While Marvel Entertainment continues to explore aliens and science-fiction storylines in their movies and TV shows, Amazon Prime’s The Boys is set to embark on a trip through the infamous 1950s. Announced last Friday, July 26th, at San Diego’s Comic-Con, the new prequel to the popular show is called Vought Rising. The announcement is certainly generating buzz, so what are the things we know about the new show so far?
What Is The Boys?
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It’s well known that The Boys uses its fictional characters, spaces, and events to deliver a rough critique of our reality. By adding layers to how the characters’ powers work and analyzing how they use and misuse them, the show asks whether those powers falling can corrupt a good person or if that person has always been corrupted. By highlighting the duality between heroic and corrupted use of power, The Boys definitively breaks the idealistic, fantasized image people have about modern superheroes.
So What Is Vought Rising?
While the previous season of The Boys explores a contemporary scenario full of movements based on impulsive beliefs, social media, films, and the explosion in media consumption, Vought Rising takes place at a time when these new media are merely emerging. Scrolling on phone screens transforms into flipping through old newspapers; social media selfies become black-and-white photos on a nightstand full of used cigarettes.
On radios, the soft sounds of old-fashioned voices hum in the air. While the light shines on the end of World War II, the shadows of a quieter one take shape: the technological advances of the Cold War. The show looks like it will focus heavily on how the evils of the main “pharmaceutical” company hide in its self-representation as a “good” force in this context of scientific experimentation.
Pulp Fiction
According to actor Jensen Ackles, who plays Soldier Boy on The Boys, Vought Rising is a “lurid pulp saga prequel” that focuses on both his character and the Stormfront character played by Aya Kash. In The Boys‘ storyline, Stormfront, also known as “Liberty” or Clara Vought, travels to the U.S. with her husband, who is involved in Operation Paperclip, the historical U.S. program where the government facilitated the escape of Nazi scientists and gave them powerful positions that significantly affected the Cold War landscape. Soldier Boy, meanwhile, is used by the government as a figure of war propaganda. In both shows, these characters provide a strong critique of the forces that place dangerous people in powerful positions.
In the 1940s and 1950s, two art movements emerged: film noir and pulp fiction. Noir was a lush yet lustful genre that revolved around dark atmospheres, femme fatales, and detectives investigating through the corrupt world. Pulp fiction followed mysteries, lurid crimes, horror, and action, focusing on sexual and violent themes, and featured suggestive covers made of cheap materials. Both, the noir and the pulp, shared the U.S epoque; mysteries, murders, action and sensuality were what surrounded 1950s, the time where Vought Rising would take place, evoking the post-war context; the secret, shadowy schemes by the government and individual people.
Conclusion
With their biting social critique of manipulative governmental and personal powers and the silent way people who want to expose the truth have to operate, the showrunners on The Boys have shown how acclaimed heroes can become fatal villains. Vought Rising promises to deliver more satire, reflexive stories, characteristic fights, and bloody explosions that fans of the original show have gotten used to.
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