Series Review: Avengers Assemble, Season 1

Avengers Assemble, Season 1

I don't like to compare shows to each other. Shows like, say, Teen Titans versus Young Justice are meant to have different tones and themes, and I can't in good conscience say that one show is better than the other because they focus less (or more) on comedy and gags. 

But coming off of the flawed-but-pretty-great Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes and moving into ts 2013 successor, Avengers Assemble... I really, really can't help but feel that this is kind of an inferior show. I realize that Assemble is marketed towards a younger audience, and I for one don't mind the retooling to feature the live-action movie cast's appearances and lineup more closely... but the actual episodes themselves are... well, they feel more at home for something done in the 80's. 

See, what made shows like Batman: The Animated Series so revolutionary at that time is to show that even in an episodic format, you can experiment a whole lot with storytelling, and the writers are able to deliver character arcs spanning several seasons without losing the episodic format of the show. It's something that other superhero shows -- DC and Marvel alike -- would follow in their own ways. Just because cartoons are primarily targeted towards children doesn't mean that you have to make everything dumb and simple. 

But that is genuinely how I feel while watching Avengers Assemble. So much of the dialogue thrown around that the voice actors read feel insipid and inane, with them trying too hard to cram one-liners that aren't even especially funny. A huge chunk of the attempted jokes fall flat on their face, and the characters are genuinely one-dimensional. And while the voice actors try their best to deliver their jokes, Hawkeye cracking a one-liner when 99% of his dialogue is made up entirely of one-liners doesn't make it any funnier.

While most other superhero TV shows aren't strangers to the trope of forgetting a previous character development, Avengers Assemble can literally have Tony Stark be humbled in one episode for relying too much on his smarts, and then doing the exact same thing in the next episode. Throw in some hackneyed attempts to make references to the MCU movies without understanding why said moments worked in the movies themselves, and it's not a particularly flattering look. 

The first season ran for 26 episodes, and... and I can honestly say that a good half of these are forgettable. Not even the actual action scenes or events that happen in them are memorable -- I am taking a look down the list of episode titles and sort of scratch my head. That's the one where they fought Jormungandr, right? And that's the gratuitous alternate universe one? Oh, and there's the obligatory Guardians of the Galaxy team-up episode. A whole lot of the episodes are genuinely just using the admittedly fancier-looking animation (though IMO the usage of conspicuous CGI and a particularly ugly-looking Iron Man suit makes me shrug at this) to hide the fact that most of the time, they're just recycling the same old plot with a different villain, something that I really can't forgive in a cartoon series made after the 90's. 

The main plot of the season roughly follows the Red Skull as he gets transformed into the Iron Skull and starts recruiting a bunch of villains to for the Cabal, made up of MODOK, Attuma, Dracula and Hyperion. They end up being the main villains for the final three episodes or so, too. It's your standard supervillain team-up, but comparing the sheer lack of subtlety or any attempt at storytelling -- especially compared to Earth's Mightiest Heroes and how Zemo and Enchantress built up their team -- it's frankly no more compelling than Cobra in the 90's G.I. Joe cartoon.

Credit where credit's due, though -- they do some superb voice work for these villains. Red Skull, Dr. Doom, Dracula, MODOK... even secondary villains like Justin Hammer manage to get some really well-done voices. Pity they don't have much to say with those voices. 

Throw in the utterly flat main characters, and it's really hard to think up of what these guys do. Black Widow, I think, got hit the worst, quite literally being nothing but a sarcastic token girl, being bland and only really used for action scenes. Throw in some blatant sexism, because Black Widow is entirely absent for a good one-third of the episode despite being the sole female character.  Ditto for Thor, honestly. His mythology gets the spotlight of some episodes, but he's kind of a rambunctious Viking-god warrior without any of the depth that his live-action or EMH counterpart has. And I've complained about Hawkeye before, since his entire point is "crack unfunny jokes". Those three are probably the worst offenders in that they're flat-out bad, although the rest of the cast don't fare that much better.

Hulk is... he's still simple and speaks in Hulk-speech, but at least the show tries its best to try and give Hulk some extra depth, especially with the constant showcase of his gentle collection of glass animals. He is still irritating since he spends 90% of his screentime arguing with either Thor or Hawkeye, but at least when they do give Hulk some focus (okay, just two episodes -- Hulked Out Heroes and Hulk's Day Out) they manage to portray Hulk as this raging beast-man with a gentler side. It's... it's interesting, in any case.

Iron Man and Captain America basically repeat the same "technology-vs-guts" argument for like half of the episode's run, and if I did a drinking game for every time they have an argument about it, I'd probably die of cirrhosis before the first season's over. The two characters are at least well-voiced and well-portrayed, even if they don't do anything interesting with them. Also, Tony tends to come off as a bit of a dick most of the time, but that's, like, basically the entire cast other than Cap and Falcon.

The Falcon is probably thrown in so that the cast has a bit of a racial diversity deal going on, but god damn the writers really turned him into a bit of an everyman, didn't they? Super-competent, almost as smart as Tony Stark, SHIELD's golden boy, et cetera... I'm not sure how faithful this is compared to his comic-book counterpart, but I'm genuinely not sure if Falcon was ever meant to be a young impressionable sidekick character. Did they write the role for Spider-Man or someone and then swapped it out for Falcon? Eh. 

Overall, though, the characters are genuinely flat. The villains don't fare much better either, with the Iron Skull's plans being nebulous at best and him being a generic mwa-ha-ha conquer the world villain. The other recurring villains -- MODOK, Attuma, Dracula and Hyperion -- are glorified recurring punching bags, and while Dr. Doom is entertaining, he never really ended up being as huge a presence and feels more like a recurring nuisance than, well, Dr. Doom. 

My favourite episodes -- or, rather, the only episodes I'd call "good" -- are episode 16, "Bring on the Bad Guys", which is a neat bit of writing where the villains actually learn from their mistakes and learn to cooperate. In a superior show it'd be a run-of-the-mill episode, but here it's pretty damn great. "Hulked Out Heroes" is a great episode and a rare bit where Black Widow does something, and it's a shame that the season never really builds up on this. "Hulk's Day Out" might overplay its hand with the amnesia subplot, but the gentler side of Hulk no one ever sees is a great concept. "Planet Doom" is also a neat alternate-universe style episode, great in its style if not substance.

The worst episodes... "Avengers: Impossible" and "Mojo World" straight-up insults my intelligence in using two utterly horrid guest stars. I already loathe Mojo from various X-Men cartoons, but this series' handling of Mojo is just straight-up bad. Impossible Man is even worse, and that entire episode is just an abomination. What else? "One Little Thing" was also pretty damn bad with two very uninteresting subplots mushed together, and "Savages" is probably the least entertaining way they could have made the whole is-technology-good mentality of Cap and Iron Man work. "By the Numbers" was also pretty bad, I remembered.

Overall, definitely a step down from the Earth's Mightiest Heroes seasons I've reviewed. I would like to acknowledge that I've at least seen this season, before moving on to other more interesting shows.