JULY 17th - I am Batman

On this day in 1935, Variety printed the famous headline STICKS NIX HICK PIX. The article detailed that rural American audiences weren’t showing up to see movies about rural Americans. So moviegoers from the “Sticks” aka rural America were “nixing” (rejecting) motion pictures (pix) about “hicks” aka people from the sticks. Clever little use of language, or slanguage as Variety called it. It’s also pleasant to look at, don’t you think? The repetition of the ck’s and x’s is quite aesthetically pleasing. But it also makes sense. We were in the middle of The Great Depression, and while you have to be careful of shoving wealth and opulence in struggling people’s faces (for example I wouldn’t have shown a Kardashian Marathon), I doubt they would want to go to the movies to see the dismal circumstances of their everyday lives. They just wanted to escape. Can’t fault them for that. I’ve wanted to escape before. Like the time I saw my parents mugged and murdered outside of an opera. I wanted to escape then. But I stuck it out until I found the perfect opportunity to disappear, walking away from tremendous family wealth, and travelled the world in anonymity, learning a variety of deadly defense tactics until I was finally arrested for stealing food from my own company. A guy has to eat. Luckily a strange, interesting man who looked a lot like the badass from Taken who killed Marco from Tropoje took me under his wing and taught me even more deadly tricks. He basically turned me into a badass ninja. I could have killed Marco from Tropoje myself. But then he wanted me to return to my home city and destroy the whole thing. But I was like, nah man. That ain’t cool, Bro Diddley. So I left and returned to my city. Only I wanted to change the city. I wanted to take it back from the criminals and the thugs. So I became a symbol. A symbol for them to fear. Okay, so that was actually an amalgamation of Batman's origin story as detailed by Batman and Batman Begins. But that’s what I’m talking about. Hicks from the sticks wouldn’t have nixed those pix. Because sometimes you just need to escape. Like the time I was bitten by a radioactive spider and then saw my uncle shot by a common criminal that I easily could have stopped…

This Day has been Marked.

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