Freddy
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Aug 1, 2012
- Messages
- 800
Before starting, I should make it clear that basically none of these eras are any way "official". I came up with their names and cut-off points myself and you are free to disagree with my reasonings.
Anyway, in my eyes the history of Marvel Animation can be broken off to following eras:
The Silver Age (1966-1970)
While Marvel has been around all the way from 1939 (then known as Timely Comics), many people see 60's as the decade Marvel was truly born, with Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko creating the likes of Fantastic Four, X-Men, The Avengers and Spider-Man. So, it makes sense that Marvel animation also got its start in the 60's.
This was of course back when most of characters were still, relatively speaking, in their early days and weren't all fully formed yet. This was before X-Men were an overt commentary on bigotry, before Tony Stark was a self-destructive wreck, before Hulk was a stand-in for mental illness etc. Also, this was before all the truly big breakthroughs of TV-animation, so animated shows on TV were still done extremely cheaply. Not saying none of the comic stories of that time were great or hold up (the original Lee/Ditko/Romita run is IMO arguably still the best era of Spider-Man comics) or you can't find certain charm from cartoons of this time, but I don't think anyone would object to me saying that the truly great Marvel cartoons were yet to come.
It would be unfair of me not to give a special shout-out to the Spider-Man series, with its memetic status and truly iconic theme song, which gets refenced and covered to this day. I personally feel that those are more fun than the show itself, where the camp value gets old after couple of episodes, but I can understand how and why the show holds a special place for some people.
The shows of this era:
- The Marvel Super Heroes (1966)
- Hanna-Barbera's Fantastic Four (1967)
- Spider-Man (1967)
The Bronze Age (1970-1990)
A notable development here is that during this time Marvel formed a production company called Marvel Productions (later renamed to New World Animation Ltd.) which produced most of the cartoon shows of this era. They also produced some shows unrelated to their comics, like the original Transformers and My Little Pony, but I'm only going to count their shows directly adapting their comics for this.
Couple of things of note from this era:
- This era gave us The New Fantastic Four series, which infamously replaced the Human Torch with H.E.R.B.I.E. the robot. For the longest time, a popular urban myth was that this was done, because the producers were afraid of the kids setting themselves on fire, but the truth is a more mundane case of the rights to the character being sold to a different studio.
- Marvel teamed-up with Toei Animation a lot, which not only produced some of the best looking invidual episodes of Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, but also two anime OVAs, Dracula: Sovereign of the Damned and The Monster of Frankenstein, which adapted material from their old horror comics.
- This era predates serialized television, both in live-action and animation, yet the Spider-Man solo series had an on-going Doctor Doom storyline, which had a clear begining and ending.
- This era was when we had a first serious attempt at adapting X-Men into a media outside of the comics, with the Pryde of the X-Men animated pilot, which got never picked up for a series, but probably started the domino effect, which gave us a certain other show from the next era.
While it would be a strech to call any of the Marvel cartoon's of this era particularly "deep", they are in my eyes great improvements from the previous era. I would like to give special shout-outs to both The Incredible Hulk and solo Spider-Man shows, where you can see in certain episodes certain writers trying to be slightly more ambitious than they were allowed to be, with Hulk doing fun remixes of old sci-fi tropes and Spider-Man truly trying to have a balance between Peter Parker's real-life drama and superhero action. I also feel that the 70's Spider-Woman cartoon is criminally overlooked, being kinda ahead of its time in a way it depicted a female main character (I.E. The show was allowed to be an action series, rather than trying to be something more traditionally "girly") and, if you are someone who enjoy the likes of 60's Spider-Man or His Amazing Friends, it has ton of cheeseball entertainment value.
Also, it is very interesting and funny how all of Marvel's first movie adaptations had very unconventiol choices of source material. With their first theatrically released live-action feature film was Howard the Duck (1986) and their first animated features were the aforementioned Dracula and Frankenstein animes.
The shows of this era:
- The New Fantastic Four (1978)
- Spider-Woman (1979)
- Spider-Man (1981)
- Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends (1981)
- The Incredible Hulk (1982)
The movies of this era:
- Dracula: Sovereign of the Damned (1980)
- The Monster of Frankenstein (1981)
The specials of this era:
- Pryde of the X-Men (1989)
The 90's (1990-2000)
Now, I don't pretend to be an expert or even particularly well-researched on animation history, but I do feel that 90's was in a lot of way a big turning point for American TV-animation. Thanks to the likes of The Disney Afternoon (which, yes, technically got started near the end of the 80's) and Warner Bros. animation investing more on the production values of their animated shows than ever before and pushing some serious envelopes what animation can do on TV, the bar got set high. And finally, after years of behind the scenes battles and disagreements, X-Men got their first succesful adaptation with their 90's series, which was a bigger hit than anyone could have expected and opened the doors for ton of other Marvel shows.
A lot of people like to look back on this era as the peak of Marvel animation and X-Men '97 has no doubt made those rose colored glasses even rosier, but this era had its issues. Arguably, X-Men and Spider-Man were their only truly succesfull shows, with everything else getting cancelled after only a season or two. Iron Man and Fantastic Four had terrible first seasons, which lead to heavy revamps for their second ones, while the likes of Spider-Man Unlimited and The Avengers: United They Stand were just generally the laughing stocks for the longest time (although, to be fair, the former has gotten kinda a following in recent years). Admittedly, because of the 90's comic crash and some terrible business choices, Marvel was going through a bankruptcy at the time and genuily couldn't produce some of the shows anymore, so it can be hard to tell how much some of them were genuily tanking.
People also like to headcanon this era as one big shared universe and the head-writer of the first season of X-Men '97, Beau DeMayo, has said that he treated them as such, but I don't agree with that. Most of them had different production crews and writers working on them, with ton of story contradictions. Now, to be fair, some of them can be seen as shared universes. X-Men had a two-part crossover with Spider-Man, where a great care was taken to get every voice actor to reprise their roles, to use the same character designs, include music from their soundtrack and not directly contradict anything, so those two are clearly a shared universe. Iron Man, Fantastic Four and The Incredible Hulk all did direct continuity references to each other, so those three are also a shared universe. But one big universe with all of these shows? No, I don't think so.
Personally, I feel that X-Men is the only show that holds up as an overall great show. The other big fan-favorite, Spider-Man, has things to admire, but the production values were just abysmal and the writing of Peter Parker's personal drama got weaker season-by-season. I do, however, want to give shout-outs to the first season of The Incredible Hulk, which was very solid (too bad the second season was terrible) and Silver Surfer, which was genuily great science-fiction (especially for kids), but unfortunately ends on a major cliffhanger.
The shows of this era:
- X-Men (1992)
- Fantastic Four (1994)
- Iron Man (1994)
- Spider-Man (1994)
- The Incredible Hulk (1996)
- Silver Surfer (1998)
- Spider-Man Unlimited (1999)
- The Avengers: United They Stand (1999)
The New Millenium (2000-2010)
After being saved from the bankruptcy by making various movie deals, Marvel was able to get back on their feet and start making cartoons again and in a lot of ways this might be their most succesfull era, in terms of producing some of their biggest fan-favorites, officially forming Marvel Animation production company and just the sheer number of projects they produced. This era could also be splitted to two, with Christopher Yost becoming a notable driving creative force on these projects at a certain point and combining ton of them into his own shared universe (which unfortunately never got a chance to have any big DCAU style crossovers for various reasons).
Some of the notable points of this era are Marvel trying their hands at their first "mature" animated show, with MTV's Spider-Man (although, "mature" in this context means more teenage boys), them producing a whole series of direct-to-dvd animated features with Lionsgate and teaming-up with Madhouse to produce four anime mini-series (although, most of their premies bleed over to the next era).
Personally, this era might actually be the most nostalgic for me personally and it is an era of big hits, but also big missses. The Spectacular Spider-Man and The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes are both masterpieces and easily the best adaptations both properties have gotten. I also have major soft spots for Fantastic Four: World's Greatest Heroes and Spider-Man: The New Animated Series (despite me kinda taking a jab at it earlier). As for misses, never cared for Iron Man: Armored Adventures or The Super Hero Squad Show, and my big hot take is that Wolverine and the X-Men does not hold up.
I know a lot of people look back fondly on the straight-to-dvd animated movies and wish they would have lasted longer or came back, but, to be honest, I feel most of them played it weirdly safe (especially the Doctor Strange one, where some of the creative choices felt like something you would have done with a live-action Doctor Strange movie at the time, not with animation where CGI-limitations aren't a concern) or were too childish for my taste (Next Avengers and Tales of Asgard). Hulk vs. and Planet Hulk are the only two that I personally think still hold up (and, even then, Hulk vs. Wolverine short does a lot of heavy-lifting for Hulk vs.).
The shows of this era:
- X-Men: Evolution (2000)
- Spider-Man: The New Animated Series (2003)
- Fantastic Four: World's Greatest Heroes (2006)
- The Spectacular Spider-Man (2008)
- Wolverine and the X-Men (2009)
- Iron Man: Armored Adventures (2009)
- The Super Hero Squad Show (2009)
- The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes (2010)
- Iron Man Anime (2010)
The movies of this era:
- Ultimate Avengers (2006)
- Ultimate Avengers 2 (2006)
- The Invincible Iron Man (2007)
- Doctor Strange: The Sorcerer Supreme (2007)
- Next Avengers: Heroes of Tomorrow (2008)
- Hulk vs. (2009)
- Planet Hulk (2010)
The Dark Age (2011-2020)
Between the first and second seasons of Avengers: EMH, a major shift happened behind the scenes of Marvel Animation. Jeph Loeb became the head of Marvel Television, which gave him the power over their animated projects too. Now, Loeb is somewhat divisive figure, with him having written some critically-acclaimed Batman comics, yet his various works at Marvel make people tilt their heads. For the purpose of the topic at hand, I will ignore his works on Marvel comics and live-action TV (although, to be fair to the man, Netflix Daredevil is IMHO the greatest live-action adaptation of any Marvel property ever made) and focus on the fingerprints he left on their animation.
Look, the fact that I chose to name this era "The Dark Age" already shows my hand, so there's really no point dancing around this. This is easily the worst era of Marvel Animation. Loeb was pretty open about seeing animation as purely something for kids, which doesn't inherently mean that the end product is going to be terrible (arguably 90% of the works we have talked about so far were aimed at kids), but for him "made for kids" meant "talks down to kids". All the shows of this era are just extremely juvenile, with all the main characters acting incredibly imature and all the plots being stock cartoon fare, with almost every show having things like token body-swap episode.
This era also had two other fatal flaws. Firstly, the production values took huge nosedives. Of the shows, Ultimate Spider-Man still looked decent, but everything else had muted colors and often resulted to tricks like moving a still 2D image accros the screen to showcase a character "moving". The other flaw was constant MCU pandering and cross-promotion. Characters weren't allowed to be of any importance, unless they had made a MCU debut, all the character designs had to reflect what the movies were doing, most of the voice actors were hired to be cheap sound-a-likes of the movie actors and the characters had to constantly quote and/or reference scenes from the movies.
There were some direct-to-dvd movies from this era, two of which were more anime co-productions with Madhouse, but none of them are particularly worth talking about.
Speaking of movies, the two major bright spots of this era came outside of Marvel themselves. First, the Disney produced Big Hero 6 movie, which I personally always feel iffy counting as part of Marvel Animation, since it's pretty much in-name-only adaptation and Marvel is mentioned nowhere in the main credits, but it is based on a Marvel comic, so it counts. Second, Sony's Into the Spider-Verse movie, which is one of the rare non-Disney/Pixar movies to win the best animated feature Oscar. While BH6 is not one of my personal favorite Disney movies and I do think Spider-Verse, both the original comic and the movie, is overhyped, they are both quality movies and leagues above Marvel's own animated productions of the time.
The shows of this era:
- Wolverine Anime (2011)
- X-Men Anime (2011)
- Blade Anime (2011)
- Ultimate Spider-Man (2012)
- Avengers Assemble (2013)
- Hulk and the Agents of S.M.A.S.H. (2013)
- Marvel Disk Wars: The Avengers (2014)
- Guardians of the Galaxy (2015)
- Marvel Future Avengers (2017)
- Marvel's Spider-Man (2017)
- Big Hero 6: The Series (2017)
The movies of this era:
- Thor: Tales of Asgard (2011)
- Iron Man: Rise of Technovore (2013)
- Iron Man & Hulk: Heroes United (2013)
- Big Hero 6 (2014)
- Avengers Confidential: Black Widow & Punisher (2014)
- Iron Man & Captain America: Heroes United (2014)
- Marvel Super Hero Adventures: Frost Fight! (2015)
- Hulk: Where Monsters Dwell (2016)
- Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
- Marvel Rising: Secret Warriors (2018)
The specials/shorts of this era:
- Phineas and Ferb: Mission Marvel (2013)
- Lego Marvel Super Heroes (2013)
- Marvel's Rocket & Groot (2017)
- Marvel's Ant-Man (2017)
- Marvel Super Hero Adventures (2017)
- Marvel Rising (2018)
- Spider-Ham: Caught in a Ham (2019)
The Streaming Era (2021-???)
I would almost like to ignore this era, since it hasn't really formed its identity yet and is still ongoing. Not only have some of the final projects of the previous era bled into its begining, it has been really slow to actually get started. At the time of writing this, only three shows, which I would consider of this era, have premiered, with one of them having only just recently finished its first season.
On the other hand, it is currently shaping up to be an improvement from the previous era. At first, all it took for me to embrace What If...? was it being better than anything Jeph Loeb produced, but with season 2 being a major mixed bag for me, I'm not sure the show overall will hold up for me beyond that. However, X-Men '97 has been better than it had any right to be and up there one of the greatest Marvel animated projects period, so that alone counts for a lot.
The shows of this era:
- M.O.D.O.K. (2021)
- Spidey and His Amazing Friends (2021)
- What If...? (2021)
- Hit-Monkey (2021)
- Baymax! (2022)
- Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur (2023)
- X-Men '97 (2024)
- Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man (Upcoming)
- Marvel Zombies (Upcoming)
- Eyes of Wakanda (Upcoming)
The movies of this era:
- Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)
- Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse (Upcoming)
The specials/shorts of this era:
- I Am Groot (2022)
- More Lego Marvel (2022)
- The Spider Within: A Spider-Verse Story (2023)
My Personal Ranking of the Eras:
1. The New Millenium
Has its clunkers, but the good stuff is some of the best Marvel has ever produced.
2. The 90's
Perhaps overrated, but X-Men is iconic for a reason and some of the other gems shine brightly.
3. The Streaming Era/The Bronze Age
One is too young to be properly judged, but already has one major masterpiece under its belt and could jump to the second place, if not all the way to the first, if future projects are even half as good. The other is goofy cornball fun, which doesn't stand the test of time exactly, but is fun to look back to.
4. The Silver Age
Has certain value in terms of history and memes, but I'm not personally going back to any of its offerings.
5. The Dark Age
The one genuily terrible era, even with some bright spots.
Anyway, in my eyes the history of Marvel Animation can be broken off to following eras:
The Silver Age (1966-1970)
While Marvel has been around all the way from 1939 (then known as Timely Comics), many people see 60's as the decade Marvel was truly born, with Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko creating the likes of Fantastic Four, X-Men, The Avengers and Spider-Man. So, it makes sense that Marvel animation also got its start in the 60's.
This was of course back when most of characters were still, relatively speaking, in their early days and weren't all fully formed yet. This was before X-Men were an overt commentary on bigotry, before Tony Stark was a self-destructive wreck, before Hulk was a stand-in for mental illness etc. Also, this was before all the truly big breakthroughs of TV-animation, so animated shows on TV were still done extremely cheaply. Not saying none of the comic stories of that time were great or hold up (the original Lee/Ditko/Romita run is IMO arguably still the best era of Spider-Man comics) or you can't find certain charm from cartoons of this time, but I don't think anyone would object to me saying that the truly great Marvel cartoons were yet to come.
It would be unfair of me not to give a special shout-out to the Spider-Man series, with its memetic status and truly iconic theme song, which gets refenced and covered to this day. I personally feel that those are more fun than the show itself, where the camp value gets old after couple of episodes, but I can understand how and why the show holds a special place for some people.
The shows of this era:
- The Marvel Super Heroes (1966)
- Hanna-Barbera's Fantastic Four (1967)
- Spider-Man (1967)
The Bronze Age (1970-1990)
A notable development here is that during this time Marvel formed a production company called Marvel Productions (later renamed to New World Animation Ltd.) which produced most of the cartoon shows of this era. They also produced some shows unrelated to their comics, like the original Transformers and My Little Pony, but I'm only going to count their shows directly adapting their comics for this.
Couple of things of note from this era:
- This era gave us The New Fantastic Four series, which infamously replaced the Human Torch with H.E.R.B.I.E. the robot. For the longest time, a popular urban myth was that this was done, because the producers were afraid of the kids setting themselves on fire, but the truth is a more mundane case of the rights to the character being sold to a different studio.
- Marvel teamed-up with Toei Animation a lot, which not only produced some of the best looking invidual episodes of Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, but also two anime OVAs, Dracula: Sovereign of the Damned and The Monster of Frankenstein, which adapted material from their old horror comics.
- This era predates serialized television, both in live-action and animation, yet the Spider-Man solo series had an on-going Doctor Doom storyline, which had a clear begining and ending.
- This era was when we had a first serious attempt at adapting X-Men into a media outside of the comics, with the Pryde of the X-Men animated pilot, which got never picked up for a series, but probably started the domino effect, which gave us a certain other show from the next era.
While it would be a strech to call any of the Marvel cartoon's of this era particularly "deep", they are in my eyes great improvements from the previous era. I would like to give special shout-outs to both The Incredible Hulk and solo Spider-Man shows, where you can see in certain episodes certain writers trying to be slightly more ambitious than they were allowed to be, with Hulk doing fun remixes of old sci-fi tropes and Spider-Man truly trying to have a balance between Peter Parker's real-life drama and superhero action. I also feel that the 70's Spider-Woman cartoon is criminally overlooked, being kinda ahead of its time in a way it depicted a female main character (I.E. The show was allowed to be an action series, rather than trying to be something more traditionally "girly") and, if you are someone who enjoy the likes of 60's Spider-Man or His Amazing Friends, it has ton of cheeseball entertainment value.
Also, it is very interesting and funny how all of Marvel's first movie adaptations had very unconventiol choices of source material. With their first theatrically released live-action feature film was Howard the Duck (1986) and their first animated features were the aforementioned Dracula and Frankenstein animes.
The shows of this era:
- The New Fantastic Four (1978)
- Spider-Woman (1979)
- Spider-Man (1981)
- Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends (1981)
- The Incredible Hulk (1982)
The movies of this era:
- Dracula: Sovereign of the Damned (1980)
- The Monster of Frankenstein (1981)
The specials of this era:
- Pryde of the X-Men (1989)
The 90's (1990-2000)
Now, I don't pretend to be an expert or even particularly well-researched on animation history, but I do feel that 90's was in a lot of way a big turning point for American TV-animation. Thanks to the likes of The Disney Afternoon (which, yes, technically got started near the end of the 80's) and Warner Bros. animation investing more on the production values of their animated shows than ever before and pushing some serious envelopes what animation can do on TV, the bar got set high. And finally, after years of behind the scenes battles and disagreements, X-Men got their first succesful adaptation with their 90's series, which was a bigger hit than anyone could have expected and opened the doors for ton of other Marvel shows.
A lot of people like to look back on this era as the peak of Marvel animation and X-Men '97 has no doubt made those rose colored glasses even rosier, but this era had its issues. Arguably, X-Men and Spider-Man were their only truly succesfull shows, with everything else getting cancelled after only a season or two. Iron Man and Fantastic Four had terrible first seasons, which lead to heavy revamps for their second ones, while the likes of Spider-Man Unlimited and The Avengers: United They Stand were just generally the laughing stocks for the longest time (although, to be fair, the former has gotten kinda a following in recent years). Admittedly, because of the 90's comic crash and some terrible business choices, Marvel was going through a bankruptcy at the time and genuily couldn't produce some of the shows anymore, so it can be hard to tell how much some of them were genuily tanking.
People also like to headcanon this era as one big shared universe and the head-writer of the first season of X-Men '97, Beau DeMayo, has said that he treated them as such, but I don't agree with that. Most of them had different production crews and writers working on them, with ton of story contradictions. Now, to be fair, some of them can be seen as shared universes. X-Men had a two-part crossover with Spider-Man, where a great care was taken to get every voice actor to reprise their roles, to use the same character designs, include music from their soundtrack and not directly contradict anything, so those two are clearly a shared universe. Iron Man, Fantastic Four and The Incredible Hulk all did direct continuity references to each other, so those three are also a shared universe. But one big universe with all of these shows? No, I don't think so.
Personally, I feel that X-Men is the only show that holds up as an overall great show. The other big fan-favorite, Spider-Man, has things to admire, but the production values were just abysmal and the writing of Peter Parker's personal drama got weaker season-by-season. I do, however, want to give shout-outs to the first season of The Incredible Hulk, which was very solid (too bad the second season was terrible) and Silver Surfer, which was genuily great science-fiction (especially for kids), but unfortunately ends on a major cliffhanger.
The shows of this era:
- X-Men (1992)
- Fantastic Four (1994)
- Iron Man (1994)
- Spider-Man (1994)
- The Incredible Hulk (1996)
- Silver Surfer (1998)
- Spider-Man Unlimited (1999)
- The Avengers: United They Stand (1999)
The New Millenium (2000-2010)
After being saved from the bankruptcy by making various movie deals, Marvel was able to get back on their feet and start making cartoons again and in a lot of ways this might be their most succesfull era, in terms of producing some of their biggest fan-favorites, officially forming Marvel Animation production company and just the sheer number of projects they produced. This era could also be splitted to two, with Christopher Yost becoming a notable driving creative force on these projects at a certain point and combining ton of them into his own shared universe (which unfortunately never got a chance to have any big DCAU style crossovers for various reasons).
Some of the notable points of this era are Marvel trying their hands at their first "mature" animated show, with MTV's Spider-Man (although, "mature" in this context means more teenage boys), them producing a whole series of direct-to-dvd animated features with Lionsgate and teaming-up with Madhouse to produce four anime mini-series (although, most of their premies bleed over to the next era).
Personally, this era might actually be the most nostalgic for me personally and it is an era of big hits, but also big missses. The Spectacular Spider-Man and The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes are both masterpieces and easily the best adaptations both properties have gotten. I also have major soft spots for Fantastic Four: World's Greatest Heroes and Spider-Man: The New Animated Series (despite me kinda taking a jab at it earlier). As for misses, never cared for Iron Man: Armored Adventures or The Super Hero Squad Show, and my big hot take is that Wolverine and the X-Men does not hold up.
I know a lot of people look back fondly on the straight-to-dvd animated movies and wish they would have lasted longer or came back, but, to be honest, I feel most of them played it weirdly safe (especially the Doctor Strange one, where some of the creative choices felt like something you would have done with a live-action Doctor Strange movie at the time, not with animation where CGI-limitations aren't a concern) or were too childish for my taste (Next Avengers and Tales of Asgard). Hulk vs. and Planet Hulk are the only two that I personally think still hold up (and, even then, Hulk vs. Wolverine short does a lot of heavy-lifting for Hulk vs.).
The shows of this era:
- X-Men: Evolution (2000)
- Spider-Man: The New Animated Series (2003)
- Fantastic Four: World's Greatest Heroes (2006)
- The Spectacular Spider-Man (2008)
- Wolverine and the X-Men (2009)
- Iron Man: Armored Adventures (2009)
- The Super Hero Squad Show (2009)
- The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes (2010)
- Iron Man Anime (2010)
The movies of this era:
- Ultimate Avengers (2006)
- Ultimate Avengers 2 (2006)
- The Invincible Iron Man (2007)
- Doctor Strange: The Sorcerer Supreme (2007)
- Next Avengers: Heroes of Tomorrow (2008)
- Hulk vs. (2009)
- Planet Hulk (2010)
The Dark Age (2011-2020)
Between the first and second seasons of Avengers: EMH, a major shift happened behind the scenes of Marvel Animation. Jeph Loeb became the head of Marvel Television, which gave him the power over their animated projects too. Now, Loeb is somewhat divisive figure, with him having written some critically-acclaimed Batman comics, yet his various works at Marvel make people tilt their heads. For the purpose of the topic at hand, I will ignore his works on Marvel comics and live-action TV (although, to be fair to the man, Netflix Daredevil is IMHO the greatest live-action adaptation of any Marvel property ever made) and focus on the fingerprints he left on their animation.
Look, the fact that I chose to name this era "The Dark Age" already shows my hand, so there's really no point dancing around this. This is easily the worst era of Marvel Animation. Loeb was pretty open about seeing animation as purely something for kids, which doesn't inherently mean that the end product is going to be terrible (arguably 90% of the works we have talked about so far were aimed at kids), but for him "made for kids" meant "talks down to kids". All the shows of this era are just extremely juvenile, with all the main characters acting incredibly imature and all the plots being stock cartoon fare, with almost every show having things like token body-swap episode.
This era also had two other fatal flaws. Firstly, the production values took huge nosedives. Of the shows, Ultimate Spider-Man still looked decent, but everything else had muted colors and often resulted to tricks like moving a still 2D image accros the screen to showcase a character "moving". The other flaw was constant MCU pandering and cross-promotion. Characters weren't allowed to be of any importance, unless they had made a MCU debut, all the character designs had to reflect what the movies were doing, most of the voice actors were hired to be cheap sound-a-likes of the movie actors and the characters had to constantly quote and/or reference scenes from the movies.
There were some direct-to-dvd movies from this era, two of which were more anime co-productions with Madhouse, but none of them are particularly worth talking about.
Speaking of movies, the two major bright spots of this era came outside of Marvel themselves. First, the Disney produced Big Hero 6 movie, which I personally always feel iffy counting as part of Marvel Animation, since it's pretty much in-name-only adaptation and Marvel is mentioned nowhere in the main credits, but it is based on a Marvel comic, so it counts. Second, Sony's Into the Spider-Verse movie, which is one of the rare non-Disney/Pixar movies to win the best animated feature Oscar. While BH6 is not one of my personal favorite Disney movies and I do think Spider-Verse, both the original comic and the movie, is overhyped, they are both quality movies and leagues above Marvel's own animated productions of the time.
The shows of this era:
- Wolverine Anime (2011)
- X-Men Anime (2011)
- Blade Anime (2011)
- Ultimate Spider-Man (2012)
- Avengers Assemble (2013)
- Hulk and the Agents of S.M.A.S.H. (2013)
- Marvel Disk Wars: The Avengers (2014)
- Guardians of the Galaxy (2015)
- Marvel Future Avengers (2017)
- Marvel's Spider-Man (2017)
- Big Hero 6: The Series (2017)
The movies of this era:
- Thor: Tales of Asgard (2011)
- Iron Man: Rise of Technovore (2013)
- Iron Man & Hulk: Heroes United (2013)
- Big Hero 6 (2014)
- Avengers Confidential: Black Widow & Punisher (2014)
- Iron Man & Captain America: Heroes United (2014)
- Marvel Super Hero Adventures: Frost Fight! (2015)
- Hulk: Where Monsters Dwell (2016)
- Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
- Marvel Rising: Secret Warriors (2018)
The specials/shorts of this era:
- Phineas and Ferb: Mission Marvel (2013)
- Lego Marvel Super Heroes (2013)
- Marvel's Rocket & Groot (2017)
- Marvel's Ant-Man (2017)
- Marvel Super Hero Adventures (2017)
- Marvel Rising (2018)
- Spider-Ham: Caught in a Ham (2019)
The Streaming Era (2021-???)
I would almost like to ignore this era, since it hasn't really formed its identity yet and is still ongoing. Not only have some of the final projects of the previous era bled into its begining, it has been really slow to actually get started. At the time of writing this, only three shows, which I would consider of this era, have premiered, with one of them having only just recently finished its first season.
On the other hand, it is currently shaping up to be an improvement from the previous era. At first, all it took for me to embrace What If...? was it being better than anything Jeph Loeb produced, but with season 2 being a major mixed bag for me, I'm not sure the show overall will hold up for me beyond that. However, X-Men '97 has been better than it had any right to be and up there one of the greatest Marvel animated projects period, so that alone counts for a lot.
The shows of this era:
- M.O.D.O.K. (2021)
- Spidey and His Amazing Friends (2021)
- What If...? (2021)
- Hit-Monkey (2021)
- Baymax! (2022)
- Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur (2023)
- X-Men '97 (2024)
- Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man (Upcoming)
- Marvel Zombies (Upcoming)
- Eyes of Wakanda (Upcoming)
The movies of this era:
- Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)
- Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse (Upcoming)
The specials/shorts of this era:
- I Am Groot (2022)
- More Lego Marvel (2022)
- The Spider Within: A Spider-Verse Story (2023)
My Personal Ranking of the Eras:
1. The New Millenium
Has its clunkers, but the good stuff is some of the best Marvel has ever produced.
2. The 90's
Perhaps overrated, but X-Men is iconic for a reason and some of the other gems shine brightly.
3. The Streaming Era/The Bronze Age
One is too young to be properly judged, but already has one major masterpiece under its belt and could jump to the second place, if not all the way to the first, if future projects are even half as good. The other is goofy cornball fun, which doesn't stand the test of time exactly, but is fun to look back to.
4. The Silver Age
Has certain value in terms of history and memes, but I'm not personally going back to any of its offerings.
5. The Dark Age
The one genuily terrible era, even with some bright spots.
Last edited:
