You're listening to Imaginary Worlds. Let's show about how we create them and why we suspend our

disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. If you haven't seen the Dark Knight rises, Tom Hardy plays the villain

Bane, and for some reason he did the voices across between Sean Connery and Darth Vader,

given that the character was supposed to come from a fictional Latin American country, it was a very

weird choice. But it was so weird. It was kind of amazing and led to all these really great

parodies. But for all the buzz around the voice, I was surprised more people didn't talk about

the costume, which I thought was ingenious. So in the comics, Bane looks kind of like a Mexican

wrestler. He's got a black hood over his face, with a white design in the middle that kind of

looks like a skull with red eyes. His strength comes from tubes going to his back that pump him

full of liquid steroids. In fact his shoulders are so huge and volked out. Artists like to draw his

head below his neck. There's no way you could do a literal version of that. But that didn't stop Joel

Schumacher from trying in his 1997 catastrophe Batman Unrobin. Of course Christopher Nolan's

Batman took place in kind of a semi-realistic universe. So he and Lindy Heming his costume designer

turned Bane's liquid steroids into a gas that he inhales. But it doesn't make him super strong.

It actually dulls physical pain. His breathing apparatus is the same shape as the design on the hood

in the comics, but the breathing apparatus is black and the design on the hood was white. Of course

he's not wearing a hood in the movie. Instead we see the actors bald head. So if you squint, Bane's

head in that movie looks like the exact same design as the comics, but the negative image of it.

Of course it couldn't give Bane like cartoonishly huge shoulders, so instead he wore a coat

that had a very high round wool collar that gave him the same silhouette as the comic books.

Like I said it was a brilliant design solution. Impossible.

Superhero costumes used to be cringe worthy. Even the cool ones like Batman from the Tim Burton

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