#FreeWillyFriday: A Whole New Willy

Huh. I guess Willy really didn't make it out of that last one. Fortunately, someone's got a plan to bring him back using... SCIENCE!

If Willy X was inspired by my junior high school band's rendition of “Free Your Mind,” the credit for this one goes in part to our halftime show featuring “A Whole New World.” But that's not the song I would pick for the soundtrack here.

I didn't give a lot of thought to what would happen in these not-movies beyond the elements needed for the posters. But now I imagine this one opening up where the last one ended, with someone surreptitiously spiriting away a bit of genetic material from our hero's (or possibly villain's) carcass. From there, we go to a science lab montage and credit sequence to the tune of Weird Al Yankovic's “I Think I'm a Clone Now.”

Clones figure into a lot of movies and comics, but a couple stood out more than others in my mind.

Movie-wise, it's Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones. At some point between hearing the reference in the original film and actually seeing the second prequel, I imagined the Clone Wars involved some sort of cloning technology gone awry, with people unable to tell the originals from the duplicates (unless they helpfully added extra vowels to their names, like in Timothy Zahn's Heir to the Empire trilogy).

That's not what we got. In fact, the clones were sort of the good guys at first, meaning that even long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, people had the same trouble describing conflicts as the folks who named the French and Indian War (turns out they were on the same side).

If you're expecting a digression into the beloved Clone Wars animated series, I'm afraid I'm not qualified. I overdosed on the expanded Star Wars universe before I had a chance to dive into that corner of it.

Comic-wise, clones are all over the place, but the one that's seared into my brain is the Clone Saga. This used to induce a Three Stooges “Niagara Falls”-type reaction in comic fans of my vintage, but, I have to admit, I read almost none of it. I thought the Scarlet Spider's costume was cool but I felt betrayed by the idea that the Spider-Man I'd grown up reading wasn't the real one. Until he was again.

As much as people seemed to dislike the concept at the time, the Clone Saga seems to be remembered rather fondly now. During his long run on Amazing Spider-Man, Dan Slott seemed to bring back many elements of it, and folks appeared fine with it. Ben Reilly even returned as (“Clone Conspiracy” spoiler alert) a villain, and managed to get his own title out of it, written by Peter David no less. And now it appears Ben is (recent Marvel advertising spoiler alert) taking up the Spider-Mantle once again.