51% Of Fans Would Want To Steal This Superhero Tool
For many of us, our favorite superhero, sci-fi, and fantasy films offer a cathartic escape from the mundanity of the real world. We like to picture ourselves in the shoes of our heroes, wielding our otherworldly abilities to overcome impossible obstacles and defeat the evildoers, and looking extremely cool while doing it. If you give it a moment's thought, however, there would be more than a few drawbacks to actually being able to step into those shoes. For example, if you woke up tomorrow in a galaxy far, far away as a seasoned Jedi Knight, you'd be pretty psyched for a moment. You can wield the Force and your mighty lightsaber, performing dazzling feats of acrobatics while deflecting blaster bolts and vanquishing squads of attack droids with a wave of your hand. Awesome! After about five seconds, though, you'd realize that you know have a ton of extremely powerful enemies, you're due in front of the Jedi Council to discuss a diplomatic mission to some barren rock on the Outer Rim, and thanks to last week's Imperial incursion into a newly-established neutral zone in the Manaan system, the stability of the entire galaxy is threatened. Not so awesome!
Most every hero has their tools of the trade, though. To run with the above example, one may not necessarily want the responsibility of being a Jedi, but who among us wouldn't want to play with a lightsaber? We'd fire it up, reveling in its iconic hum. Then we'd whirl it around, grievously injure ourselves, and spend the subsequent ambulance ride cackling about how it was totally worth it. With this in mind, Looper decided to survey our readers to see which iconic hero's most trusted tool they would most want to steal — with some insanely sweet options from which to choose — and a clear winner emerged.
Over half of respondents would steal Iron Man's armor
A whopping 246,000 readers responded to our query, and of those, just over half — 51% — would nab Iron Man's armor, one of the most formidable pieces of tech in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. One might argue that the suit would come with a pretty steep learning curve. We would respond that a) we don't care, just give us the suit, and b) if Rhodey and Pepper Potts can figure out how to use one in about ten seconds flat, we figure we can, too.
The appeal of the armor is pretty obvious: with one, the average person can go from screaming bystander running from the fallout of the alien invasion to ultra-powerful badass sending those aliens packing just by suiting up. Tony Stark, just a regular, non-enhanced human, used one to go one-on-one with Thanos, one of the most powerful beings in the universe; during the battle of New York, he brought down a Chitauri Leviathan by using himself as a bullet. Canonically, wearing the Iron Man armor gives Stark superhuman strength more or less on par with Thor, an actual god — with whom he has also gone one-on-one, battling him to a draw.
We can't really think of any drawbacks to owning an Iron Man suit, other than every government wanting to take it from us (or the fact that Tony urinated in at least one of the suits). Heck, we'd even take the "lite" version that pops out of Stark's briefcase in Iron Man 2 — but if we get to choose, we'll go with the nanotech version from Avengers: Infinity War, please and thank you.
Harry Potter's Invisibility Cloak was the second-most-popular choice
Coming in second with 32%? Harry Potter's Cloak of Invisibility, which we have to admit would be pretty incredible. Most of the other magical items in the Potterverse, like wands and time turners, would make it a little too easy to accidentally turn your roommate into a frog or completely screw up the time-space continuum. But it's pretty tough to turn down the ability to turn invisible, although said ability might present even the most morally upright among us with a pretty stiff test of our scruples.
Harry famously used his cloak to get out of some pretty tight spots, and it really came in handy during his hunt for Lord Voldemort's horcruxes and during the events of the Second Wizarding War. But you wouldn't have to worry about any of that; you could use it to go anywhere, observe anything, and hide from anyone simply by tossing it over your head. Of course, it's also one of the three Deathly Hallows, and legend has it that while wearing the cloak, not even Death itself can find you — so, you know, that's pretty cool, as well.
As we alluded to before, though, we can think of one pretty serious drawback to the cloak: the searing temptation to use it for less-than-benevolent ends. By way of illustration, one of our poll's respondents posted a comment that is both scary as heck and tough to argue with: "With the invisibility cloak, I can steal the rest of these choices." Well, yeah, now that you mention it...
Some iconic superhero gear rounded out our survey's choices
Small but significant numbers of respondents chose tools that, while not endowing them with their respective heroes' abilities, would nevertheless be incredibly fun to play with. Coming in third with 7% is Batman's Batsuit, with all of its many Bat-gadgets and Bat-gizmos. It won't make you a genius ninja super-detective like Bruce Wayne, but that doesn't mean you couldn't spend hours playing with it while growling menacingly about how you're not wearing hockey pads.
Showing up last with 6% are Spider-Man's webshooters. Again, it's not like they'll allow you to swing around downtown Manhattan; you'd need spider-strength for that, or you'll likely just immediately wear yourself out and plummet to your doom. But we're willing to bet you'd have no problem fiddling with them for hours, webbing up everything in sight while repeatedly yelling "THWIP!" and trying futilely to do that upside-down ceiling-hang thing that Spidey does.
The 4% of respondents who chose "Other" had some pretty cool choices: the aforementioned lightsaber; Black Panther's vibranium suit; Doctor Strange's Eye of Agamotto; Green Lantern's ring; Din Djarin's Mandalorian armor (with jet pack); Thor's hammer Mjolnir; and Aladdin's lamp all popped up multiple times in the comments. Also worth mentioning: multiple variations on the good old fashioned time machine, including the one built by Stewie Griffin from Family Guy, Doctor Who's TARDIS, and the Delorean from Back to the Future.