By: Russ Burlingame on July 16, 2012
At the Marvel Television Presents panel at San Diego Comic-Con International, Jeph Loeb made an interesting remark about the fate of Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, the Disney XD series that fans were recently disappointed to hear had been cancelled by the network. Reports said that the show would be replaced by Avengers Assemble, a new series that more closely resembles the blockbuster Avengers movie.
“Not everything you hear on the Internet is true!” Loeb told the audience in mock disbelief at the panel, at the end of a long windup that seemed to be implying the show might actually return for another season. The conversation began with “I know that there are enormous fans out there, including myself, of Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes,” but still ended with the assertion that in fact the series was always intended to be on TV for a finite run of 52 episodes, and that only after it had run its natural course did Marvel Television decide that it would change form to segue into Avengers Assemble.
“We’re going to transition out just the same way we do in comics,” Loeb said, likening the change into the new series, Avengers Assemble, will be a continuation of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes‘ continuity even though it came with a creative change a new direction.
It seems like a bit of a stretch, doesn’t it? Given that the nature of television (like serialized monthly comic books) is open-ended, the feeling among the fans tends to be that an ending is a bad thing. It’s also worth noting that it was not widely known that the show had been planned as a 52-episode run, which means whether or not it’s the truth, fans had no reason to imagine it would play out like that.
All of that said, it seems to be a way to make the Marvel Television Universe–like the Marvel Cinematic Universe–more closely resemble comic books in both concept and practice. At a time when nearly all of Marvel’s major characters are getting relaunches and major facelifts, it’s not exactly a shock that they would want to embrace that approach in other media.
