Unraveling the Ravelo Franchise - An Actual Post
Just when you thought I had finally let go of my fixation with the superbayanis created by Mars Ravelo, along comes Mars Ravelo's Captain Barbell, GMA7's latest telefantaserye offering and one immediately wrote off as another attempt by Mars Ravelo's heirs to fuck his corpse.
At least that's what the copyright holders do when they're not complaining about panty shield ads and writing mean letters to PAG-ASA and basically acting out irascible John Byrne-like behavior. I've said it before: they're small-minded capitalizing ninnies whose only concern is overprotection of a legacy that won't die.
But can you blame me? The ill-conceived treatment of these so-called national icons is a direct result of their state as sacrosanct properties. They remain eternally unchanged and for the most part, and this leads to Barbell and Darna being reduced into uninspired Superman and Wonder Woman analogues (and there ARE such things as inspired analogues).
I've never had anything against the telefantaserye medium, honestly. Long-form episodic structure is a common trait of the most locally-loved dayuhan culture, the Amerikanonical classics, if you will. The problem is that most local show producers are using it as an excuse for excessively decompressed storytelling.
This storytelling approach is what pretty much killed my enthusiasm for Mars Ravelo's Darna, which preferred to focus on the woe-is-me travails of Narda and the minutiae of her family's hardships. Rather than devote themselves to establishing internal character traits, the writers choose to develop external conflicts that tell us nothing about Narda and her struggles with the power and responsibility of being Darna.
Mars Ravelo's Captain Barbell is not without this problem either, though it is definitely a step up in terms of production values. There's definitely an improvement in how actors are composited with special effects, although there is still some odd weightlessness to explosions and airborne combat. But my chief problem with the show is that like Darna, it supposes that constant abuse is the way to earn a character some audience sympathy.
The wrongheaded assumption is that civilian alteregos must be pushovers compared to their super-selves, one derived from superficial readings of the superhero/alterego dynamics of Spider-Man/Peter Parker and Clark Kent/Superman. But there's absolutely no interiority in a character we're meant to assume is 'the hero' just because he/she is suffering from ill-deserved abuse.
Our superbayani to be, the meek Tengteng (Richard Guiterrez) pretty much spends his screen time being mistreated by most every student in Maravello High School for no reason at all and spends the rest of it wordlessly angsting over his problems --- his adopted family's hardships and his unrequited love for krush ng campus Leah (Rhian Denise Ramos, who still can't act her way out of a paper bag, but I'm sure the malaswa out there would like to taste her McJelly).
Like Angel Locsin's Narda, we don't get a glimpse of what really makes Tengteng tick; of what lies beyond those surface emotions of romantic longing for Leah and his attempts to counter his friendlessness in his stilted friendship with Levi (Patrick Garcia), the impulsive son of wealthy corporate patriarch Viel (Richard Gomez). There is no there there in this Captain Barbell, except for another adolescent empowerment metaphor.
...To Be Continued