Spoiler warning:
Ever since I watched this film on its NBC premiere, there's been a question in my mind about it. I've asked this on a message board at the "Comics Should Be Good" site, to no avail, and thought I'd ask here, since if it is correct, it should be in the article. Now the two immediate predecessors to this movie included adaptations of other Marvel Comics heroes, Thor and Daredevil respectively, and this one was initially announced as featuring She-Hulk (not a follow-up to this one that never happened, which is what the article claims--I'll change that after this is done). That, obviously, didn't happen, but what we do have, specifically Elizabeth Gracen's character Jasmin, reeks of being developed from their character the Black Widow, aka Natasha Romanoff. It has long been my understanding that the Widow was forced to work for Soviet intelligence by having her husband's life held over her, eventually learning that her costumed superior IS he, a revelation that gave her the freedom to defect (I admit that her Wiki article doesn't quite jibe with this, but it's not that far off, and I've found some articles here that were so; note my rewrite of the origin of DC's the Creeper). In this film, Jasmin discovers that her superior whom she has never seen and knows only by a code name is the sister who has been threatened to make her carry out her assignments. Add in the black bodysuit she wears in several scenes (compare it to BW's 70s costume), and she is at least as close to Marvel's Widow as the Thor seen in the first of this trilogy was to his comics basis, other than the names being the same in the earlier instance. Was She-Hulk replaced with Natasha, then that property was dropped or withdrawn or something too late for the character to be completely excised, only just enough time for a superficial rewrite to thinly (very thinly) disguise her (the titular event—the Hulk's death—comes out of left field, further supporting the eleventh-hour re-write theory)? Anybody know one way or the other (not that there's much room for doubt on the basic point, i.e., Jasmin = Natasha)? Ted Watson 19:48, 10 September 2007 (UTC)Reply
