Gearing Up

I recently saw the new Get Smart movie. On its own, it was amusing, but more than that it made me a bit nostalgic for the original TV show. Watching Max answer his shoe phone, I began thinking about how the ridiculous technology of the spy genre seems like a natural progression from the dieselpunk era.

I mentioned this to my friend Xandra and she suggested we call it spypunk.

So how would I define this theoretical spypunk genre? It shares the penchant for gadgetry that the other punks show, in this case focusing on small gadgets that mimic harmless items. Rather than dieselpunk’s usual Nazi enemies, the Cold War is all the rage, and thus there is some obvious overlap with what has been named atomicpunk.

The key difference, in my mind, is that spypunk focuses on the efforts of individuals, almost like a throwback to the Victorian era’s detectives and gentlemen adventurers. Both era’s heroes work on their own, but often in concert with a greater organization and have a patriotism that is often lacking in dieselpunk outside of the narrow WWII window.

As examples of the genre, I would cite the aforementioned Get Smart, the ubiquitous James Bond in virtually all of his iterations, and the classic Avengers series out of Britain. Austin Powers might also fit snugly in this genre. What do you think?

This entry was posted on Monday, June 30th, 2008 at 3:26 pm and is filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.