>>149387138
>>149388508
"Dumb hero competent sidekick" really started in the 60s with the Pink Panther movies.
It was honestly the 80s and 90s when "competent sidekick is female" kicked in.
If you really wanna go back though, "smart wife, dimwitted but lovable husband" was basically a staple of the 50s and 60s because it appealed to the housewives of the time who were the predominant television viewers.
"Smart woman uses intelligence and feminine wiles to get what she wants out of the men around her" was sorta just the trope of the time because it was something audiences weren't used to seeing. Paired with a competent man and you got a femme fatale in a noire or a spy thriller. Paired with a more dimwitted one and you had potential for a funny rom com. The whole point was that it was so different from the average woman you'd see at the time that it made for fun character work while still playing to the kind of social power a woman can actually hold.
This shit's been around forever
