If Superman were real, he wouldn't get "bored" of saving humanity.  Perhaps you and Trey would, and that's your right, but Clark Kent would not.  And it's not because he's got superpowers and as such doesn't have to be afraid (which isn't true, by the by), it's because if Clark Kent were you and had no superpowers he'd readily dive in front of a train to save a stranger by the very nature of his personality.

I want to have this debate sometime, but I fear it's kind of pointless since you seem to be basing your opinions on Supes on misinformation. 

Oh hey. There's a thing going on in here.

Okay, so Dr. Manhattan is not Superman. Superman has been through like a million different iterations over the years — or so I've heard; I'm not a comic-book fan myself — and the pattern seems to be that he gets more and more powerful (by virtue of having lazy writers give him a new ability to get him out of the story of the week or whatever), and then some mini-reboot knocks him back down to a less omnipotent level.

Dr. Manhattan, on the other hand, is God. I think the point of the character is that a truly omnipotent character would — or at least might — be inhuman, but if the authors were trying to say that about Superman, they were beating up a straw … superman. Whatever.

I know there's a pretty good age spread among the Down in Front crowd, meaning the on-air talent and the forum peoples too. I think Teague still has some of his baby teeth, and Trey is about six minutes from Methuselah. So there are at least two natural points of view on Watchmen: the pre- and post-Cold War perspectives. For my part, I caught just the tail end of the Cold War. Cuba was over, but Afghanistan wasn't, and short-range missiles were in western Europe, and nobody knew anything. There was a very real and tangible chance of nuclear war. There were buttons, and fingers were on them. It was part of the zeitgeist at the time.

The film adaptation of Watchmen did the right thing by making it a period piece, because taking the story out of the Cold War context would have gutted it. But at the same time, I wonder how people born after Gorbachev — hell, maybe even born after the dissolution of the USSR — can really relate to the whole conceit. Does that kind of pessimism seem melodramatic? Cause it is today, for sure. But back then … back then it seemed like history was a sentence, and there was a period at the end of it. We hadn't gotten there yet, but it was coming. Even in the late 1980s we still talked of the year 2000 like it was impossibly distant, because we knew, deep down, there was a very real possibility it would never come. Or rather that it would come, but by then nobody would be keeping calendars any more.

Ultimately, I think Watchmen is a product of its time. That's not a criticism. Just an observation.

Zarban, you have a major flaw in your premise. Dr. Manhattan never worked with Ozy, and probably never would.

"People seem to regard Watchmen as great because it supposedly depicts what would really happen if superheroes were real, but it really depicts more like the worst case scenario of what could happen."

There is a difference between a "Superhero" in the classic sense that we know it, and the superheroes of Watchmen. The superheroes of watchmen are not these shining perfect specimens of the human existence, they are real human beings that simply decided to do this. They are as fucked up as the next guy and they deal with it like any human would (As much as I love Batman, how many people would actually exile themselves for how ever many years and learn to become one with themselves, er whatever actually goes on up there. No, they get shitfaced and scream at the moon.)

I think it's not so much a case of "If superheroes were real, as it is , "what if people tried to be Superheros" (The Doc notwithstanding).

I actually just finished reading the novel (Like yesterday actually) and I thought it was probably one of the coolest things I have ever read. Namely because these are real people aspiring to be something more, and some fail, some succeed, and some just get fucked up beyond any imagining.

"Besides, of all the wars superbeings could win, Vietnam wasn't one of them. Machine guns, explosions, and flame-throwers? That's exactly what US troops used!"

You seem to be missing the part where the Doc was leveling the forest from the roots up. Thus making flamethrowers, explosions and machine guns a little more useful.

I'm sure I have more to say on this, but I can't think of it at the moment.

Agreed. Especially since they already had an ongoing workig relationship in the movie. How much of a stretch would it be for Ozzy to say, "Hey, this energy project thing is going to do a lot of good and all, but how about we do something really big picture?" do you really think Doc would turn him down?

"I don't mean to piss on your love of the film. But I just don't think it's quite the story you want it to be. It's basically a noir mystery. It's about very damaged people doing bad things and trying to get out from under them and mostly not succeeding. That's great and kind of cool, but man is it bleak."

Dude, this is WHY I love it.

You say it's bleak that that somehow makes it not worth watching or invalid. That what I am having a hard time understanding. That's the point of the series/movie. It's the story of these normal people (Granted some of them arn't probably the most balanced, but then you get the entire range of the spectrum too) who either decided to become superheroes or get forced into it. And it's the story of them in a cold war environment (And you expect a happy go lucky story perhaps?) dealing with trying to be these people and dealing with the world they live in.