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| - Steven Ulysses Perhero finally got a role in the newest blockbuster film! Finally, the mainstream audience can be introduced to the awesomeness that is Grass Man! ...Except no one ever calls him that. Throughout the movie, he's just "Steven Ulysses". We get all of one scene where he hints at casual drug use in college, saying his roommates used to call him "The Grass Man" with a snicker. Afterwards, they never use that name again, even when he gets the ability to control plants. Heck, even the end credits refer to the character as "Steven". What the heck just happened? Simple: "Grass Man" is a name that the general audience might have a hard time taking seriously, and the producers knew it. Sure, that's what he's been called for forty years in comics, but there are very poignant reasons why people still have a hard time disassociating comic books with Campiness. Forty years ago, "Grass Man" might have been perfectly feasible for a character that can control plants, but nowadays, there's almost no way to use that name around the uninitiated without invoking a snort and a snicker. Hell, even a potentially "cool" name like "The Sabre" or "Dark Wolf" might seem a little too superheroic, especially if you're going to be calling someone by that name the whole movie. And on the villain side, it probably wouldn't make sense for someone to go through a traumatic experience and immediately start calling themselves "Dr. Destructo". However, because the producers don't want to completely alienate the comic fans which supported the character to begin with, they add a little Shout-Out just to appease them. "Grass Man" was definitely in the movie, even if that wasn't officially his name. However, sometimes this trope gets taken Up to Eleven and the superhero name is never used at all. Examples of Comic Book Movies Don't Use Codenames include:
* Several examples from the Marvel Cinematic Universe:
* In The Incredible Hulk, "The Abomination" aka Emil Blonsky goes by his given name and there is only an offhand referrence to that title once, by Samuel Sterns, who quickly points out to Blonsky that he didn't call him an abomination but rather, might turn into one if further experiments were used. Lampshaded in the Marvel short "The Consultant", in which the name Abomination is brought up but Agt. Coulson says "[The security council] really don't like when you call him that."
* Averted by The Hulk, who is called "Hulk" four times. The first time comes after the Culver University fight, where some college students refer to him as a "big hulk". Later, the military guys chasing the transformed Blonsky through New York mistakenly report that "the Hulk is in the street." Blonsky explicitly uses that name after the Hulk shows up for the final battle and the Hulk himself uses his patented "HULK SMASH!" at the end of the fight.
* In The Avengers, Bruce Banner notably takes pains not to call his alter-ego "the Hulk", preferring to call him "the other guy" instead. The one time he does say Hulk, he immediately corrects himself. But no one else has the same qualms.
* Iron Man himself doesn't get called that name until the end of the first film and it's only used once or twice in the following films where he appears, usually in reference to the suit (i.e. "the Iron Man weapon").
* In Iron Man 2, Natasha Romanov's handle of "Black Widow" never comes up, and the words "War Machine" are only used as an offhanded insult from Tony to James Rhodes. "Black Widow" is used later on in The Avengers, but only once.
* As for the villains, Obidiah Stane is never called "Iron Monger", although he briefly says the word in reference to Stark Industries' role as a weapon manufacturer. Meanwhile, there's Anton Vanko: a Composite Character of two villains named "Crimson Dynamo" and "Whiplash". He gets called neither in the second film.
* Inverted in Thor, as the character once had a civilian identity in the comics, but the movies don't bother. So "Thor" is used all throughout the movie, while the name "Dr. Donald Blake" is the one that only gets a few token mentions.
* In Captain America: The First Avenger, the eponymous hero only has the name Captain America as a stage name but once he makes the transition to war hero, all of the characters call him Steve with a few exceptions (once by Bucky, once by Cap himself, and the other time by the Red Skull). Though, unlike in the original Golden Age comics, Cap does officially have the rank of "Captain", and we've got various characters referring to him by that rank, usually either just "Captain" or "Captain Rogers" and it's hard to know if they're using his stage name or military rank.
* Johann Schmidt gets called "The Red Skull" (by Hitler, no less) one time as an insult, much to his annoyance. For the rest of the movie, only his real name is used.
* Technically, this is also true of Montgomery Falsworth, aka "Union Jack", the British counterpart to Captain America. However, Falsworth is not a costumed hero in this movie so there would be no reason to say the name at all.
* In The Avengers, Clint Barton is only called by his codename of "Hawkeye" once or twice. During his prior cameo in Thor it wasn't used at all.
* The same concept can be applied to the MacGuffin of Captain America and The Avengers. In the movies, it's called the Tesseract. They never use its comic book name, the "Cosmic Cube".
* During the live action film adaptation of Casshern, the titular hero only refers to himself as "Casshern" once, and it isn't even near the climax of the movie.
* The original Hulk movie also hardly used the term "hulk", the characters preferring to call him Bruce Banner. His father was never a supervillain so he never had a codename to begin with.
* His father was kind of a Composite Character, with powers similar to the Absorbing Man's. He even turns briefly into an electrical humanoid like old Hulk's foe Zzzax. Think about which of those names would have been less Camp...
* The Fantastic Four movies, (including the Roger Cormen one) rarely mention the codenames of the heroes and never refer to Victor Von Doom as Doctor Doom. This is actually in keeping with the nature of the original series since none of the characters had a Secret Identity.
* Which is funny, seeing how "Doctor Doom" would be a perfectly sensible thing to call a person with a doctor's degree, whose last name is "Doom".
* Interestingly, in some of the dubs his line "Call me Doom" is changed to "Call me Doctor Doom". The Brazilian one, for example.
* It also addresses the inherent Fridge Logic with Ben Grimm's codename, calling him "The Thing" is seen as unnecessarily cruel.
* In the Spider Man film series, the name Spider-Man was used regularly but his villains weren't so lucky:
* An entire scene was dedicated to naming Doctor Octopus, only for him to mostly go by his real name or the nickname "Doc Ock" for most of the movie.
* Venom is known only by his real name, Eddie Brock, throughout all of Spider-Man 3. Similarly, Flint Marko is generally known by his real name for most of the film until a reporter calls him "the Sandman" during the final battle.
* While Norman Osborn was called "Green Goblin" multiple times in the first movie, when it came time for his son Harry to adopt that persona, the name was never uttered. In fact, promotional material called him New Goblin, a name that was never used in the comics. The closest Harry comes to being known as the Green Goblin is when Peter mockingly calls him "Goblin Jr.". Harry himself strips most of the goblin styling out of the hardware going for basic armor and a hoverboard in place of the spiky hanglider.
* This trope is played with all over the place in the X-Men series:
* Cyclops' codename is mentioned but he mostly goes by Scott throughout all of the movies.
* The name "Prof. X" is only used once, near the end of First Class, and Xavier brushes it off. This is after four films in which he uses his real name.
* Jean Grey and Kitty Pryde never use codenames in the films. While their comic counterparts went through a few over the years, they usually go by their real names anyway (a rarity for superhero comics).
* Mutants seem to adopt codenames as their "true names" as evidence when "Marie" changes her name to Rogue or when Magneto asks "John" what his real name is and he starts calling himself Pyro.
* Of course, Magneto has no problem being called "Erik". Of course, the only people who call him that are Mystique and Xavier.
* Wolverine goes by the name Logan almost exclusively and even mocks people with codenames. Stryker seems to be the only one who wants to call him Wolverine, which was more of a military-style Code Name.
* The Blob never gets called by that name. The best we get is a Lampshade Hanging where he mistakes Logan's "bub" for that name, and sees it as an insult.
* "Bobby" has no codename in the first movie, introduces himself to Wolverine as Iceman in the second film, and is then called Bobby throughout the rest of the series until a brief moment in which Pyro picks a fight.
* "Pete" is never called Colossus (or Piotr for that matter). Oddly enough, Wolverine calls him Tin-Man as a joke.
* The name Nightcrawler is only mentioned when "Kurt" expounds about his time in the circus.
* Angel (Warren) and Beast (Hank) never use codenames in X-Men: The Last Stand. Hank does eventually use the name towards the end of First Class, however.
* Darwin from First Class is actually a nickname which happens to fit his powers, and his real name (Armando) is never referenced.
* It gets a bit tricky with Angel (the First Class member as opposed to the one mentioned above); in the comics, her code name is Tempest, and Angel is her real name, but in the movie she explicitly states that Angel is a stage name.
* Lady Deathstrike is never used. Her real name (Yuriko) is only mentioned in passing.
* Codenames are something of a plot point in First Class; it's shown that the concept of a "true name" began with the first group of students Xavier introduced. However, for the most part, it's used in playful jest and doesn't become serious until Magneto insists upon being called by that name at the very end of the film. Other than that, the codenames are used as Mythology Gags or Futureshadowing.
* The members of the Brotherhood seem to go mostly by their codenames with the odd exception of Magneto who wants mutants to go by their "real names". He refers to himself as Magneto at the end of First Class and it is brought up in the first flick but he has no problem being called Erik by Mystique and Xavier, and as they're whom he he has the most meaningful dialogue with, we hear "Erik" much more than we hear "Magneto."
* Averted and played straight in The Dark Knight Saga. Batman and Ra's al Ghul are commonly referred to as such. Oddly enough, in the comics, Ra's al Ghul is a real name but in the movie it's a false identity. Nobody knows the Joker as anything else, but Scarecrow and Two-Face mostly go by their real names. Jonathan Crane briefly calls himself Scarecrow while under the effects of his own gas and in Two-Face's case, it's referring to an old nickname of Harvey Dent's.
* Ra's Al Ghul isn't a real name in the comics; it means "The Demon's Head", the Demon being the name of his international terrorist organization (the League of Assassins / Shadows is just one branch of it). It's also the name of a constellation of stars. His true name is something he has forgotten after having lived for so many centuries. In the movie its not clear whats going on, but its possible that in this case it really is his real name, and Ducard is the alias, unless the Nolan films are treating Ra's Al Ghul as a Legacy Character, a title given to whoever happens to be head of the League at that time. The 3rd movie may or may not clear that up.
* Kamen Rider the First and The Next, Darker and Edgier modernized retellings of the original series and V3, never use the name "Kamen Rider"; Takeshi Hongo and Hayato Ichimonji are called Hopper 1 and 2 respectively, while Shiro Kazami is simply called V3 (which, in the movie's universe, stands for Version 3).
* Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance never refers to Carrigan's character as Blackout, which was his name in the comics.
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