the monicker would put people in mind of Namor instead.

Don C.

[hedrap]

>with "Man From Atlantis", they have a valuable title going unused that could make Aquaman a working brand again

It's an interesting idea, but I'm wondering if they're afraid it'd conjure up images of Pattrick Duffy in a speedo.... which might not help. The title "Man From Atlantis" is kinda generic too, which might limit it's usefulness. It's possible among fans that the monicker would put people in mind of Namor instead.

Don C.

That's a good point. I could see Marvel via Disney suing over Market Confusion. WB would win because MFA is almost 40 years old, but the risk of the lawsuit would probably stop the merge in the diligence stage.