An unlikely force of heroes… why not resurrect them?

Where do we start with this? I hate giving stuff bad reviews no matter how much I dream of it inside my own head. Yet this supposed documentary and addition to the Marvel 616 anthology is both terrible in its own right and, frankly, an insult to the others alongside which it appears.

It is rubbish.

It pitches itself to the viewer in the opening minutes as a recording of a heroically doomed attempt to resurrect some lesser known characters and turn them into a television series. We’re told in the opening frames the show didn’t get commissioned.

And right from the off the tone is weirdly uneven. At some points it feels like it’s trying to be serious but Paul Scheer mugs at the camera from the start and seems to take joy in ridiculing stupid characters. There are plenty of characters which appear absurd even by comic book standards but this is just what it is – nearly all of those faded away because they didn’t find an audience.

Yet with no real sense of why, Scheer settles on a set of anthropomorphised animal superheroes whose initial series was almost immediately cancelled and tries to rehabilitate them on the basis that if toys can translate into great comics then comics can translate into great toys.

There’s no pitch for why, out of all the possible characters on the shelf, Scheer takes these ones, what makes them compelling, what he thinks the angle is – it just feels like a teenage boy deciding that today he’ll try this out.

And this is where I start to lose my patience with the show completely. It’s half hearted, lacking passion, commitment or insight. We don’t have any discussion of why some characters work while others don’t. We have no comparison with other animal themed heroes and then we have no sense of the process Scheer actually went through to develop his pitch – there’s footage of graphics etc but no insight at all is offered into the process of development, of how Marvel itself thinks about developing its IP. All of which is a wasted opportunity.

Yet to compound this complete waste of our time, it’s not clear this is even a documentary – as clearly staged deeply unfunny meetings with Marvel executives left me feeling I was the one being mocked for giving the show my time.

When you compare this with the superb episode about how actual artists work or how women writers and editors entered the field after decades of exclusion, this feels entirely anachronistic.

If you want, it’s like sitting in a bar with people telling you how important it is to be progressive only for them to then call over a white guy with no talent and give him the show you were hoping to write because he happened to be there.

They then turn back to you with a straight face and ask what the problem is.

Am I angry? Yes, which is a weird response to a documentary about Marvel. And yet. How did anyone think this was worth spending money on? How did this get greenlit?

Verdict: Please don’t waste your time because then I’ll feel like I wasted mine twice – once was only my time but twice because you’ll have wasted yours too.

My rating: 2 Anthropomorphised Animals out of 10.

Stewart Hotston