{"id":16947,"date":"2011-06-10T10:00:30","date_gmt":"2011-06-10T17:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/?p=16947"},"modified":"2018-02-14T10:02:59","modified_gmt":"2018-02-14T18:02:59","slug":"movie-madness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/movie-madness\/","title":{"rendered":"Movie Madness 2011: A Look Back"},"content":{"rendered":"

Movie Madness 2011 has come and gone. We’ve followed the tournament for a good three months, as we watched some of our favorite cinematic characters bite the dust while others moved on to dominate. In the end, there could only be one, true champion\u2026
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After all the battles, after all the dust has settled, one movie character stands triumphantly over the rest. The winner is, indeed, the Dark Lord of the Sith himself: Darth Vader. As I’ve mentioned before, I initially hesitated putting Vader in the tournament at all, because of his overpowering might and popularity. However, there were a few times throughout the tournament (notably against Tony Stark\/Iron Man) that Vader could feasibly have stumbled. A few opponents in the tournament gave him all he could handle, but in the end, we have to give it up for him. Apparently, good doesn’t always win, because evil usually is more badass.<\/p>\n

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Vader isn’t the only success story in the Movie Madness Tournament O’ Death. Oh no, there were quite a few characters who had great runs. My favorite story of the tournament had to be Alice from the ‘Resident Evil’ movies. She ended up in a deadlock (the only tie in the entire tournament) in the very first round with L\u00e9on from ‘The Professional’. The battle was so close, in fact, that I had already wrote the next day’s Movie Madness article declaring L\u00e9on as the winner. It came right down to the wire, but in the case of a tie, the movie character with the biggest box office earnings went on to the next round. That was Alice. After that, she breezed by Morpheus and even Blade. She went further than any other female in the tournament, and even had to go up against future finalist Batman. That’s where she lost, but I think she could have taken Batman easily. I voted for her, but she didn’t quite make it into the Final Four. No matter, she had a great run. I was rooting for her the whole way.<\/p>\n

The tournament wasn’t without its controversy. The word “fanboy” got slung around willy-nilly in an attempt to demonize the fan bases of certain characters. It was all in good fun, though. That’s really what this tournament was all about, getting people to talk about these characters. Sure, popularity played an important role in the voting, but it was interesting to hear the reasoning behind people’s votes.<\/p>\n

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There were, however, a few matchups that seemed to defy logic. Indiana Jones was a heavyweight favorite entering the tournament, but he doesn’t really have any amazing fighting skills or superpowers. He coasted on his widespread popularity for the most part. In the second round, Jones had the misfortune of going up against Wolverine. I personally thought that Dr. Jones was done for. Wolverine is bigger, stronger, faster, and damn near immortal. Oh, and he has metal spikes in his hands. Jones has a whip, that’s it. Still, Jones managed to pull out a win against all odds. I was stunned.<\/p>\n

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Another strange road through the tournament belonged to ‘Star Wars’ alum Boba Fett. Never, during any of the ‘Star Wars’ movies, does Fett really show that he’s all that badass. He sort of stands there, holding his big gun, and relishing in having captured Han Solo. That’s about it. His quirky, accidental death at the teeth of the Sarlacc only fueled the fire that he’s extremely overrated. I was able to easily buy the fact that Fett could get past Hans Gruber in the first round. But when he faced super-assassin Fox in the second round, I thought that he’d be out in a flash. Not so fast. Fett pulled something out of somewhere and ended up making it all the way to the last eight characters. He couldn’t fend off Indiana Jones, but it didn’t matter. He’d already made it further than he should have.<\/p>\n

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My favorite battle came in the first round. It was just hilarious to think about this fight taking place. Evil computer HAL 9000 went up against sword-master Inigo Montoya. Let me tell you, when I picked that matchup out of the bowl, I couldn’t help but laugh. How would Montoya and HAL even do battle? Where would this take place? Would Montoya continually whack Hal’s computer banks with his sword until he eventually cut the power cord? Montoya ended up ousting the nefarious computer, but not before we all had a few laughs about it.<\/p>\n

Now that the tournament is over, we can all breathe a sigh of relief. We don’t have to bicker and quarrel with one another about petty things like which movie character would defeat whom in a battle. It’s just silly stuff, right? Aren’t you glad we got this all behind us? I for one am\u2026 Well, that is until we start up the TV Character Tournament O’ Death. Then all bets are off.<\/p>\n

What were some of your favorite or not-so-favorite moments of Movie Madness? Let us know in the comments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Movie Madness 2011 has come and gone. We’ve followed the tournament for a good three months, as we watched some of our favorite cinematic characters bite the dust while others moved on to dominate. In the end, there could only be one, true champion\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":16955,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[132],"tags":[2589,707,2616,1579,3123,303,2746,188,2590,2591,2447,5206,2661,568],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16947"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16947"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16947\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35862,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16947\/revisions\/35862"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16955"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.highdefdigest.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}