The good old Grey Lady alerted us to this little item about a Swiss inventor who demonstrated the possibility of making a real Iron Man type suit:

That’s him, Yves Rossy (the Swissest name we’ve ever heard), cruising high above the Alps on a jetpack sort of thing. It seems more akin to the suit the Rocketeer wore while wooing Jennifer Connelly, but it’s not 1991 and no one would care about that comparison. But it is 2008, the year of Robert Downey Jr.! I suppose it was also his year when Chaplin came out, right around The Rocketeer’s release. It seems a bit unfair that Druggy McDruggerson Jr. gets two “Year of”s, while Cliff Secord’s (Who? Exactly.) seems to have vanished, never to return. Or maybe…2009 YEAR OF SECORD!

Oh well. Look how cool Downey’s suit is, man!

The U.S. military has even commissioned working prototypes of the Iron Man-ish suits. If you would like to know more about the “real” Iron Man, you should probably look here, where they keep their opinions on The Rocketeer to themselves and focus more on the “facts.”