So with the Avengers haven gotten a lot of spotlight both in and out of comics, I thought I'd talk a little about the first attempt to bring the team into the general public's view the animated series Avengers: United They Stand.
I remember watching the first ep of this show and being intrigued by it but looking back it hasn't aged well. I daresay it's aged far worse than the Fox Spider-Man and X-Men series. The animation looks cheap and stilted, the voice acting ranges from bored to over the top, the story lines lack flair and interest and the Super Sentai inspired transformation sequences are so blatant in their purpose for merchandising, it makes Transformers and Power Ranger look subtle. But the area that this show really fails in is the team. I wasn't bothered by the fact that the "Big Three" wasn't present in this. Pretty much every adaptation of super hero teams from the Big Two had changed the roster. And I always admire trying to get B/C-list characters into the mainstream.
The problem is that instead of trying to show what made the Avengers unique, the writers pretty much took the traits and dynamic shown in the X-Men cartoon and slapped them unto the Avengers:
- Ant-Man is the straight-laced, stoic leader ala Scott Summers
His girlfriend, the Wasp, serves the same role as the useless red-headed girl like Jean Grey (yeah, the writers copied even the bad parts of X-Men)
Scarlet Witch invokes mystical forces in battles like Storm and is just as hammy
Tigra is the boisterous, Southern gal who loves to fight just like Rogue
Falcon serves the role as the audience surrogate like Jubilee did in the X-Men series
Hawkeye is the loud, temperamental rebel like Wolverine
Wonder Man gets captured in the opening episodes just like Morph
The show ran for 13 episodes before being cancelled. Plans for a second season included Hawkeye returning to the carnival he grew up in and the origin of Scarlet Witch's powers. There were also plans for a crossover with the X-Men animated series.
The theme song is a blast to listen to though.