Ooops, looks like there was already a thread, ignore this.
I turned on the Super Bowl, but I quickly lost interest when I realized it was for people who like football.
Sure, it’s on me, and this is clearly their strategy and it works for them, but at the same time, I do find it odd that seemingly the only on-ramp for all this content that they want you to subscribe for is to watch every single MCU movie or watch every single preceding piece of preceding Star Wars content. They’re not throwing a bone to people who are somewhat into it, or who might want to approach it from the comics, say. Even given a premise, the whole point of which is that they can ignore the canon and go crazy, what they choose to do is reimagine a specific MCU film. It’s even more weird when they spent so many of the initial MCU films on origin stories, even for characters whose origin stories we’ve seen a thousand times. They didn’t want to assume any knowledge there, but when it comes to the TV shows, you’d better do your research first. It’s weird to me they don’t have more standalone shows like Modok, where they’re drawing on the deep reservoir of characters and lore they have, but without any particular connection to specific movies.
There are so many on-ramps for the MCU, I don’t even know where to start! You can pick one character you like and watch their movie trilogy and generally get a complete character arc. My brother has seen all of the Avengers movies and nothing else. Hell, I have a friend whose wife watched WandaVision as her first Marvel show, then went back and just watched the movies with Wanda and Vision in them. I think there are tons of entry points, and then you can backfill whatever other movies interest you.
Even the complaint about the comics seems strange. If you have a general idea of Captain America’s origin from the comics, I think you can follow Avengers or What If…? or the other movies pretty easily. And if you want background on a particular character, the Marvel Legends show has episodes for each character introduced in the new series.
And I don’t know what origin stories we’ve seen a thousand times; besides the Hulk, I literally don’t think we’ve seen any of these origin stories before. Hell, in the 1940s Captain America serials, he was a district attorney named Grant Gardner! But other than those, Iron Man, Thor, Black Widow, Ant-Man, Guardians of the Galaxy…none of them have had origin stories in any film medium. (Captain America and Doctor Strange both had TV movies in the ’70s, but again those are very loosely based on the comics. Plus, nobody saw them.)
As for the What If…? series, those comics have always been based on a specific origin or storyline. It’s not just “ignore the canon and go crazy.” I guess if you haven’t seen a particular movie, then skip that episode? I don’t know what to tell you.
They’ve had standalone shows in the past. Daredevil. Iron Fist. Luke Cage. Jessica Jones. Runaways. Cloak and Dagger. But the big complaint about those was that they didn’t ever tie back in to the movies. Now they’re trying to make everything connected, which has always been one of Marvel’s strengths. I’m pretty sure that upcoming series like Ms. Marvel or She-Hulk will be more standalone shows.
Most MCU stuff is made with a ton of onboarding, this is probably the most extreme example of no onboarding I can remember from them.
But it’s 30 minutes, I get it, it’s for people who already know all the stuff and just want to see the differences.
But even the previous MCU shows, I think you could follow them well enough even without much previous knowledge, or maybe as a comics fan I’m vastly underestimating what much previous knowledge means.
Well, yeah, the on-ramps are on-ramps to watching the movies. Which I don’t particularly want to do any more, as I’m sick of them by now. Again, it’s the MCU, so it’s on me. But I still find it weird that the shows are so aggressively tied to specific movies, rather than Marvel at large.
Again - it’s always coming back to a specific movie. I’m fine with them basing it on a specific story line. I just wish it wasn’t always from the movies. And, again, I acknowledge this is my problem.
And personally, I felt those complaints were wrong (and, NB, those were all shows not on Disney+). Or at least half wrong - the weakness of those shows for me wasn’t that they didn’t tie into the movies, it’s that they couldn’t, for either contractual or budget reasons, use the movies’ characters (much). So in Agents of Shield, you basically never saw the Avengers. It made them feel low rent and out of place. Modok, by virtue of being animated, gets to have Iron Man in it, and so feel like part of the Marvel universe, without being dependent on knowledge of everything that happened across the MCU.
It’s not generally a question of following, as not getting anything like as much out of them, by design. I watched Wandavision, and a lot of the fanservice went right over my head, and I’ve read Vision comics! The Quicksilver reveal, for instance, was a huge story beat, but meant nothing to me. Similarly for the Mandalorian - I’ve watched most of the Star Wars movies, and some other stuff, but even so there was a ton of stuff that was references to characters and events I’ve never heard of. And that was their big budget mainstream show - you’d think that would be the lowest common denominator one.
I’m not saying it’s a bad approach, just a surprising one, and one that means I’m just not going to be able to buy into most of these shows, as much of their appeal is lost on me.
But that’s an unfixable problem. If you show TFA trailer to someone who’s never seen a Star Wars movie, it’s going to hit different than for a fan.
My first Dr. Who series was the Eccleston one, loads of stuff has much less impact on me than on someone who had I dunno, followed the series since they were 6.
Someone who knows what a flying monkey is will get more out of Avengers 1 than someone who doesn’t.
It is what it is, otherwise half these shows and movies would be just explaining everything you need to completely grok them. You either like the product to fall more into it, enjoy it enough to just go along with what you do get or just say “not for me”.
And I assume the What is series is entirely in the people who were already into our stuff part of the equation.
Hence my post in the first place. It didn’t have to be. I’d be interested in watching a “What if Captain America were a woman” story. But not really a “What if Captain America: The First Avenger had a female lead” story.
I do think the Dr Who comparison is interesting. Certainly there’s stuff that die-hard fans will get out of it that newcomers wouldn’t. But they very, very consciously aimed the Eccleston show at newcomers (partly to escape from the legacy of the McCoy years, I think) . And indeed you found plenty of old-school Whovians moaning about it.
The reason I was talking about the on-ramps to the movies is because until 2020, the MCU was almost entirely about the movies (with Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and Agents of Carter being the exceptions). And so far, yes, the series have all been spinoffs from the movies, so I get that complaint. But at some point we’re going to get Ms. Marvel and Moon Knight and She-Hulk, who are all characters that will be originating in their own TV series.
The What If…? comics were always based on the comics, so the What If…? MCU show is going to be based on the MCU movies. It wouldn’t really make sense to have a story like, “What if Annihilus Didn’t Leave the Negative Zone with the High Evolutionary?” when people don’t know who Annihilus or the High Evolutionary are. What If…? is supposed to be a fun twist on stories you already know, and they can’t do that unless they are stories you already know.
I sort of get what your complaint is here, but I’m not really sure there’s a solution. I haven’t seen any of the Fast and Furious movies, but I could go see F9 right now and I’m sure it would be a pretty fun ride, even though I won’t get any of the references to the previous movies. Should they remove those references so that I don’t feel left out?? I don’t know how you do a story that’s part of an ongoing universe without including references to other characters and events.
And I really don’t get your complaint about The Mandalorian. It’s about as standalone a show as you can get. What characters and events did you need to know for the story to make sense?? It’s about two characters wandering the galaxy and having adventures. I don’t know of anything besides the three movies that you would need to know to understand the show.
Or let me put it another way: The original Star Wars movie made several references to the Clone Wars, which was some unknown historical event. And if someone were watching it today, they could say, “I never watched the Clone Wars TV series, so this reference is totally lost on me.” But when the movie originally came out, it was just a reference to something that happened in the past. Throwing in a reference like that makes the world feel real and lived-in, but it shouldn’t make anyone feel left out for not getting it.
I think this is a great example. You can enjoy a story about living plastic men that attack people, but it means something more to people who remember the original episode that the Autons were in (I don’t know, because I’ve never seen it).
And there are always going to be references to things that happened in the past. There’s one episode where the Doctor meets some tree-woman, and they clearly have some sort of past history together. Was that something that was made up for this episode, or was it actually a reference to a previous series? It doesn’t really matter to me, since I haven’t seen the previous series, but maybe it means something to someone who watched all of the previous shows.
Spoiler alert: Those are the same story.
I started the Fast and Furious series with the 6th, and I’ve never gone back to the earlier movies and still have a great time. FWIW.
Watched it last night with my 12 year old daughter. We both loved it! Totally dug the art style and it looked fabulous on my OLED. Really liked how it played off the original and enjoyed the callbacks and twist. Can’t wait for more. Would have watched a whole series of Capt. Carter though.
Well it ending in yet another Tentacle Portal was pretty lame IMO.
When was there another one?? Besides Hellboy, I mean.
I actually like that the storyline diverged somewhat from the original Captain America movie.
A certain game that came out last week for one.
It’s feeling as tired as Evil-Superman
I’m probably not the only one who was hoping for a surprise cameo from Brett Dalton… although the timing wouldn’t be right for him to be Hive yet.
Yes, please
Live action and I’m in.
Hah, yeah, it was a cute almost-AoS callback. Maybe the best we’ll get in the MCU proper. But I was here for it. But alas, no Squid-Ward :(
Maybe not, but it’s what I was expecting when they started talking about summoning their champion