The Avengers combined pop art, fashion, tradition, modernity, high Englishness, feminism, espionage, sadism, fetishism and much more. Here Toby Miller focuses upon the texts of the series, their broadcast contexts and the interpretations that followed.
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
The Avengers is one of the strangest and best books on popular culture to come out in the last several years. Ostensibly a study of the sexy-hip British television series that gave us the mod fashions and whimsical self-parody of super spies Emma Peel and John Steed, this book is all it claims to be and much more. While fans of the series will find everything their hearts could desire, what is really presented is an in-depth introduction to the ideas and theories of pop and postmodernism. Using the show as a testing ground for the concepts of contemporary academic criticism, Toby Miller has produced a book that is eminently readable, rigorously researched, and eye-openingly informative. Providing a history of popular culture in explications of the development of "fans," the meaning of postmodernism, the point of pop, and the truth of genre, Miller's book is also endlessly fun, never turning into the dull exercise in manipulating jargon that so much theorizing devolves into. In fact, the intellectual aspect is so well camouflaged that one could easily mistake The Avengers for pure entertainment.
About the Author
Toby Miller is Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at New York University.
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17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This book is needed!,
This review is from: The Avengers (Paperback)
What makes "The Avengers" one of the most popular spy/action shows ever produced? How has the naive conception of a show, that started by two male lead actors, turned to be an outstanding, successful outlet for daring, witty, subversive and sexy aspects? All the features that contributed to this huge success are depicted in this book: the atmosphere, the beauty, the locations, the taboos of an era, the charming automobiles, the leather fetishism, the good humor, the coreographing fights, the Cold War, and why not to add, the social political symptoms of hard times that fortunately seem to have passed away. All these aspects make this book a real need. Film scholar Toby Miller reveals the details of the show by bringing fan opinions, focusing on the scripts and writers of the series, allowing us to know some interesting behind-the-scenes aspects that also contributed for the huge success of "The Avengers". This is a good book not only for the millions of fans, but also to the ones who want to understand a very controversial period of time in plain English. The author also emphasizes the Emma Peel phenomenon and the involving equilibrium of the opposite sex in the series with the explicit inversion between the male and female lead roles. Thus, this book is an appeal for anyone who, for just once, had the opportunity to see a full episode of such admirable, charming tv show.
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