Why is Luke Cage so corny?

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The Marvel superhero seems to be caught between its early 1970s blaxploitation origins and his role today as a married father. "One of the oddest parts of watching Luke Cage is reconciling the fact that even though the show wants us to see Luke as something of an aspirational hero, he’s corny as hell—and not in a charming, old-man-out-of-time way like Steve Rogers," says Charles Pulliam-Moore. "Corny as in, he pretends that there hasn’t been any good music on the radio since the ‘80s and will literally tell people to pull their pants up if they want to set foot in his neighborhood. There’s a kind of old school swagger to the way that (Mike) Colter embodies Cage that very specifically reads as the energy one might expect from a black person that’s around my father’s age."