When EMH premiered way back when, it seemed to be Marvel's way to introduce kids to the Avengers before the big upcoming movie. Remember, back in the fall of 2010, there were only three entries in the Marvel Cinematic Universe: IRON MAN, IRON MAN 2, and THE INCREDIBLE HULK. THOR was still half a year away, and CAPTAIN AMERICA was slated for the following summer, with AVENGERS still nearly two years in the future. But Marvel Studios was already planting seeds in their films, and a TV tie-in would be a fine way to get the characters out into the hearts and minds of a major chunk of the movies' audience.
So, as yet unburdened from a need to mirror the movies' character lineups and continuity, EMH instead adapted plotlines from the comics of decades past. Material was mined heavily from the Silver Age, as well as the Bronze Age and the then-modern era. The result was, in my opinion, the only time a Marvel cartoon has ever matched the high water mark set by the Distinguished Competition's DC Animated Universe shows. I mean, I watched and enjoyed a lot of Marvel shows as a kid, from reruns of the 1960s SPIDER-MAN show to SPIDER-MAN AND HIS AMAZING FRIENDS to the 1990s X-MEN and SPIDER-MAN, but while some of them were quite good, they never equalled, in my mind, shows like BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES, SUPERMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES, and JUSTICE LEAGUE and JUSTICE LEAGUE UNLIMITED.
(This was especially evident watching X-MEN and SPIDER-MAN alongside B:TAS as a kid; all three aired around the same time on Fox -- and while I liked both Marvel shows quite a bit, every time I tuned in to BATMAN, there was just no comparison. B:TAS had stronger writing, better animation, better music. It was just a superior production in every way. The only thing it lacked next to the Marvel shows was any degree of serialization, but at the same time, B:TAS didn't need serialization to work.)
And while Marvel never quite seemed to figure out how to do cartoons right, the DCAU flourished, ultimately culminating with the brilliant JLU, which set a standard no Marvel show had ever met and, I suspected, would never meet.
Then, in 2010, four years after JLU ended, EARTH'S MIGHTIEST HEROES hit the airwaves, and I was blown away. It seemed Marvel had finally done it; they had, at long last, produced their version of a DCAU show. The plotting was great and the writing good, the voices were decent, the animation was top-notch (the music was kinda crummy, though -- but DC's series scores had gone way downhill too over the years -- I would even say so far downhill that it was like a drop off a cliff into a sea of bland mediocrity -- when they moved away from orchestras to synthesizers). This was the Marvel series I had been waiting my whole life to see!
I eagerly tuned in every week, and I had hopes that the series would run for several years, introducing new Avengers to the team, adapting more and more stories from the comics. But sadly, that wasn't meant to be. EMH was cancelled after two seasons and fifty-two episodes in order to make way for AVENGERS ASSEMBLE, an uninspired, bland-looking production that was created to more closely mirror the MCU.
But we'll always have those fifty-two installments of EMH, which I now intend to cover here, starting next Friday. I crunched the numbers several times to make certain, and by my calculations, one episode a week for a fifty-two episode series should take exactly one year. So buckle up, true believers, because next Friday we take our very first dip into the strange and mysterious world of television!
*Ten years? TEN YEARS?! I have no problem believing that there were only three Marvel movies ten years ago, but it's insane to me that this show debuted that far back. I don't know what I would've guessed, but it certainly wouldn't have been a decade!
i love hulk
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