As Previously Discussed, I’m chewing on the big lump of media that is Marvel (film & TV remix ft. RDJ et al)1 and trying to find a corner of it that I can chip off to talk about. It’s like a huge chocolate Easter bunny except it’s not chocolate, not religious (or adjacent), and much more like a metaphor than a confection. And aside from reading a huge amount of background material on wikipedia23 I’ve mostly been slacking on the assignment. This weekend though, I took a few hours to catch up on season 3 of What If…?.
The animation is CG and… serviceable. If anything, I find it too… shiny? One the one hand, they do amazing things with lighting and effects but on the other hand, I’m perfectly fine with animated shows being mostly ‘flat’ when it comes to color and shadow. The stories are also fine. I do have one quibble: moreso than in season 1 or 2, the inclusion of certain characters seemed to rely not so much on the story they wanted to tell, and much more on which of the big movie actors they could schedule to come in and record voice lines. Weird line-ups and clashing culture is kinda the whole deal with What If, comic or adaptation, but even so I never thought the fate of multiple multiverses depended so heavily on appearances by Alexei Shostakov, The Red Guardian.
One thing I did like was how they continued (and concluded) the ‘behind-the-scenes’ storyline that was threaded through all three seasons of What If, getting super meta with “What if the Watcher did more than just Watch”.
Roughly a year ago, the “what if” banner was taken up by spin-off Marvel Zombies, which is fine for fans of Marvel Zombies but not recommended otherwise. And also last year, Diz+ started airing Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, which seems like a good use for the tech and talent they’ve accumulated at Marvel Studios Animation. There are 10 episodes in that first season and a second season already on the way, coming this Fall.
“What If” has also become, unofficially, the slogan of the whole MCU. The Multiverse™, the whole focus of the back half of “Phase Four” and entirety of “Phase Five”, could have been a way to slowly introduce all the various bits and pieces of a fractured Marvel landscape — fractured because of corporate history and ownership and pre-Disney licensing deals. These bits and pieces don’t have to be part of an all-Disney MCU but there’s at least one executive or accountant at Disney who very much thinks that just about any tv show or movie will do better, financially, if it is an Official MCU Story.
Actual implementation of the multiverse? Well…
I really liked the end of the second season of Loki. I haven’t been as enthusiastic about anything with Doctor Strange in it. Multiple Spiders-men was neat, but that movie really should have come out at the end of Phase Six or whatever — a nice dessert, a coda — and not as the unofficial kick-off of Marvel multiversal madness. And then: Doomsday. I feel like Disney is jumping right into a big Avengers title and team-up but without doing any of the ground work for it. Age of Ultron felt rushed (and didn’t really earn the Avengers badge; Civil War felt more like the Avengers movie of that cycle) but Doomsday almost feels worse. Forced. “We need an Avengers movie, it’s on the calendar”
It’ll be fantastic4. The directors, Anthony and Joe Russo, know their way around a big, messy action flick with way too many characters and the actors in the core roles5 will no doubt turn in great performances. RDJ, if he chews enough scenery, will get a best actor nom. None of that actually forgives the context in which Doomsday is being made but I’m looking forward to watching it.6
Once all this is put to bed (Phase Seven?), then maybe we get more Marvel alt-history. Until then, well, the question always is: What If. [/mblind]
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1 and writing about it, which it seems like everyone else is also doing this summer
2 “Marvel”, or any sufficiently large corpus is almost as much about the metatext as it is the actual text. The stuff that goes on around the thing, and the discussion of the thing. And what counts as canon (spoiler: apparently, to a sufficiently large fraction of ‘the fan base’ — it ALL counts)
3 … so. many. characters. omg. And everyone gets an entry.
4 Fantastic Four pun intended
5 I’m not even sure which characters might be the mains, here. Other than RDJ as Doom. Between F4, X-men, Old Avengers, New Avengers, Wakanda, Talokan [MCU’s Namor’s ‘Atlantis’], Team Magic, and Team Space* — I’m not even sure what you do with all of those. I’m Guessing that the New Avengers Thunderbolts Flavor and New Avengers Team Sam-is-Captain-America have some sort of clash before coming together as friends and that our Old Avengers (or versions of them) have some sort of clash with both. Still too many characters. I’d rather this was 12 to 16 episodes of television, though the budget on that would never work out at this scale. It has to be big screen. [* I’ll just note, footnote on the footnote, that Nova Corps, Ms. Marvel, & Guardians of the Galaxy seem to be sitting this one out ]
6 even if it’s a train wreck. especially if it’s a train wreck?