Underdogs

Why are underdog stories so great? Sure, many of us identify with those nice guys who always finish last. Maybe we're inspired or motivated to see someone overcome impossible odds. Honestly, it's a little boring when a person is equipped to face his or her challenges and accomplishes things with ease. It's so much better when someone is pushed to the brink of failure, or actually fails, and then makes a recovery no one expected, even the underdog himself. It's why I get out of bed every morning, and possibly why I maintain an audience here. One day there's going to be a post where I get the girl, score a high-paying and secure job, get my own place, and generally break out of my shell and achieve the restrained potential no one, including myself, is aware of.

Today is not that day.

Instead, I'll be reviewing some more famous underdogs, in response to the latest Tell It To Me Tuesday from fellow Blogger's Choice Award Nominee Janet. In addition to the things I normally write about, I can also be considered an underdog in the Awards at this point, but things may yet change.

Here are my underdogs:

5) Why is Scrubs an underdog? It's a popular sitcom with a huge fan base and a great cast, with Zach Braff well on his way to a successful film career. It's lasted six seasons, and may in fact gain a seventh. However, due to being owned by its creator, Bill Lawrence and not the network on which it airs, the show has always been treated like an unwanted stepchild. The timeslots would change constantly, and it aired on at least three different days for five years before finally landing on Thursday nights where it always belonged. It was rarely advertised, and episodes were shown once, with no reruns available before it finally became syndicated. And even though ABC will grab it and air its seventh season, the current network keeps talking about its “final episodes”. For a show to move around a lot and get poor advertising, and still attract a loyal fanbase who followed it wherever and whenever it moved is truly the story of an underdog overcoming adversity.

4) Not every underdog story is going to end in success. Sometimes fiction imitates reality. I always rooted for Marc Price's Skippy over Scott Valentine's Nick on Family Ties, but Justine Bateman's Mallory could never see Skippy as more than a friend with a puppy dog crush. Nick at least wasn't a bad guy, but he was a complete moron. Looking back, I can see how he was a better match for the equally dim Mallory and Skippy could definitely be better off with someone more his intellectual equal. Nevertheless, I went through a period in my life where I greeted people with Nick's “aaaay!” and tried to dumb myself down. It's a shame my parents never let me wear leather jackets or grow my hair long, although I did ultimately become an artist. I'm starting to wonder if television ruined my life...

3) I'm now going to ruin Major League for anyone who hasn't seen it, and if you don't want to know the ending, feel free to skip ahead. I'm not a sports fan. The only time I followed a team was in college when I played in the pep band for basketball games. Watching baseball, blasphemous as this may be, bores me. At least in basketball or football there's constant movement in one direction or another, and not a lot of running in a circle. My friends had a hard time convincing me to play as a kid, and I usually had to be coerced. When I saw this movie with them for the first time however, I was motivated to get out on a field as soon as possible and play ball. It might not be most people's idea of a great movie, but a comedy about a bunch of screw-up ballplayers assembled to fail, only to prove their owner wrong and make an amazing winning comeback had me cheering every time. Besides, you get to see future “president” Dennis Haysbert curse out his voodoo idol and find the strength within himself to finally hit the ball. The characters in the film prove themselves by the end, and even actors like Wesley Snipes became well-known and went on to bigger things.

2) I guess I should put at least one real person on this list. I'm tempted to go with Joss Whedon, because who knew how big Buffy would become, or the kind of credibility a former Roseanne scribe would get from taking a film that had suffered changes imposed on him before making it to the big screen and making it into a series true to his original vision five years later? Instead though, I'm going with Judd Apatow, who might be well on his way to a Whedonesque following of his own. I've never seen Freaks and Geeks, though I'm sure it was the kind of series that would either resonate with me positively or hit so close to home as to be painful. It was his next short-lived series, Undeclared, that I got hooked on. It was a quirky comedy about college life, complete with losers and underdogs and cute girls. It did lose some steam when the geek actually got his dream girl, but maybe Apatow knew FOX wasn't a network that might give him a chance to tell that tale over more than one season. Yes, it's among the many great shows that network cut down. Remember when they let underdogs like The X-files actually have a chance to gain an audience? Undeterred, Apatow moved on to movies, and while Anchorman at the very least had some hilarious moments I appreciated, his first great movie is The 40-year Old Virgin. This guy's career is definitely blowing up, and his new movie Knocked Up not only looks funny but stars Undeclared alums Seth Rogen and Jay Baruchel. Like Whedon, Apatow has built a reserve of good actors that frequently appear in his projects.

1) With all the talk of Spider-man 3 lately, I doubt choosing Peter Parker here will surprise any of my regular readers. A nerdy high school orphan lives with his aunt and uncle, gets picked on by kids at school, and can never get girls to notice him. After being bitten by a radioactive spider, he gains the proportionate speed, strength, and agility of arachnids. In the comic books, he used his natural genius to create wrist devices that spun an artificial webbing, but after the movies included web spinning among the abilities he inherited from the spider, he gained this power in the comics as well. In both continuities, he learns a hard lesson after trying to use his abilities for personal gain, and his uncle is killed. He becomes a hero, but while he does all these amazing things in costume, he's still something of a loser without the mask. Even with the mask the public fears him, including his own aunt, and the newspapers call him a menace. Eventually he uses his freelance photography career to get a college degree and become a teacher, and he marries his dream girl. It's the best possible underdog story, the classic ”Ugly Duckling” scenario. A glasses-wearing loner geek becomes a leader for the next generation, husband to a super model, and a superhero. Of course the thing about Peter Parker is that when things go really well for him, something bad is always around the corner. Will Spider-man be alone again after an upcoming storyline potentially negates the existence of his marriage, as some fans speculate? I hope not, but I know that this is one character who will always pick himself up, dust himself off, and start all over again.

That's just what underdogs do, and the distinction between an “underdog” and a “loser”.