MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, psychological, sociological*
I was a moderate fan of AVENGERS: EARTH'S MIGHTIEST HEROES, and nothing I saw in the first two seasons of that show's replacement, AVENGERS ASSEMBLE, made me think the follow-up was an adequate substitute. However, though there were still various weak episodes in Season 3, for the first time other stories were at least on the same level of good melodrama as the best tales in MIGHTIEST.
One of the weaker arcs is an attempt to boil down the very involved introduction of the 1990s superhero-team The Thunderbolts into a handful of episodes. As in the comic, the members of the team are all supervillains pretending to be heroes, in line with a master plan by their leader Baron Zemo. In the comic book. the whole idea is to gradually show some of the villains turning good, but that's not possible in ASSEMBLE, so the best thing about the Thunderbolts is just that it puts a few new costumes into the mix. The character Songbird makes a few other appearances, and has a slight rapport with Hawkeye, who's a former criminal in the comics (not sure about in the cartoon).
Ultron and Kang make return appearances, and they're both as forgettable as they were in previous seasons. But I greatly appreciated the show's take on The Black Panther's first encounter with these Avengers. I don't know to what extent this Disney XD show was privy to the MCU's articulation of its Panther-iteration, though elements of that variation began to appear as early as 2015's AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON (with the introduction of the Panther's regular enemy Klaw) and then with the Panther himself appearing in CAPTAIN AMERICA CIVIL WAR the next year. In contrast to 2018's BLACK PANTHER, the Panther-episodes in ASSEMBLE do not over-emphasize a "woke" political viewpoint, and in that sense the cartoon-Panther is better than the live-action one. However, I think that one or more of the ASSEMBLE writers may have known about the politics brewing in Ryan Coogler's teapot. In the episode "Panther's Rage"-- significantly named for a famous (if unrelated) arc in the comics-- Panther gets into a battle with Klaw, who of course now looks like the live-action character. During the battle, Klaw has a line which I'll paraphrase as, "I'm gonna steal all your vibranium for the cause of colonial supremacy! Just kidding; I'm doing it for the money!"
Various other Marvel characters make peripatetic appearances. The Carol Danvers of Captain Marvel (who had appeared as the original "Ms. Marvel" in MIGHTIEST) shows up, and though she's as lousy a character here as in the comics, at least no one avoids using the Captain Marvel tag for her. Close on Danvers' heels is the Kamala Khan Ms. Marvel, who's also a nothing character, though the animators make her a better fighter than a lot of other iterations. This Ms. Marvel is made to be in line with her late 2010s iteration, who was retconned into a spawn of The Inhumans due to Disney/Marvel's attempt to build up those characters into a franchise to rival that of X-MEN. That attempt failed both in the comics and in the dismal live-action INHUMANS show. But though the Royal Family of Inhumans aren't particularly memorable in their ASSEMBLE appearances, the show gets decent mileage out of the situation where the Inhumans' mutation-chemical gets loose and transforms various humans into super-types. among them the aforementioned Ms. Marvel II. The social panic of these transformations causes the government to clamp down on the Avengers' activities, particularly upon the Hulk, and this development at least makes a little more sense than the MCU's idiotic Sokovian crisis. Though Season Four will deal with some sort of "Civil War," I liked the fact that in this arc, all of the Avengers defend their green-skinned fellow member, and thus earns better characterization-marks than many similar events both in comics and live-action movies.
No comments:
Post a Comment