It looks interesting, but I don't see many names there that can speak about Stan Lee. Who else besides Gerry Conway is still alive that they ought to be interviewing? Jim Shooter, Roy Thomas...

It would be a ratings dud with comic creators and no movie stars.

I think the emphasis is going to be on his legacy rather than the man himself, and to that any of the guests they have, who are all working in the wake of that legacy, can speak to.

-M

The documentary is on ABC, which like Marvel is owned by Disney. Essentially this is a promo piece for future Marvel movies. So it won't be informative, but it will stoke the publicity fires. Participation in projects like this was probably written into the contracts of the film actors. Disney is smart to do this. I grow in my conviction that Disney ought to be hosting an annual Marvel "cosplay and celebrities" convention at Disney World.

By the same token, simply working in comics doesn't make someone more qualified to talk about Stan Lee or his cultural legacy than anyone else either. Just because you work in the same field as someone doesn't make you any more knowledgeable or credible about an individual in that field than anyone else. Few alive working in comics worked with Stan, they just worked on stuff he helped create, just like the movie and tv folks. The folks who worked with Stan who could really speak to it-Ditko, Kirby et. al are no longer with us, and probably wouldn't actually say things people wanted to hear as a celebration of Stan due to the differences and disputes they had, so you are left with people who will speak about what Stan's work meant to them (or in your example, people speaking of what the Beatles' music meant to them), in which case, everyone's opinion/insights are on the same footing.

I don't think anything entitled a Celebration of Stan Lee was ever meant to be a serious critical examination of his life or work, but just what it says, a bunch of people celebrating hi work and what it meant to them. Any serious examination or study of his legacy would have to start getting into the nitty gritty of who did what on the heavy lifting of creating the Marvel characters and critically examining the truthfulness of a lot of the well known Stan anecdotes about their creation, etc. and that would open a lot of cans of worms, and that's not something that is going to be a part of a "celebration" of Stan, or something that is going to air as a prime time special on American network television. So you have to temper your expectations on what something actually is rather than what you think it should be. If a fluff piece celebration of Stan doesn't interest you, that's fine, but that's all it was ever meant to be, so calling it out for not being that is kind of missing the point.

-M

Of course it does. Especially if they knew and/or worked with Stan Lee. Working in the same industry and possibly even having worked with Lee, a la Roy Thomas, would absolutely mean that they can talk with greater authority and insight than, say, Cobie Smulders or Tom Hiddleston.




I think it does. The very fact that you do the same job will give you a greater level of insight into the subject's work than someone from outside of the industry. Now, that's not to say that it's in any way a necessary requirement, of course; if you were a comics historian who had written about Lee at length, for instance, you'd likely still know more about him than a comic writer who's not particularly into old Marvel stuff. But to strike a Beatles analogy again, a world famous musician like Paul Simon or Bruce Springsteen would definitely be a more knowledgeable or credible interviewee on, say, the subject of the Beatles' guitar playing than some luvvie like James Corden, who happened to star in a Beatles-related film once.




You keep repeating this "the problem is with you, not with the material" rationalisation a lot in the forum, and it just doesn't make sense. In fact, worse than that, it's a logical fallacy. In order for your line of reasoning to have any merit, we would have to assume that every comic or film or book or, in this case, documantary is absolutely equal in terms of its objective quality. That's neither true, nor possible.

It's long been a principal of aesthetic literary and artistic criticism to put the viewer at the centre of critical analysis in order to evaluate the relative merits of different pieces of art or popular culture. You can and should temper that opinion with objective criticism, of course, but there is always a subjective "eye of the beholder" element in any aesthetic criticism.

Subjective and aesthetic criticism is what this forum exists for. So, to complain about its presence at the CCF is well and truly a case of "missing the point", to quote you.

In fairness to Kevin Smith, who you've singled out, he's actually worked with Stan Lee quite a bit over the years, and probably knows the man a lot better than most of the celebrities on that list. I don't disagree with your point though, but even if they were to make a more thorough documentary with proper historians and as many of his older collaborators they could find, it wouldn't be unexpected to see Kevin Smith in that as well.