Dr. Strange - Benedict Cumberbatch Cast!

[Timby]

12 Years a Strange.

 

[JD]

Looks like we're going to get another great cast for this one. Marvel continues to impress. I think casting is definitely one place where Marvel is kicking DC's ass. DC has gotten some good actors, but definitely not on the same level as people like Robert Redford, Glenn Close, and Michael Douglas.

 

[kirk55555]

I've only seen this new guy in Serenity, but he did a decent job. I tend to trust Marvel when it comes to casting, so I'm sure he'll do a great job. I wonder if he's the main villain, or if we'll still see Dormammu? I could see them saving Dormammu for a sequel.

 

[JD]

I just read the article on IGN and it says

"Although he’s an enemy in the comics, don’t look for him to be necessarily a completely villainous character," claims Deadline. "Rather, he’s an amalgamation of characters culled from Doctor Strange‘s mythology."

 

[Guy Gardener]

Mordo is that thug from Highschool who bullied you because he was repressing how nice your bum looked like in just the right light.

I always wondered if the Ancient One kept Mordo around for so long, to use as a character building learning tool for a real student, as soon as one turned up... Now, I'm wondering if Mordo was real? If he was an obvious #### who was never going to be the Master of the Mystic Arts, maybe he wasn't some guy with feelings used as a prop to help Steven's development, maybe he was an artifical construct... Or possibly Baron Mordo's existence was completely metaphorical and what really happened, and not how Dr Strange chose to remember what happened, was a battle of wits between the #### half and decent half of Strange's Soul, which really means that Strange was tricked into comitting Half suicide, if he expelled everything that was a dick about himself, and it turned into a real person who hated him.

 

[Captaindemotion]

12 Years a Strange.

Excellent.

 

[Turtletrekker]

The rumor mill is a churning...

Rachel McAdams as female lead (presumably Clea)?

 

[The Nth Doctor]

Aside from the awesomeness of having Rachel McAdams in the film, it'll be cool to see Sherlock Holmes from one universe alongside Irene Adler from another universe...

And I just realized: We could very well have a moment between two Sherlocks at some point.

 

[Turtletrekker]

Some details emerge about the costume and the movie's tone.

"Psychedelic" and "Marvel's Fantasia" were the things that stuck out to me.

 

[Guy Gardener]

1. At first Clea is basically a sex slave bordering on furniture, Stephen plucked from a backward tribal dimension. Then she becomes his apprentice, then she turns out to be Dormammu's niece and in line for the throne of the Dark Dimension, and takes that throne. It's a strong female role by the end, but was too phallocentric in the beginning for a modern audience to tolerate.

2. What if Rachel has been cast as Morganna Le Fay? King Arthur's sister, Merlin's lover, rightful heir to the Throne of Great Britain and the most powerful sorceress in the universe intent on ruling that universe?

 

[RJDiogenes]

I like "psychedelic" and "Fantasia," but I'm not so crazy about "dark palette." Sounds like the villain in Spaceballs II.

 

[Guy Gardener]

I got a good look at the 1978 version of Dr Strange last night.

Dude looked like a lampshade.

 

[The Old Mixer]

"Psychedelic" would be exactly right...I read somewhere that Ditko's Dr. Strange art was a major inspiration for the psychedelic poster art style of the 60s. And, likely fueled by the same affinity, one of the earliest psychedelic "happenings" in the Frisco Bay area, back in 1965, was called "A Tribute to Doctor Strange".

 

[JD]

Some details emerge about the costume and the movie's tone.

"Psychedelic" and "Marvel's Fantasia" were the things that stuck out to me.

Sounds good to me. I can't wait to see the MCU delve into the magical side of things.

 

[Alidar Jarok]

"Psychedelic" would be exactly right...I read somewhere that Ditko's Dr. Strange art was a major inspiration for the psychedelic poster art style of the 60s. And, likely fueled by the same affinity, one of the earliest psychedelic "happenings" in the Frisco Bay area, back in 1965, was called "A Tribute to Doctor Strange".

Yeah, there's a lovely article that touches on that.

Not surprisingly, Strange quickly became the emerging counterculture’s favorite Marvel hero. “I was a child of beatniks,” the writer and occultist Catherine Yronwode2 once said, “and it was an urban legend among us that Ditko smoked grass.” The truth was less far out: “Cartoonist Trina Robbins,” wrote Gerard Jones and Will Jacobs in The Comic Book Heroes, “remembers the day she and some of her East Coast freak friends — many of them cartoonists for the underground newspaper the East Village Other — made a pilgrimage to Marvel Comics to meet the acid-dropping, long-haired creators of Doctor Strange, who had obviously somehow infiltrated the establishment world of superhero publishing. They were stunned to find the crew-cut conservative Sturdy Steve and the lovable but politically vague Stan the Man.”3

Strange wasn’t an acid-in-the-reservoirs kind of guy either. Although he moved fearlessly between realities like a prototype psychonaut, his mission as Sorcerer Supreme was ultimately about keeping the doors of perception closed. Strange could experience all those trippy Ditko dimensions and return to Bleecker Street with his well-trained mind intact; the implication was that ordinary people couldn’t. In one Strange Tales story, two burglars are accidentally transported to another dimension while attempting to rob the Sanctum. After Strange rescues them from an eternity of suffering, they turn themselves in to the nearest beat cop. “Mumbled incoherently — something about you saving them behind a purple veil,” the cop tells Strange. “Pay them no mind, officer!” Strange replies. “Who can fathom the senseless ramblings of the criminal mind?” Who indeed.

But the fact that the early Doctor Strange stories resist close reading as countercultural propaganda didn’t stop them from being received that way by heads eager to anoint their own heroes. If mysticism had permeated the funny books, didn’t that prove that a new age of consciousness was dawning everywhere? Weren’t the signs all there, wasn’t it all connected? One month before Strange Tales no. 110 hit newsstands, a Harvard divinity-school grad student named Walter Pahnke published the results of the so-called “Good Friday Experiment,” a study of the entheogenic properties of psilocybin. Pahnke had conducted his experiments — in which volunteers were dosed inside Boston University’s Marsh Chapel — under the supervision of Dr. Timothy Leary and Dr. Richard Alpert’s Harvard Psylocybin Project. Leary and Alpert were dismissed from Harvard in ’63 after undergrad and future alternative-health kingpin Andrew Weil snitched to the Crimson about the nature of their research; four years later, in India, Alpert would find his own Ancient One, the Hindu holy man Neem Karoli Baba, or Maharaj-ji, who’d give him the name Ram Dass. “There’s a great series of comic books called the Doctor Strange comics,” Ram Dass would tell an audience of health professionals in 1970, before recounting the plot of “When Meet the Mystic Minds,” from Strange Tales no. 137, in which Doctor Strange strains against the veil of maya while dueling psychically with the Ancient One: “Unless I can shatter this web of wonderment, all is lost! My mission will be forgotten — I will be doomed to a life of aimless IMAGERY!”

The Lee-Ditko period on Strange Tales coincided with the publication of G.I. Gurdjieff’s spiritual travelogue Meetings With Remarkable Men, Philip Kapleau’s The Three Pillars of Zen, and Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, in which alternate realities become accessible through the use of alien hallucinogens. Meanwhile, on the converted school bus carrying the Merry Pranksters across the country in 1964, Tom Wolfe — reporting 1968’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test — found a serene Ken Kesey sitting “for hours on end reading comic books, absorbed in the plunging purple Steve Ditko shadows of Doctor Strange attired in capes and chiaroscuro, saying: ‘How could they have known that this gem was merely a device to bridge dimensions! It was a means to enter the dread purple dimension — from our own world!’ Sandy may wander … off the bus, but it remains all Kesey. Doctor Strange!” One year later, more than a thousand San Francisco flower children packed the Longshoremen’s Hall in North Beach for a concert put on by a group of hippies turned promoters who called themselves the Family Dog; the show, which featured the Charlatans, the Great Society, and Jefferson Airplane, was advertised as “A Tribute to Dr. Strange.” In 1968, the Sorcerer Supreme showed up in subliminal form on the cover of Pink Floyd’s A Saucerful of Secrets “On a mountain range, I’m Doctor Strange,” Marc Bolan sang on T. Rex’s “Mambo Sun” in 1971. By then Marvel had at least come close to acknowledging Strange’s status as an unwitting godfather to the Children of the Revolution, by licensing his image to a manufacturer of blacklight posters.

 

[Guy Gardener]

Any love for Rintrah?

A freaking Minatoaur as Stephen's apprentice.

(Although a later writer brought him back as the big bad who was pissed that he flunked out.)

 

[HIjol]

On all that is Trippy, when I grow up, I want to be a Prototype Psychonaut!

<searching "Distance Learning" courses...Far Out!!!>

 

[The Old Mixer]

Thanks for sharing, Alidar. (Was having trouble trying to quote the post for some reason.)

I should add that Dr. Strange was a character that I had no interest in when I was a kid, but I read the black and white Essentials volumes several years back and was very impressed with where the Lee/Ditko run went...a lot of early MU world-building in there, and what started as a very episodic semi-anthology series became what was probably one of Marvel's first fully-serialized comics in that era.

 

[Alidar Jarok]

I read the Lee/Ditko run on Marvel Unlimited and it was a lot of fun (having the issues be 8 pages long really helped burn through it). There were some other stories that I wanted to read but the selection online isn't all that great.

 

[RJDiogenes]

Ditko's art on Dr. Strange was really emblematic of what was going on in the 60s at the time. I'd love to see a movie try to capture that level of surrealism. I doubt if it will happen, though.