The Second Season of Avengers Earth's Mightiest Heroes to Be the Last; New Avengers Cartoon on the way.
There is a pretty good chance that Avengers Earth's Mightiest Heroes (and Iron Man Armored Adventures) will be wrapping up after this season. Granted, given the struggles of many comic book based cartoons to get more than a season (that being a season that that doesn't get shunted around in about six different time slots with minimal promotion at that), perhaps we should be happy about the fact that we got a second season of Avengers Earth's Mightiest Heroes.
However, being a fan, I'm far from happy. The fact is the new Marvel Animation division wants everything of their own, even if it sabotaging a great television show. And the best way to sabotage a television show is to not promote it all that much, to shuttle it around into different time slots, so you can use the ratings as a scapegoat that it needs to be retooled.
This new Avengers cartoon will have mostly standalone stories. I don't really have too much of a problem with that. Batman the Animated Series was for instance pretty much standalone with some two part episodes here and there. It wasn't until Superman the Animated Series took off years later that BTAS was part of an interweaving tapestry of continuity. It is also more in line with the movie, which may or may not work, I'm on the fence.
The cartoon would be more "kid friendly." To me that phrase chills me to the bone, not because of the fact that something is kid friendly, but the perception that many people have of children working in the entertainment business and what appeals to them.
The perception is that you have to have characters that are obnoxious and everyone is trying to be "funny" every single minute. Where they take jokes and beat them to the ground where the point they are waving a hand in your face, saying "see that's funny, see, ha, ha, ha, laugh." And obviously the villains will just be evil just because...well they are.
Granted some people go so far into a certain end of the realm of making every single villain deep and three dimensional, which is reason why I think that some villains come across as less powerful than they should, because everyone has to have a complex backstory. You need a mix of your people who have been twisted by society and people who just are just plain mean.
I've said this before, and I've said this again, the best cartoons are the kinds that I can enjoy as a child and turn around and enjoy it in a different way as an adult. People have that senseless notion that cartoons are only for children and thus they make cartoons that are only for children to justify their perspective.
This is the future of Marvel Animation, where everything is a hyped up sugar fest. Granted it could be decent, but the phrase "more kid friendly" chills me to the bone. Ultimate Spider-Man has had a lot of ups and downs and I fear that it won't have a rewatch factor. The new Hulk series is on the table, the new Avengers series after Earth's Mightiest Heroes wraps up, and everything else is marketed in such a way where it is going to do more harm in the long term.
No comments:
Post a Comment