The Beast, Or Catherine Zeta-Jones?!? You Decide!!

You know that ridiculous cliche that every movie and TV show has to give us, of a hero or thief (or both) jumping/crawling/tumbling/bouncing their way through a laser detection grid?

Aside from the fact that no one in real life uses a system like that, it's also pretty ridiculous--I'm going to design a multimillion dollar security system, but I'm going to leave big enough gaps in it that a 6 foot tall guy could gymkata his way through it without tripping it?

Still, all cliches have their origin somewhere, and I've decided somewhat arbitrarily that the secret origin of the "acrobatting your way through an impossible gantlet of lasers" really began back in Avengers #137 (1975).

See, the Avengers are meeting in Yankee Stadium, to audition new recruits (the ballpark closed for renovations at the time...). Anyway, The Stranger show up, to pull a dickweed move [SPOILER ALERT: it wasn't really The Stranger]:

Hey, dopey alien--Yankee Stadium is a baseball field!

What a dummy. You know, Thor, you could have just stayed on the ground and thrown your hammer, clearing a path...

Tony Stark calling someone else a know-it-all is pretty rich...especially since:

Hey, double dummy, you could have just stayed on the ground and taken out a bunch of mines with your repulsor rays!! And, yeah, you were pretty stupid not to take the drifting into account, Mr. Maneuverability.

Next up?

Seriously, was this a meeting of the Great Lake Avengers, or what?

Well, let's let Dr. Henry McCoy settle matters, shall we?

And there you go.

So, you can keep all your tight-leather-catsuit-wearing females who somersault through an "impassable" laser array (although I do concede the visual appeal...).

Me, I'll take a blue-furred mutant working his way through a drifting flotilla of explosive hover-mines, every time.

(Don't get me wrong, though, I'll still watch Catherine Zeta-Jones crawling through them there lasers in Entrapment...I'm no dummy)