Adversity requires the desire to overcome and make oneself and ones surroundings far bettter than they are. Progress and an optimistic outlook on the future are mandatory for such a mindset.

The optimism was set during the war. I have a whole bunch of Fortune magazines from the war period and they are filled with examples of the "after the war is over your life will be better than ever!" type of ad. With Sikorsky having perfected the one man helicopter, often the future was expected to promise everyone their own home, a helipad on the roof, two "rocket" or "turbine" powered cars in the garage and a push-button society where the drudgery of war work and toil was just a distant memory.

The Tucker could be born in such an optimistic era. Television could spread like a level 3 contagion. By the early fifties the Korean conflict weighed against the optimism. By the late fifties rocket ship fins were already ridiculed as phallic substitutes by leftist psychologists who drove Volkswagens and were the forerunners of the SUV haters. The new young generation were being told that materialism was bad, progress was really a Madison avenue gimmick and that one has to drop out of the race and rebel against the system. The beatnik and hippie generation were born long before the Beatles arrived.

To go into more detail: the Jazz clubs started sprouting up in the major metropolis' and the young generation just want to be "hip" and with the "beat" listening to music. Rock and roll was just an offshoot of the more dominant Jazz music influence from the mid-fifties.

Suddenly all those helipads, automatic highways, picture-phones and sonic laundry-cleaners were forgotten. The corporations quickly adapted to the influence of the "leftist intellectual" on the buying public. Small cars hit the roads in 1960 and the war between the "materialists" and the pseudo-anti-materialists was in swing. Folks working in big companies still bought large cars dreaming of the promised post-WWII utopia, but their kids were already dreaming about drugs, nightclubs and new levels of promiscuity which would eventually evolve into the "free love" generation.

The space race was born into this conflict. Parents and the government were "bad guys who wage war" the young generation was "with it" and wanted to "make love not war." By the mid-sixties a serious societal dichotomy was evident and the young had time on their side.

Even the moon-shot was often portrayed as something evil. Space programs were just tools of conquest. Vietnam afte the French fiasco certainly didn't help "progress" in any form.

By the seventies the future was again focused upon, but now in a manner which glorified the collective - not the individual. Here is where we meet Tom's points head on. The new future was one of collective harmony - recycling, gardens, monorails, UN-programs of international scope, shared resources etcetera. Personal helicopters, big cars and things glorifying the individual or the individual family were out. It was a "big-brother" based future where everyone wears polyester jumpsuits and inhales the pollen from state approved flowers.

Now we just regurgitate the old days when optimists still outnumbered the cynical.

(If you haven't seen the Incredibles - stop here)

In The Incredibles they are consciously or unconsciously showing the battle of the collective versus the individual.
Syndrome is the failed materialist who rejects his elders views and goes about systematically destroying them and what they stood for - just like every leftist intellectual who felt he couldn't compete in the ratrace.

Mr. Incredible is symbolic of every man in America who had a set of values and watched them belittled over the decades by posturing dweebs, lawyers and paper pushers.

Violet is the neurotic result of this individual suppression. She literally "disappears" because individualism and pride have been relegated to almost criminal behavior.

Dash is the hope of the next generation to reclaim hi lost heritage. He gets the best and most important line in the film, "Saying everyone is special is just another way of saying no one is."

He rebels against his teacher, who symolizes all leftists in the educational arena, and his dad is happy he didn't get caught.

Edna symbolizes the repentant conformist who has morphed to the wishes of the collective, but secretly yearns to return to ways of the old days. Her private guarded mansion is 1950s era indulgence to the extreme - all carefully hidden from the publics condemning eyes. She is even more indulgent to make up for the change in societal attitude.

Her slapping Elastigirl is a wake-up call to all women. Don't be tools of the collective, assert yourself! Don't buy into the false limitations society has put on you!

She offers hope for the future, she doesn't look back--but believes in leading the charge in the return to individual assertion working hand -in-hand with technological progress.

That's why folks who truly love this film are white, male and probably well over thirty.

I've gone into this pretty well, but the topic could fill a book.

;-)