What If…? is a new animated series on Disney+. Based on the Marvel comic of the same name, each episode is going to examine what if some key even in the Marvel Cinematic Universe occurred differently. The first episode premiered today, “What If…Captain Carter Were the First Avenger?”, with Peggy Carter getting the Super-Soldier Serum instead of Steve Rogers.
Without spoilers, I really enjoyed it. I was a little disappointed it was only a half-hour episode, but that tight time frame meant that the episode really moved along briskly. I’m looking forward to the rest of the series. (It probably helped that Captain America: The First Avenger was my favorite MCU movie, and this episode remixed the elements of the movie was also respecting the original).
It was excellent. I liked the animation, the story was solid, and the action sequences were really good. It was nice that damn near all the original cast lent their voices to this. It was probably pretty easy for most of them, but still a nice touch.
A lot of people have complained about how powerful Captain Carter was, forgetting that Steve was small, sickly, and mostly untrained when he took the serum. Peggy started off better, so the improvement was more profound.
Yeah, I’ve got to say, though…Sebastian Stan only had a few lines, but…he did not strike me as a good voice actor. He sounded like he was reading lines. He was probably literally just phoning it in. I really liked Hayley Atwell’s voice work, though, and most of the other voice actors.
Really? She didn’t seem more powerful than Super-Steve to me, but she did seem more capable. But, Steve was an untrained guy who had never won a fight in his life, and Peggy was an elite operative who was capable of disabling multiple armed opponents without the Super Serum.
Also, she was animated. I can’t remember where I came across it, but as someone pointed out, drawing (or animating) Superman bathing in the fires of the sun is as cheap as drawing Clark Kent walk across the lobby of the Daily Planet. Animated characters can engage in action stunts as throw-away gags that would be show-stoppers for live-action characters.
I thought it was a bit of a boring one to start with. It was basically the first Cap movie done in less than 30 minutes, which really doesn’t do it justice. I thought it might have gotten interesting when the Hydra Stomper was the one that fell during the train mission and they were going to go with Steve as Winter Soldier, but that didn’t happen. I’m ready for the weird shit like the zombie stuff.
I’m not sure Steve could take a truck head on and not even move. Cartoons are always made more unrealistic than live action stuff though so that didn’t bother me.
I was afraid they would go the route of the first “What if…?” comics, which were used to bolster the idea that the writers and editors of Marvel Comics didn’t make mistakes with their characters and their plotlines-For the longest time any variations the fans called for were written in such a way as to end in disaster for the most part, “proving” that The marvel Bullpen had obvious got it right the first time.
I thought this was great. The animation was fantastic, and watching Peggy discover the joys of wrecking Nazis with her bare hands was absolutely delightful. I appreciated that they made her huge after the super soldier treatment, too, and didn’t use it as an excuse to do a bunch of waif-fu.
I liked the plot and the animation, but I thought the voice acting by the original actors was off, to be frank. It’s always tough for face actors (or whatever the term is) to take on voice actor roles, and I think it really showed here - you could tell they had read the lines in a studio somewhere, with no interaction with any other actors. Dominic Cooper was the exception, because he went 100% over the top with his 1920’s radio news announcer voice.
Wasn’t the first one something like if Spider-Man joined the Fantastic Four, Sue Storm would marry Prince Namor?
The Watcher is an established character in the comics, dating to pretty early in the Marvel Universe (first appearance in 1963, the Marvel Universe is traditionally dated to the first appearance of the Fantastic Four in 1961). In the comics, a race of beings that were among the first intelligent life in the universe dedicated themselves to observing other life throughout the universe without interfering. Every inhabited planet in the universe has a Watcher, who observes without interfering. Earth’s Watcher lives on the moon, and on occasion has interfered in Earthly matters, usually on the “good” side (he helped the Fantastic Four defeat the world-devourer, Galactus, and save the Earth).
The meta-conceit here (and in the original comics) is that Earth’s Watcher somehow also watches all the various alternate universe versions of Earth, and is relaying stories of how history played out differently on those Earths. Part of the conceit is that it’s not his place to say which way history “should” have gone, or which outcome is “better”, just to factually relay what happened. As @Czarcasm alludes to, though, in the comics, there was often a not-too-subtle message of “I’m not saying this would have been worse, go ahead and judge for yourself, but…”
Actually, lived on the moon-he was killed a few years ago, and his eyeballs were stolen. He was replaced by someone who had a large part in that murder:
Much in the same way that the only time Captain Kirk ever mentioned the Prime Directive was right before he broke it, The Watcher regularly prates about how he must not interfere while he is in the very process of interfering.
I enjoyed this a lot. I am a sucker for parallel worlds so this show is right up my alley. The animation style reminded me of the Fleischer Superman cartoons from around that era. If that was intentional it makes me wonder if every episode will have its own style which would be very cool.
As far as the story, I was sure The Red Skull was going to summon an Asgardian but what actually happened was much cooler.
I enjoyed it. It didn’t really get me jazzed like Loki and Wanda/Vision, but they’ve got a lot of room to tell good stories so I’m on board.
The only thing I didn’t like (and this is a really minor thing) is a little bit of the animation style–namely, the men’s lips. They reminded me of that comic where they showed Batman as drawn by a female artist, with “kissable lips.” Totally a stylistic thing, and it certainly won’t stop me from enjoying the show, but just something I noticed.