Super Friends

When I was a kid, there was a full afternoon's entertainment to be found in tying a dish towel around your neck and spending the rest of the day bounding around the house. Leaping from couch to easy chair and flying down the hall, this was a magical time. There was almost as much concern about what your costume looked like as what your super powers might be. We all understood that deciding on Superman was kind of cop-out, since that meant that you had just about any power you had a mind for: super speed, super strength, super hearing, super vision, super this and super that. Superman was just a little too super to be truly interesting.
Instead, we began to fabricate our own super-amalgams. This guy could fly and shoot lightning from his fingers, while another could run as fast as light and control other people's minds. It was always a good idea to have at least two super powers, in case the bad guys found a way to foil one or the other. Once the powers had been established, then you needed a snappy moniker (a term I gleaned from reading Marvel Comics). I had a period where I was "Zip" no matter what my powers were, because I liked the logo of our local dairy's new skim milk: Zip. I cut up a few milk cartons and used them to adorn my uniform.
Finally, it was time to get the dish towels. If we were lucky, the number of kids waiting to be super heroes didn't outnumber that of clean dish towels. Every so often one of us would have to make do with one that was slightly damp from drying the day's dishes. Still, nothing airs out a damp dish towel better than a few single bounds over a nearby skyscraper.
These days, capes get kind of a bad rap. Spiderman, the Fantastic Four, and most of the Marvel Universe eschew capes. Capes are considered "old school." Batman wears a cape, Daredevil doesn't. There is a whole sequence in "The Incredibles" that outlines the explicit dangers of wearing a cape. Still, I was happy to see my son stomping around the house the week before Halloween with his Darth Vader cape flowing out behind him. Maybe there's hope for this younger generation yet.