Spoilers DC's Legends of Tomorrow - Season 4
- Thread starter dahj
- Start date
Wow, John Cattentine is actually shown smoking a cigarette.
Like the "bellybutton moratorium" of the 1960ies - with a show like this (IE that kids watch) - you ain't going to see a network censor allow a main character to be promoting smoking in any fashion.
That's rather different, since having a bellybutton doesn't kill people.
The point was: It's something current Censors see as a non-crossable line.
And my point was that this time, unlike that other time, there's a valid reason for that. It's not some arbitrary unfairness like the bellybutton thing.
Smoking's bad kids, do like the Legends and drink hard liquor instead!
I was going to say that cigarettes are also harmful to the people around the user, but that's true of excessive alcohol consumption too, what with drunk driving and the fact that the majority of all violent crimes are committed by people under the influence of alcohol.
Which to me seems like it's a good thing for people to not smoke in real life but I don't see why it's a negative in fiction, especially if it's part of the character. Did he smoke in the comic books? It would seem strange to me that it would be okay for him to smoke in comics which are also created for kids but not on tv.
Jason
Because kids like to emulate the people they see on TV and movies. They take up smoking because peer pressure and the media make it look "cool" and grown-up. For generations, tobacco companies sponsored TV programs and films and actively pressured them to show smoking as a ubiquitous, cool, romantic thing as a form of product placement, and it created a major public health crisis. Tobacco commercials were banned in the '70s or so, but the onscreen depictions of characters smoking continued and came to be seen as inappropriate as public opinion turned more against the tobacco industry. So networks and movie studios increasingly banned depictions of smoking as something of an atonement for their past role in promoting it. When they do show characters smoking, they try to avoid making it look cool and glamorous, and they try to limit it to productions that aren't aimed at juvenile audiences, since teens and pre-teens are the ones most vulnerable to taking up the habit.
The problem in this case, then, is that Legends is a show that probably has a fair number of young viewers, and that Constantine, for all his flaws, is a pretty cool character. So they have to be circumspect about his smoking.
Wow, no. Really, really no. The comics that Constantine was created for and developed in were mostly very much not for kids. He was introduced in Alan Moore's run on Saga of the Swamp Thing, which was the first DC book to ditch the Comics Code and tell stories geared to adult readers. That book spawned DC's adult-oriented Vertigo imprint, which was where Constantine got his own series, Hellblazer. Vertigo comics were R-rated stuff, with violence, sex, nudity, drugs, graphic profanity, you name it. The TV version of Constantine, even on the rather dark NBC series, was substantially toned down from the comics. Recall that the Keanu Reeves Constantine movie was R-rated. And the Constantine: City of Demons animated webseries and movie (not in continuity with the Arrowverse, but still starring Matt Ryan) are relatively close to the comics and have really intense, gory horror images and violence.
Legends looks to be as wacky, crazy, fun as ever. Legends returns April 1!
Mid season promo:
Mid season promo: