Consume Product

I'm guessing it replaced people like Jim Bowie, Davie Crockett, Sam Houston....or if you're looking for "super heroes", Biblical heroes like Sampson maybe, or perhaps the Greek pantheon.

My Dad's generation was into cowboys and indians. He was a huge John Wayne fan. I'm not sure what all my grandfather's generation was into. I would assume whatever the popular books/magazines were at the time. I'm not sure that my grandfather's generation had as much free time as subsequent generations do.

>Superheroes as New Mythology

>Superheroes as New Mythology refers to the emergence of superhero narratives as modern-day myths that convey cultural values and moral lessons. This phenomenon began in the late 1930s, during the Great Depression and on the brink of World War II, when traditional myths no longer resonated with the American public. Characters like Superman, introduced in 1938, became symbolic figures representing ideals of bravery, individualism, and the triumph of good over evil, offering a new framework for understanding societal challenges.

https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/history/superheroes-new-mythology

westerns, the wild west, cowboys, explorers, settlers. maybe?

I wouldn't call it a mythology unless referencing the ones that are based on mythology (like thor). What makes myths so powerful is that they are so old that we don't know the author or if there even was one.

The stories we collectively see in our "mainstream media" has always been used to convey cultural values and moral lessons (for better or for worse) long before comic movies blew up, people would reference any other movie or tv show in conversation so long as it is relevant and both had witnessed the same media.

We could argue that the internet broke the monoculture of the media so that nowadays most people get their media from more niche, curated sources such as youtube or steam; rather than when everyone saw the same movies and talked about the recent drama on Friends and Seinfeld or whatever. Or later on when almost everyone would spit out Borat quotes so much that even the few who didn't see the film became part of the culture.

I think we have come a long way in the last 20 years. And the media today does not have much of a message at all, its more just "normalization" or degeneracy via just having it exist unchallenged, rarely with any story regarding it. There are exceptions but the majority of new films do not convey cultural values and moral lessons effectively even when they try, they usually just make a well-known character gay.