Posted in: Movies, TV | Tagged: Comics, jerry siegel, joe shuster, movies, superman, superman legacy

Superman: Legacy: Making The Case For (and Against) Those Red Trunks

One of the big Superman: Legacy mysteries is if James Gunn is going with the red trunks for the costume - here's a case for and against it.

Fans keep pressuring James Gunn to reveal whether there should be read trunks in Superman: Legacy. The most hotly contested and controversial topic about Superman in the last fifteen or twenty years has been his red trunks. Should Superman keep wearing his underwear on the outside? Not casting or politics, but the trunks. Or should he go without? All the hipsters and "grownups" think Superman looks dumb with his red trunks on the outside of his costume, while nostalgia fans and purists like the red trunks.

"You wouldn't believe the amount of pleading and upset I get based around trunks or no trunks. To me, not the most important aspect of Superman or his story. But so many strong feelings!" Gunn mentioned in his Threads posts about the progress of Superman: Legacy. "This might be an extreme point of view, the costume has changed in many, many ways throughout the years. They are all (or mostly all) valid versions of Superman, with or without trunks, with or without yellow S on cape. with or without black around the S, with or without mullet, and on and on and on."

It's easy to make fun of Superman's red trunks. It makes people feel sooooo smart to say, "Oh! He looks so dumb wearing his underwear on the outside!" Well, there's a reason for that. Superman's costume – and superhero costumes in the 1940s, in general, were inspired by circus strongmen's costumes and professional wrestlers of the time who wore trunks on the outside partly as an aesthetic choice and partly for censorship (you can guess). You could argue that it's modern times, and Superman doesn't need red trunks on the outside because he doesn't need that considering most comics don't show him having a big bulge. Having the trunks on the outside is a part of fashion and design history, and to just say it's dumb without knowing where it came from is just ignorant and petty. So far, the only reason for naysayers now is that it looks "dumb." Or that no red trunks makes the costume look more streamlined. Do we really need Superman's costume to be streamlined? Aren't the red trunks part of Superman's legacy after all?

There is an argument to have the red trunks on Superman, and that is an aesthetic one. The red trunks break up the uniform all-blue monotony of his costume so he looks less blandly blue. To just have him in all blue makes him look like a big blue dildo. The red-and-blue combination is generally pleasing to the eye; that's why Superman's creators, Jerry Siegel & Joe Shuster, chose the red trunks with the blue bodysuit after all. If it's good enough for the American flag, why isn't it good enough for Superman? If you love Superman, why would you want to get rid of an artistic choice from his original authors? Again, it's Superman: Legacy, after all, and Superman is, in the end, Siegel and Shuster's legacy.

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