Sky High (2005 film)/Headscratchers

• Just Bugs Me: It seems powers can be a recessive trait. What happens to super powered kids with 'muggle' parents?
  • They get recruited after their powers manifest, and change schools.
    • But how does the school know about them?
      • Civilian reports (mostly from parents wanting to teach them control over dangerous powers), monitoring of the news for bizarre incidents, and sci-fi machines searching for abnormal energy levels.
• What about kids whose parents can't afford the tuition mentioned?
  • There is probably a scholarship for those.
  • Or they let you borrow against your future paychecks as a jet-setting reporter, millionaire playboy inventor, genius doctor, or whatever awesome job you get as part of your secret identity.
• Aren't all the students technically sidekicks since none of them actually battled villains and the main point of a sidekick is to learn from a hero so they can be a hero when they grow up.
  • Sidekicks seem to be permanent assistants and gophers in this world.
  • The designation "Sidekick" in the school is dependent on the powers, not the prowess or experience. If it's a power you would expect a "sidekick" to have, you are deemed a sidekick. They aren't literal "Heroes" or "Sidekicks".
  • That's not really the definition of a sidekick anyway. A sidekick is basically just a subordinate superhero/vigilante. While most of them in comics are younger people who are trained by the hero they're teamed up with, not all of them are, and even then not all of them are really in "superhero training"... even one of the original and best-known sidekicks, Bucky, wasn't really training to be a superhero when he "grew up", he was just doing his part in the war effort by hanging out with Captain America and/or wearing an inspirational costume while fighting Nazis.
• Why is there no class for being the Badass Normal for kids without powers? It seems like they would be natural targets for supervillains, especially in Roy's case as he has two superhero parents and probably had twice as many people gunning for him. The fact that there's no Badass Normal heroes at all is kind of annoying in and of itself.
  • No one really seems to care about Ron Wilson. Bus driver (I assume that's who you're talking about, I'm pretty sure there's no Roy in the movie). And the fact that people are automatically written off as sidekicks for not having cool powers (although YMMV on exactly how cool some of them are) is kind of the point.
• I don't see how some of the hero powers would be classified as hero powers. How is having six arms going to help you?
  • They're being trained to fight crime, having four extra arms would give you an advantage in any hand-to-hand fight.
  • Four more guns. Four more fists. Four more saved civilians. Plus the strength and coordination to use them effectively. If six arms isn't "hero material" by your standards, then why is technopathy or turning into stone? Flight? Creating copies of yourself? Creating fire? Super strength?
• A room full of superheroes cannot stop four supervillains.
  • Not to mention that a large portion of them are teachers, with the sole purpose of teaching the kids for just such a situation.
  • Considering that they had just seen the world's two best superheroes taken down effortlessly, they were probably panicking. Of course, this leads to the question of how none of them were able to break down a standard steel rolling gate, but we can assume Gwen reinforced them.
  • A big part of the movie seems to be that superheroes are very used to even villains playing by the rules. The fact that they study very specific situations, have very strict qualifications for what's a hero and what's a sidekick, and so on indicates that the heroes are probably very inflexible and set in their ways. A supervillain engineering a situation like that to take on an entire room of them at the same time simply isn't done, thus it flustered and panicked them.
• If having no real powers means you can't be a superhero, what would Batman be in this universe?
  • A superhero anyway. He just wouldn't have gone to the school. Not even every superhero with powers can have gone to Sky High, after all some must have been empowered after school age.
    • Some, but the nurse makes it clear that superpowers manifest before or at puberty in all except the rarest cases; even Will eventually gets his well within the limits of young adulthood. Excepting cases like Ron's, where random chance gives you superpowers in adulthood, it seems like post-grad power awakenings don't happen all that often.
    • Will is stated to be "third generation", indicating at some point his family did not have powers. It also indicates some people may gain abilities in ways other than genetics (Ron Wilson, Bus Driver for example), and so it is entirely plausible a Muggle can gain powers at any time.
• Warren Peace can breathe through his own fire, but can't breath inside a tornado generated by a speedster. Fire consumes lot of air, so Warren, that clearly need to breath, should collapse when ignited. Maybe his fire is self-sustained? Sounds more like magic than anything else.
  • It wouldn't be unusual for the comicbook-style universe, where magic and "scientific" powers (like those possessed by the Marvel mutants aren't always distinct types of abilities.
  • One possible explaination is that his powers are extensions of his physical self. No air for the fire, no air for Warren. In effect, he "breathes through his own fire." Just WMG.
  • Breathe through his own fire? Where in the movie is he ever surrounded by that much fire that it would be eating up all the available air around him? Do you suffocate when standing next to a camp fire?
• No-one thought that creating a caste-system based on perceived utility of superhuman powers might be a bad idea? High school can be difficult enough with normal kids, what's it like in a school where the kids are sorted based on "usefulness" (not anything they have control over) and are apparently ingrained with the Hero/Sidekick mentality? The Hero classes seem pretty normal but the cliqueishness of a normal school can get significantly more dangerous - or at least worse - when your bullies have superspeed and the like, not to mention teachers like Coach Boomer encouraging the divide if not the bullying; what we see of the Sidekick classes seems bent towards eliminating individuality, with the answer being "Let your Hero handle things" and hero careers being dependent on the Hero they're assigned... especially considering that you might fall by the wayside and be unable to separate from your sidekick persona, like All-American Boy. And while it's clearly not intentional, Heroes who come away thinking that a person's worth is based on their superpowers may have issues once they leave school and have to deal with non-powered people.
  • Yet again: That the system sucks is the point of the movie.
• Will claims he has no superpowers. Yet before his super-strength manifests, he takes a brutal amount of punishment without receiving as much as a scratch. His father throws a heavy weight at him with enough force to collapse his bed; a car is dropped on him; he's flung halfway across the gym and slammed into a concrete pole... no one notices he has invulnerability?
  • It's a movie that heavily, heavily utilizes comic book logic. Being a character with a name in a comic book pretty much automatically endows you with Made of Iron, it's not really remarkable.
• How could Gwen have been "Written off as a science geek"? Her power is moving technology with her mind, that's not something "Science geeks" can do. Did she for some reason not show her powers and just say "I'm a technopath"? Why not just do some big flashy display to show them what you can do?
  • It didn't seem as if they didn't know she had a power, so much as they didn't consider it a "real Hero power" like flight, super-strength, laser-vision, or Hulking out. Technopathy (which this troper still thinks should be "technokinesis") probably just wasn't recognized as a viable hero-ranked power until relatively recently, in the modern modern/technology-based present-day.

---

Back to Sky High (2005 film)