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==Cartoons, TVs and Movies== Naturally, Marvel has tried to branch out into other media with their characters for years, but... never to any real success. In the 90s, they struggled to create their own counterpart to the DC Animated Universe, but poor inter-connectivity and a lot of executive screwups (Spider-Man not being allowed to ''punch people'') meant that the shows they put together just couldn't cut it. Not helping was that, due to bankruptcy, movie rights to several of their most prominent characters - the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, and Spider-Man - were sold off to 20th Century Fox, whilst the rest of Marvel would ultimately become a subsidiary of Disney, leading to Marvel literally competing against itself. With the creation of the MCU, the general perception of Marvel's extra-comic media has more or less settled into "Marvel does shit cartoons and TV shows, but great movies; DC does great cartoons and TV shows, but shit movies", due to DC's incredibly fumbled attempts to try and jump on the MCU-style movie-verse bandwagon. However, DC has slowly started to get better at things, so who can say how it'll develop. ===TV Shows=== Surprisingly, Marvel traditionally was very leery of delving into TV shows. Up until the release of the MCU, whereupon they began flooding the market with tie-in TV shows based around B-lister superheroes. Outside of that library, the list is quite short. In the late 1970s, they ran a 2-season, 13 episode Spider-man show called "The Amazing Spider-Man" (1977-1979) and, weirdly, a Japanese sentai version of Spider-Man called, simply, "Spider-Man", which ran for a single 41 episode season (1977-1979), as well as their biggest TV show; the 5-season, 80-episode long "The Incredible Hulk" (1977-1982). After this, they went on hiatus, until 2006 saw them release a failed sequel series to the Blade films called, simply, "Blade" (1 season, 12 episodes). Then, from 2017 to 2019, they ran two series that attempted to be "X-men shows without the X-men"; ''Legion'' and ''The Gifted'', with the former being based on a minor X-man villain (David "Legion" Hall, who has the ability to literally give himself '''any''' superpower he can imagine, at the cost of each power being controlled by its own independent personality) and the latter being loosely based on the New Mutants (the "Junior Division" of the X-men). ===Cartoons=== Unlike TV shows, ''this'' is where Marvel concentrated its extra-comic media, producing a very large array of different comics over the years. '''Animated Comics''' were Marvel's first debut into animation; these mid-60s shows were all basically animated (barely) adaptations of then-current Marvel comics. * The first of these, and the first ever Marvel cartoon, was 1966's ''The Marvel Super Heroes'', an anthology of Captain America, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man, The Mighty Thor, and The Sub-Mariner. * ''Fantastic Four'', an independent show in the same style, debuted in 1967 and ran for a year. * ''Spider-Man'', a Spidey cartoon in the same vein, ran from 1967=1970. As the 1960s ended, the Marvel cartoons went silent, until the late 1970s, with shows mostly notable for having better animation than the original animated comics shows: * ''The New Fantastic Four'' started the show in 1978; this one is mostly remembered for dropping the Human Torch for a bumbling robot sidekick named H.E.R.B.I.E. * ''Fred and Barney Meet the Thing'' (1979) paired Flintstones episodes with a weird alternate version of the Thing as a teenager who could use a magic ring to assume the form of the Thing. * Jessica Drew entered the limelight in 1979 with the ''Spider-Woman'' cartoon. She only ran until 1980. * In 1981, the second ''Spider-Man'' cartoon debuted. It too ran for just a year, but it also ran concurrently with ''Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends'', which had Spider-Man rooming with and fighting crime alongside Iceman of the X-Men and new original character Firestar, a female analogue of the Human Torch who was later brought into the comics as an X-man. ** ''The Incredible Hulk'' also got his second cartoon series from 1982 to 1983. Once again, the cartoons dropped off the picture...and then the 90s started, and we got the '''Marvel Animated Universe'''. Well... kinda. Whilst Marvel ''wanted'' to compete with the DC Animated Universe, despite the fact that they had all their shows being produced by the same company (Saban Entertainment), they never managed to pull off the same level of interconnectivity as their DC rivals. Combined with extreme restrictions from the censors, and... well, they're not bad cartoons, but they just never stood out quite the way their DC rivals did. * ''X-Men the Animated Series'' started the show, and showcases the best (and also the worst) of the MAU. It drew deep inspiration from the comics of the 80s and 90s, and often made changes that were in many ways superior to the original. * ''Fantastic Four'' * ''Iron Man'' was a weird show, mostly because it took its roots from the short-lived "Force Works" comic series, which was about Iron Man leading his own knock-off to the Avengers. The first season also made it a very visible effort to showcase very, ''very'' egregiously dated CGI. * ''Spider-Man the Animated Series'' * ''The Incredible Hulk'' * ''Silver Surfer'' a very brief 13-episode run. Infamous for the part where the Surfer had a conversation with Hank Hill as part of a commercial. * ''Spider-Man Unlimited'' was intended to be a sequel to the original Spider-Man TAS, but Marvel dropped the ball on actually making it feel like a sequel. Combined with the weird choice of story - Spider-Man is stranded on an alien world whilst trying to stop Venom and Carnage - and, well, it was the beginning of the end of the MAU, being cut short at 13 episodes and ending on a cliff-hanging. It ran from 1999 to 2001. * ''The Avengers: United They Stand'' was the very first Avengers cartoon, and generally considered the worst of the Marvel Animated Universe cartoons. Whilst the Marvel Animated Universe died, it paved the way for a further wave of Marvel cartoons across the early 2000s and into the 2010s. It started with ''X-Men: Evolution'', a reimagining of the X-Men that portrayed most of the characters as teenagers (except for Beast, Storm and Wolverine, who were teachers). It ran from 2000 to 2003. 2003 also saw the release of the CGI ''Spider-Man: The New Animated Series'', a tie-in to the original Fox Spider-Man film that only lasted one season. 2006-7 saw the release of ''Fantastic Four: World's Greatest Heroes'', which unlike its predecessors focused on telling entirely new stories rather than adapting comic stories. 2008-9 featured ''The Spectacular Spider-Man'', which like X-Men: Evolution focused on a teenage version of the titular wall-crawler, and was in fact the first cartoon to focus on the "teen Spidey years". Widely beloved but was cut short far too soon. In 2009, ''Wolverine and the X-Men'' ran for a single season. This version of the show had Xavier's mansion leveled by a mysterious explosion, which seemingly kills Xavier. A year later, Xavier telepathically communicates to Wolverine from a bad future where the Sentinels rule and instructs Wolverine to re-assemble the X-Men. ''Iron Man: Armored Adventures'' (2009-12) was another "teenage years!" version of a Marvel superhero. ''The Super Hero Squad Show'', which ran for 2 seasons from 2009-2011,was a toyetic super-deformed, self-aware parody-comedy in which Iron Man and Dr. Doom duelled for possession of the shattered "fractals" of the reality-bending Infinity Sword with their respective teams of supers. In 2012, the second Avengers-based cartoon, ''The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes'' was released. Running for two seasons before being cancelled, in comparison to its predecessor, it was widely beloved and like Spectacular Spider-Man is often held up as one of the best Marvel animated series. In 2010 to 2012, Marvel and Studio Madhouse released 4 12-episode long [[/a/|anime]] series, based on Iron Man, Wolverine, the X-Men, and Blade. It also included a set of OVAs. ''Marvel Disk Wars: The Avengers'' was another animu that ran from 2014-2015. Unlike the rather dark and gritty Madhouse animus, this one was very much aimed for young kids. All the heroes got trapped into little disks that are picked up by a bunch of kids and activated by using special peripherals that look way too much like something that should be on store shelves. While this was released during the era of the MCU's reign, it was more than a fair bit removed from everything else. From 2012 onwards, the cartoons became more... "MCU adjacent", with a distinct tendency to employ MCU-style humor. These cartoons are not as well received as their precursors. * ''Ultimate Spider-Man'' * ''Avengers Assemble'' * ''Hulk and the Agents of S.M.A.S.H'' * ''Guardians of the Galaxy'' * ''Marvel's Spider-Man'' ===Marvel Cinematic Universe=== One of the five or six largest franchises on Earth at the moment, the MCU has plenty of coverage elsewhere. We only mention it here because, again, one of the most profitable franchise on Earth at the moment.
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