Confession time: I have been watching Avengers Assemble over this past month. It was one of the Marvel cartoons that made me stop watching Marvel toons. But I got the urge to watch something with the Squadron Supreme in it and AA was the only option. And it was...alright, kind of

Squadron Supreme is Marvel's Justice League pastiche, with Hyperion (Superman), Nighthawk (Batman), Doctor Spectrum (Green Lantern), Zarda the Power Princess (Wonder Woman), and Speed Demon (Flash). And they were one of the first "what if superheroes took over the world" stories.

There was one Squadron ep in season 1 about Hyperion, and then the rest of the Squadron was in season 2. That season 1 ep was as bad as I remembered the show being, really choppy animation with so much corner cutting on the budget, and lots of really pointless shallow references.

This series was designed to keep the movies in the minds of kids in-between the movies coming out, and it really shows. It's designed to look like the movies, and reference the first Avengers movie as much as possible. The ep even ending like this:

But when I started season 2 I found the animation had improved a lot. It wasn't anything amazing, but at least it wasn't on the level of cardboard cut outs. The references were cut back substantially, and the writing had gotten less shallow and childish.

The Squadron arc even treated Falcon well, who was like a child in season 1 and even had an ep where he had to "comically" hide being an Avenger from his mom. The ep "Nighthawk" has Falcon's old SHIELD plans to take down the Avengers stolen by Nighthawk and used against the team.

And this show was made pre Falcon's MCU introduction, so he's very different here than the movies. Here he's a tech wiz who is "as smart as Tony" but only when the show needs him to be. And this arc ended with him leading the Avengers when Tony and Cap were MIA.

The show's main appeal is the Avengers being fun characters to watch and banter with each other. And it does deliver on that. Though the show might as well be called "Iron Man: Also Starring The Avengers" as so many episodes have Iron Man as the main or secondary focus.

The show was also really weird with introducing characters. Just throwing them in and having everyone act like they've met them already. Hyperion and Nighthawk got intro eps but the rest just appeared in an altered reality ep like the audience knows who Doctor Spectrum is.

Even weirder the Squadron members did get episodes to themselves later on, so the reverse of what you'd expect. They didn't even do anything with the Justice League connection. At best they had Phil Lamar as Doctor Spectrum and Jason Spisak as Speed Demon, but that's it.

But it was alright enough to watch the rest of the season, which was a two-part final with Thanos coming back giant size to smash things. Which did give us a mech sized Iron Man suit designed to look like the Ultimate armour.

I'm gonna go get a cup of tea and watch Taskmaster, but at some in the future I'll post about watching season 3, their attempt at the Thunderbolts, their Captain Marvel years before the film version, and how they changed direction after Age of Ultron was released.

I do wish I'd started this thread back when I was watching season 2 and not when I'm half way through season 3. So much catching up to do and so much I'm gonna skip.