Monday, March 21, 2011

Prólogo: una declaración de intenciones

            Hola! Welcome to what will hopefully be an exciting new experiment in film history research. For those that don't know me, I am an avid and voracious consumer of film, as a product, art form, and as entertainment. Good or bad, important, or trivial, offensive or mundane. I take all comers, or at least, that's what I thought...
             Imagine my surprise when I discovered that there was a film series from our neighbor country Mexico, that has twice as many entries as my all time favorite, the Godzilla series, two or three times the amount of monsters, and possibly 100x the amount of pure brawling insanity. Of course, I'm talking about El Santo, the famed Mexican Wrestler. I am embarrassed to admit that until a few years ago, I was almost entirely unaware of this pillar of Mexican pop culture. 52 movies, his own comic book, and not to mention a legend in the Mexican wrestling community for almost 40 years. The man puts Buckaroo Banzai to shame. To save us all time and energy, here is the man's wiki...

Santo's Wiki

52 movies! That is a staggering number. It's a number that intimidates some. For me, it is a challenge laid down. It is a ghost in a silver wrestling mask goading me into testing my might in a squared circle that exists entirely in my own mind. Some may look at that number and decide to just sample this series, by seeing one or two, usually the best ones. Me? I'm going to watch them all. I'm going to watch the best ones. I'm going to endure the bad ones. I intend to watch one a week for the next year, in chronological order. I expect my endurance to be tested. I expect my mental stability to be shaken. Mostly, I expect to waste a lot of time on nonsense. Some do it with Julia Child recipes. I'm going to do it with Masked Wrestler movies. Join me on this journey. I do not promise it will always be fun, but I do promise it will be interesting. Stay tuned...