If you're an insufferable nerd of a certain age (like me), you probably have a strong, likely even hostile opinion about HERBIE, the goofy robot sidekick seen cooking dinner with Eben Moss-Bachrach's Ben Grimm/The Thing in the new trailer for Fantastic Four: The First Steps.
To explain the historic hate in a nutshell, HERBIE could be considered something like the Jar Jar Binks of the Marvel Universe - an oddball comedy character who wrecked up what could have been a perfectly serious story just by his very presence in it. A short-hand symbol of all the things that have ever gone wrong with a certain piece of beloved media.
