6 Other Thors Less Worthy of Your Attention

Against all odds, a movie about a muscular, blond European with a hammer impressed audiences and critics alike this weekend and looks to be yet another success for Marvel who has never made a bad movie adaptation yet so long as you don’t count Hulk, the Incredible Hulk, Spiderman 3, X-men 3, Man-Thing, Howard the Duck, three Punisher movies, The Fantastic Four, Daredevil, Elektra and Ghost Rider that I can think of off the top of my head. Anyway, while Marvel’s Norse god is riding high on a wave of popularity, other Thors are less popular and rightly so. Behold!

Thor – Stargate

Popular Canadian sci fi series (none of those words are inaccurate, isn’t that weird?) Stargate took a cool little movie starring Kurt Russel and turned it into a 30 year-long TV show that had nothing to do with the movies whatsoever beyond similar names. Along with these dissimilarities was the introduction of new alien races that, like the movie and show’s chief villains, were gleaned from Earth’s history. While the bad guys were all Egyptian gods, the producers tossed in a race of benevolent aliens based on Norse mythology, including the god of Thunder himself.  Just look!

Yep, he was a silky, smooth butthead with the body of an underfed 10 year old. Thor indeed.

Thor – Canadian Band

If you’ve never heard this band, please watch this;

Did you only watch a few seconds then stop it to keep reading? Please don’t. Watch it. Then watch this;

Thor – Oldsmobile

The 1967 Oldsmobile Thor looked like the kind of car a gritty New York detective who has interracial sexual liaisons would use to chase down murderous drug dealers. That’s sort of awesome but also, because it was just broaching on 1970’s design esthetics, it also looks like the interior probably smelled bad and the radio only received AM.

As you might expect, after the car was designed, dudes from GM looked at it, probably smelled the interior, and tossed it in some kind of Indiana Jones warehouse so they could deny its existence. It was never mass produced.

Thor – Computer

When you think awesome computers you probably think Cambridge Systems Technology. They were the Wang Computers of their time.

The Thor rocked out with 128 kibibytes of RAM. They didn’t measure things in kilobytes back then because the metric system was lame. It continues to be lame. That aside, this thing was probably killer at some basic math and may or may not have come with Oregon Trail

Thor – Serial killer

Thor Nis Christiansen had a thing for killing people. He was convicted of four murders and tried to pull of number five but managed to screw it up in a sufficiently damaging manner that he ended up imprisoned as a result. What actually happened was that he shot his 5th victim in the head and she opted to run away rather than die as one must assume he expected. He ran away too.

Three months after being shot in the head by a serial killer, his victim went into a bar and ran into him again, only this time she called the cops, he was arrested, then convicted, then murdered in prison. It’s not like a hilarious story about a guy named Thor, but really, it fits the premise of the article.

Thor – Iowa

The population of Thor, Iowa is 174, officially making it just short of not existing at all. It covers one square mile. According to Wikipedia 10.3% of the population lives below the poverty line, which works out to almost 18 people, but not quite. Those 18 people must hate living in this town.

There’s a restaurant on North Ann street called Unkie’s Entertainer. Why Ann street needs to be labeled “north” is a question for another day. A review of Unkie’s online recommends you go early or you’ll wait in line. On the plus side, one assumes the line cannot be more than 174 people long. And really, those 18 poor people probably can’t afford to eat out, so you’re down to 156. Not bad.