Avengers, Earth's Mightiest Heroes, Season 1, Episode 3: Iron Man is Born
Apparently these episodes were initially released online as five-minute mini-episodes that are eventually stitched together into a full episode? That explains why half of the episode titled "Iron Man is Born" doesn't actually feature Iron Man in it, at least. And while I'm glad that we don't get a full 25-minute episode that's basically a recap of Iron Man the movie, the fact that some of the segments are meant to be multiple separate installments is somewhat jarring.
The episode basically starts off with a bit of an introduction to Iron Man's supporting cast, Pepper Potts and James "Future War Machine" Rhodes, who more or less have the same personality as they do in the movies. The villains of the week are Hydra, who here dress up in the comic books' green armour and drive giant skull-tentacle-octopus robots. Iron Man fights Hydra and is insanely bamboozled when he realizes that Hydra, and the SHIELD agents sent to arrest the Hydra goons, all use technology based off Stark's own technology. The actual fight scenes are okay, if repetitive, and it does build up Tony's love-hate frenemy relationship with Nick Fury and SHIELD pretty well. They're both ostensibly on the 'good guys' side, but Tony Stark doesn't play well with the government-sponsored Fury, and Stark's pissed off that SHIELD has been 'stealing' his tech. It does help put Stark's reluctance to work with SHIELD in the debut episode in context, I suppose. The added screentime also helps to give Maria Hill some extra characterization as the less diplomatic of the two main SHIELD bosses.
The final Iron Man scene in this episode has him walking away from Pepper and Rhodey, both of whom keep telling Tony that he can't go at this alone, which, of course, foreshadows the formation of the Avengers. Overall, though, it's a bit too slow paced and repetitive for my liking, so thankfully we've got around 7 or 8 minutes focusing on something other than Tony Stark.
As the Hydra prisoners are escorted into the Vault (one of the prisons featured in "Breakout"), one of the Hydra prisoners apparently is a cyborg, and is revealed to be the supervillain Grim Reaper, a new character to me, but a pretty cool one with a scythe replacing his right arm. He had planned to be captured by SHIELD in order to free his master, Baron Wolfgang von Strucker, imprisoned in the depths of the Vault. It's Nick Fury's turn to shine as he faces off against Grim Reaper and later von Strucker, who gets the Satan Arm (not called such, of course) that he has in the comics in order to restore his youth. Grim Reaper and von Strucker break out of the Vault, and would've gotten away, too, if Nick Fury hadn't charged in a daredevil stunt, fought the two villains and crashed their getaway vehicle. It's actually a very well-choreographed scene, a far cry from the inane "shoot each other while vaguely-drawn beams bounce off" animation of Iron Man fighting the Mandroids earlier this episode.
Also, Nick Fury gets his mainstream-continuity's white streak of hair even though he is still mainly based on the African-American MCU version, and it's explained by him succumbing to Strucker's attack. It's a very neat buildup for Strucker and Hydra in general, and both Strucker and Grim Reaper are two of the dudes briefly seen among the many supervillains that broke out of the prison in "Breakout". I'm not sure whether watching Breakout first or the slower-paced origin stories first is more ideal, but this episode probably isn't the best place to start off due to how slow and genuinely repetitive the Iron Man segments are.
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