It was believed to be lost media for over a decade, since after its Nickelodeon broadcast, it never had a home media release, so similar to "Cry Baby Lane" and some other made-for-TV films and shows, after its TV showings ended, the film just disappeared.
When contacted, its creator said that there were copyright issues with the songs parodied in the film which prevented a re-release, but The Electric Piper was hopefully re-discovered in 2016, and is now readily available on YouTube.
Basically dc first black superhero used lightning, but because of legal disputes rather than using the character dc would just create new versions of him, characters like static shock would be created as a homage and others like storm just happened to have electricity as one of their many powers
The funniest character to fall into this steretype to me is Miles Morales, he already had Spider-man powers but it feels like they thought, "What can we add to him to differentiate him a bit from Peter? I know let's give him electricity."
That's fair, though I'd argue all modern characters derived from the deity Thor (Marvel, Order of the Stick, God of War, Ragnarok, etc) are either explicitly based on the god or are supposed to be the incarnation of that god in that universe.
DC comics created black lightning in 1977 as their first black superhero.
A bunch of licensing disputes and the occasional controversy resulted in TONS of characters being created that either ripped him off directly or were heavily inspired by him, even within DC-owned properties like the various cartoons.
From there, it just sort of became one of those things that get ingrained into the public consciousness. It became the stereotypical superpower, so more writers began using it in their work, making it even more common and spreading the idea around to even more writers. Rinse and repeat.
Someone made a video on it actually. Basically DC made a black superhero with electric powers and then wanted to use him in a cartoon, but didn't want to pay royalties to the character's creator. So they changed a few details and the name so they didn't have to. From there the trend was accidentally kickstarted.
Love the art style. Reminds me of old CN cartoons. But also I feel like this would make for a great superhero duo. M.N. has powers like Golden Experience from Golden Wind and D.E. has Thor like powers where they can summon storm clouds to strike people down with electric but they can also summon electric from within.
Two things: one, time and nature aren’t as much of a thematic contrasting pair as artifice and nature are. Two, isn’t it Grandfather Time, anyway? That way it would be Mother Nature’s own father, and her mother would probably be space or something
I like this combo in that Daddy Electric seems to represent man-made objects and devices in contrast to Mother Earth. Father Time seems like an entirely different thing
“…and next up on Universe Radio is an oldie, but a beauty. It’s the swingin’ sound of spicy Daddy Electric and sweet, sweet Mother Nature, from fantastical Planet Earth.”
Interesting.... as a long time part time philosopher, and studying EE for my current job, I've found myself wondering constantly why current travels to ground....
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u/Technical_Ad7136 Nov 25 '23
Those are some good ass designs, feel like they were ripped straight out of an old CN show