Who do you love? Pick best action flicks

Wait, wait a minute!

This is bizarre. Maybe beyond bizarre.

If you spotted the item in last Sunday’s paper, you know The Press has refused to leave well enough alone.

Rather than retire on the bells, whistles and overall success of our Popular Music Poll, we’ve decided to go for more — in this case movie polls, broken down by genre.

Since this is summer, we decided to start with “Action/Adventure” as our first category, and sure enough, we’re getting the response we were expecting.

That is ...

We are ... and we aren’t.

Sure enough, those piles of emails have come thundering in. We counted on our North Idaho brethren to be huge fans of action and adventure flicks, and yep ...

There are shoot-em-ups, spy thrillers, breathtaking car chases and even the sweet touch of romance to prove that we’re not all Neanderthals.

What we are NOT finding, however, are many folks (almost none at all) who like the same kind of action — and so far, not a single vote for Western adventure.

BEYOND THAT oddity, we haven’t found many voters who like the same type of chaos.

Nor does it appear that a fan of some mega-star — say, James Bond and those 27 films starring seven different Bonds — will have much to do with Indiana Jones.

Or Jason Bourne.

Even crazier, lots and lots of voters seem to like one star in the Bond franchise but are just vaguely interested in the others.

It’s not about eras, either.

The most popular Bonds in our poll (by some distance) are Sean Connery, Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig — or the very first and the last two, if you’re counting.

Our Bond junkies apparently have good taste. Ian Fleming, the series author, once was asked if Connery made a good Bond.

“Sean Connery IS James Bond,” Fleming replied.

Moving along ...

The rivalry, if that’s the right word, among action heroes (and even the SAME character, like the various Bonds) has not seemed to carry over yet to monster space franchises.

Star Wars is the giant of them all, of course, and you might expect its fierce fans to look down on Star Trek — if for no other reason than seniority.

PERHAPS WE aren’t giving our space aficionados enough credit.

Yes, Star Wars was the first to the big screen in 1977, but Star Trek made it two years later — and after all, Mr. Spock and company were created television regulars by Gene Roddenberry in 1966.

Sure, we have a few days of voting left to turn some of these oddities around; like, Arnold Schwarzenegger has logged more votes as a mild-mannered accountant sneaking out evenings as a government agent in “True Lies” than he has in the entire Terminator series combined.

(To be fair, “True Lies” is a great mixture of gunplay and homespun humor, and deserves the attention it’s getting — but that’s only MY opinion. And a confession: “True Lies” was the very last film left off my list. Maybe I should get a do-over.)

Actually, I suspect there will be quite a few changes before we hit the finish line at 5 p.m. on Wednesday.

That’s the way it went with the music poll — just about half our votes came gushing in during the final three days.

I’d be down with that.

Bring it on.

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Steve Cameron is a special assignment reporter for The Press. Reach Steve: scameron@cdapress.com.