Irish Culture

I was watching the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen earlier on tonight and, while it's only a so-so movie (with very bad special effects), it made me think.

The premise is, like the comic-books it's based on, various adventurers from the Victorian era (*cough* more or less) get together to Fight Eeeee-vil. It's cheesy, and corny and hackneyed, but it's not a bad idea for a story. When you have an action movie, and the only star who looks like he ever threw a punch in his life is the 73 year old star (Sean Connery), you know the movie needs work.

Anyway, the thing I thought of was that, supposing you wanted to write a story with other groups of roughly contemporary characters being heroes, what group is left to write about? Holmes has been revisited, as have the Greek Gods and the ancient Irish heroes (Cuchullain, Fionn MacCool, etc). So who's left?

I had an idea that the Irish playwrights of the 20th Century could have been an elite special forces team, but the image that kept springing to mind was Brendan Behan jumping up and shouting "The power of this whiskey makes me Borstal Boy!"

And, as if that wasn't bad enough, I've just had a flash of a mustachioed Padraig Pearse gesturing at some vast piece of steaming, hissing, rumbling machinery and saying "Behold! This is my Murder Machine! Muahahahaha!" (He'd probably be played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, and he'd still have a better Irish accent than Richard Gere did in the Jackal.)