Inspiration comes to people from a variety of sources. Take Gwen Stefani for example, we only got ‘Hollaback Girl‘ because she really hated Courtney Love. For a Marvel character like Iron Man, you’d think that Stan Lee created him as a critique on technology or because he wanted to parody billionaire playboys.
As it turns out, today I learned that Iron Man was created by Stan Lee as a way to challenge himself while trolling Marvel fans.
Speaking of trolling, the GOAT team talk about how Pornhub created a parody website in the name of COVID-19 relief on ‘It’s Been A Big Day For…’ below:
Iron Man was first created in the early 1960s during the Cold War. It was certainly a time of tension around the world and Stan Lee thought it would be fun to create a character who would go completely against the times and what Marvel fans liked.
Speaking about it on the DVD commentary for Robert Downey Jr.’s first Iron Man film, Stan recalled giving himself a “dare” and the character gradually came from that.
“I think I gave myself a dare. It was the height of the Cold War. The readers, the young readers, if there was one thing they hated, it was war, it was the military … So I got a hero who represented that to the hundredth degree.
To do this, Stan created a checklist of characteristics Marvel fans at the time would hated: rich, industrialist, makes weapons, provides said weapons to the army, and is generally an arsehole. The next step was to take this dick-ish character, force him down the “throats” of fans, and make them like him despite his flaws.
“He was a weapons manufacturer, he was providing weapons for the Army, he was rich, he was an industrialist … I thought it would be fun to take the kind of character that nobody would like, none of our readers would like, and shove him down their throats and make them like him … And he became very popular.”
As history would show us, the dare Stan Lee set himself backfired a bit considering how popular Iron Man became. Stan’s dare went even further backwards when Robert Downey Jr. slipped into the Iron Man suit and made Tony Stark stupidly likable despite being a terrible person.
In saying all that, Stan certainly wouldn’t have complained about Iron Man’s success since no one sets out to create a comic book character with the intention to fail.
Stan Lee was certainly one of a kind and his motivation in creating Iron Man to troll fans just shows that sometimes the best things were nothing but dumb jokes to begin with.
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