Quote:
Early footage of the new animated Avengers cartoon is now online at http://disney.go.com/xd/avengers/cds/
There are two quite long sequences, each around five minutes. One focusses on Banner and the Absorbing Man. The other is Iron Man vs HYDRA.
Apparently, they added Ant-man vs. Klaw since then... perhaps there will be one for all the Founders before long.
Quote:
My early impression is cautiously optimistic. The animation is appropriate and has clearly been tailored to catch the Marvel movie-going crowd. Visuals and story are in line with the characters and situations presented in the Iron Man and Hulk movies. Pepper, Rhodey, and Ross all resemble a good compromise between their movie selves and their comics incarnations. Jarvis remains merely a voice (not clear if it's still Tony's computer or a real person speaking over a comm-line) but does manage to convey far more character than the movie version.
I found the clips entertaining, although not as strong as some other superhero cartoon entries. It's a solid effort, and you're definitely right, it's far, far beyond the last Avengers cartoon.
I found the art direction to be a little generic for my tastes... there's really no mood to the visuals, just straight-up cheery colors, so that's a disappointment. I did like Ant-man's chest design flooding with Kirby Dots when his Pym Particles are activated, though.
Oh, and I thought computer Jarvis was pretty much the same as in the movies... he had something of an exasperated wit in the films as well.
Quote:
From the snippets provided we get a glimpse at the kind of characterisation level we might be seeing in the series. Banner is definitely in Bill Bixby mode - a great line at the diner was "Definitely decaf". Stark was perfectly captured a la Downey's version - smartass, brilliant, arrogant and charismatic. His line to Rhodey was also good: "The giant robot was more fun than you."
I thought they did a decent job with Pym as well. The brief bit of Jan that we see in his short is more stereotypical teen-age girl (right down to "Ew") in an absolutely hideous costume... but I suppose that's not exactly unusual for Jan either.
Quote:
All to the good. But as a purist I found the minor, and at the moment reasonless, changes to continuity grated. Absorbing Man is now a gamma-powered villain rather than a Norn-powered one. According to the website, Ultron is now the combined produce of Stark and Pym work. There had better be good reasons for these kind of alterations.
The Absorbing Man reasoning may have simply been his inclusion in the first "Hulk" film, where he too was a gamma-powered monster (although they thankfully jettisoned the idea that he was Bruce's father.)
As for Ultron, it makes a certain kind of sense that, after introducing Stark to the world as "that robot guy", if anyone on the Avengers was going to be building a robot it would be him... I'd actually be perfectly fine with this change if they establish Stark as the hardware guy and Pym as the A.I. developer. Still, it does share responsibility between the two, which would likely undercut the degree to which Ultron should haunt Pym.
My main concern is probably the line up, as I've never found the founders to be the most interesting characters on the team. I gather many other Avengers will be appearing over the course of the show, but I expect that they'll be guest stars on individual episodes rather than part of an evolving line-up. I'll wait and see how it actually plays out, however... Assuming it's ever on a channel I can actually watch.
