still dicking around with my Triple Threat design
Bruce Timm-ish/Batman: The Animated Series-style character rendering. Some Tuxedo Mask inspiration snuck in with all the roses... maybe she throws them to initiate battling evil doers?
I actually really don't like superhero shit (tough considering the direction VBros took in later seasons), but even with my distaste I wanted to do justice to the references.
🌹 more 🌹 →
🌹 Triple Threat in the 1980s
🌹 Rose Whalen (old)
🌹 Billy's prom date
Triple Threat's costume is meant to represent a Broadway chorine, but also it's a bit like a majorette... antiquated military uniform but pantsless. Very gendered. The old-fashioned/family friendly version of sexy... but not TOO sexy.
Visual reference to both the pants-less white tie tails of Zatanna the magician of DC Comics and the stage costumes from the "burlesque" Broadway musical revue Sugar Babies
The revue starred Mickey Rooney in his Broadway debut, Ann Miller... The revue subsequently had a short-lived National tour which starred Carol Channing and Robert Morse, from August through November 1980.
(Carol Channing is the model for Rose's speaking voice, obvs.)
Billy's mom as a character sucks— she's introduced as [out-of-touch old person] who becomes [smothering mother] archetype— but in just a few appearances implies potential depths not explored. She's the only canon character I've written aside from Billy & White, in a series of flashbacks to Billy's childhood with her in Boy Genius (← read it on AO3)
Based on the hair, this flashback is mid-1960s. Maybe a bit later. OG Team Venture have been painted as Jonny Quest, Doc Savage and the Fabulous Five and James Bond, but this scene has a real TV Batman '66 feel to it. Best arena for a campy Broadway-musical-themed crime-fighter.
Triple Threat would be interesting to explore in the trajectory of comic book superheroes going from Golden Age goofy to the '80s X-treme en-darkening/en-seriousning (imagine Triple Threat reimagined as a Punisher type). At the same time, her Pollyanna American Exceptionalism/Moral Purity message (that Action Man wants to soil with his filth) would get dragged through the mud as she makes "hard choices" aka being a hypocrite in service of her all-American values.
She buys into moral panics. She warns against rock and roll and drugs, despite being a Baby Boomer. She is defiantly "a square" (as well as gullible to propaganda).
Female Conservatives are fascinating as they are gross. The Anti-Feminist Feminist. She's never shown to be motivated by religious fundamentalism (she seems fine with the possibility of her son being gay), it's more insidious than that. Is she machiavellian like a super-powered Phyllis Schlafly or, like the moral panic stuff, she's really gullible to conservative messaging? I see her more as a Kissinger Neo-Con than a MAGA conspiracy rube. She's not angry or hateful in her conservativeness, just reactionary and myopic.
Another ill-defined aspect... does Triple Threat have superpowers? She can still do flying leap kicks at age 60ish which suggests she's more than just "really good at fighting." What if she had been part of some Captain America super-serum ultimate-soldier program that screws her up medically, later causing Billy's genetic birth defects? Is she filled with guilt? Angry at the government for not telling her about the side effects?
→ → More on Rose Whalen's history
all my Billy & White stuff at
→ FAILURES of SCIENCE index
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I KNOW I’ve had Triple Treat before.
I tend to want to keep the food-themed ponies but not the junk food ones even though I love me some junk food.
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My Little Pony belongs to Hasbro
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