but when these were first debuted, no one said "ah, good, they look appropriately ridiculous". they said "unbelievably awesome!" and "i think the comic version would look too cheesy. i think this one is cool".
Well, now you're just putting words in people's mouths AND telling them exactly what they meant. "Unbelievably awesome" doesn't mean "Batman should wear that in his next movie". For a lot of people, "unbelievably awesome" means "Wow, they nailed the look and feel of the comics".
What do you want people to say? You want them to not be excited?
"appropriately ridiculous" only came into play as defense against people who question the wisdom of turning something which was already designed to be ridiculous even more ridiculous.
Again, stop assuming to know what other people think. The minute those pictures went up, my first thought was, "These look a little silly, which is perfect".
these costumes were clearly redesigned to appeal to a wider audience than the smaller crowd which is already familiar with watchmen. joe blow will see these costumes not knowing anything about watchmen and will think that theyre cool. that cannot be denied, it will happen, and as evidenced on this board, has happened. im not pointing out anyone in particular, but theres at least a couple of people who come around here having only read as much of watchmen as wikipedia can tell them. its true.
So what if people think they're "cool"? In the setting of Watchmen, superhero costumes were supposed to be seen as "cool" to the average person on the street (in the story, that is). The whole nation was caught up in superhero mania. It wasn't until later that people like Dreiberg looked back and felt he looked "silly".
That's kinda the point of the whole "silly costumes" thing. You're supposed to look at the superhero genre in general (not just the Watchmen characters) and recognize some of it's silliness. On the comic page, the Watchmen characters look no more "silly" than any other superheroes. So when the book makes the comment that they do look a little ridiculous, it applies not just to the characters in Watchmen, but to all superheroes.
If they came out in obviously silly costumes, that revelation would never occur. But if the characters appear like Batman, Spiderman, etc. and then we can step back and say, "Yeah, these guys are all a little silly". That's what Watchmen did in the first place.
and because these costumes were redesigned to appeal to a wider audience(because they were, dont try and kid yourselves), that raises the question "what else will be redesigned or rethought to appeal to a greater audience, and at what point does watchmen cease to be watchmen anymore due to such rethinking?"
Again, you assume to know why they altered the costumes (and the alterations are minor, don't kid
yourself). The audience needs to recognize these characters as superheroes right off the bat, just like was necessary in Watchmen. So my modernizing the costumes a bit, the audience can immediately say, "Oh, these people are/were supheroes" and then focus on what's important - the story.
And the rest of your "if they do this, what next?" argument is just plain baseless. Slightly tweaking the costumes does not constitute a major change to the source material. Snyder's said that the ending will be in tact and every photo and bit of word of mouth we've heard has indicated that the movie will be very faithful. Show me one real piece of evidence that supports your fear of Snyder butchering the material and we can talk seriously about this.
And I feel the need to remind you that these characters are the "2nd generation" of crime fighters, so to speak. We've already seen that Dollar Bill's costume will be basically spandex. So obviously the first heroes will be less "modernized". Then the next generation will be a little more advanced, just like in the book.
