Oh, god.  Oh, god.  This … this is evidently what passed for the heroes and villains of the Marvel Universe in 1989.  (This is the company’s float in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York.)

Can I be blamed for not getting into superhero comics until college?  When portrayals like this represented the genre to the general public?

Dear God, what have they done to Dr. Doom??  And is that misshapen, dirty aluminum golem supposed to be the Silver Surfer?!  And they’re all in a … multi-level mausoleum?  A crumbling clock-tower?  A haunted castle that inexplicably has a manhole right outside its entrance?  Huh?  Wha?

Hey, this was nearly two full decades before the Marvel Cinematic Universe.  Indeed, it was the very same year as Tim Burton’s “Batman” — and that is actually the first bona fide modern superhero movie that I can think of without googling it.  The genre had a long way to go.

Hey … the Spider-man balloon was pretty cool.