Debuting this week on Disney Plus will be the latest Marvel series exclusive to the streaming service. Unlike the previous WandaVision, Falcon and the Winter Soldier and Loki, this will be Marvel’s first animated series that is part of the MCU and starring the stars of the movies reprising their roles from thee big screen.
Now if you’re planning to skip this one, dismissing it as a cartoon I’d suggest you hold fire and have a quick look through this preview to see what you’d be missing out on.
The trailer shows that we’ll get scenarios such as Tony Stark being saved by Killmonger from Black Panther at a point before Tony ever became Iron Man, and we’ll see Peggy Carter with a shield instead of Cap, and T’Challa taken in place of Peter Quinn to become a member of the Guardians of the Galaxy.
When this was announced the idea of seeing ‘what if’ scenarios that shows what could have been if events had different paths had been chosen sounded cool, but ultimately whilst they may be fun for the ride, they will be entries into the series that could be dismissed. Well that may not be the case anymore.
For anyone who has been keeping track of the events of Spider-Man Far From Home, Wanda-Vision, Loki or the upcoming Doctor Strange sequel, we know that this phase of the MCU is very much playing into alternate dimensions. We’ve seen an alternative Quicksilver played by Evan Peters who played the role in the Fox X-Men franchise turn up as the same character in WandaVision, and we saw JK Simmons return to the role of JJ Jameson in Spider-Man after having played the role in the early 2000s movies.
Loki identified these alternate versions as variants and showed that there could be an unlimited amount of variants with the timeline spewing off into countless branches where anything is possible. This means all the scenarios explored in this series could prove to be canon and these variant versions of the well known characters could turn up on screen later down the line played in live action.
The show is also guaranteed to have authentic versions of the characters as they are being played by their live action movie star actors. The most noteworthy of these is that we will get one final performance from Chadwick Boseman as T’Challa as he had recorded dialogue for episodes prior to his passing last year. The trailer also shows that we’ll have Chris Hemsworth back as Thor, and Robert Downey Jr back as Tony Stark which is significant as after the events of Endgame where his character died.
This show has brilliant animation which I’m sure fans of the movies will very quickly get used to and with alternative worlds now being part of the MCU actually opens up the possibility that we could see this visual style as an actual canon part of the series and not just as an artistic choice.
We know that the past live action Spider-Man films will now count as part of the MCU multiverse and that begs the question of whether Spider-Man Into the Spiderverse will be included. In that film we saw multiple art styles being used from various alternate realities and it may be that in another reality live action could have been how the universe looks. This What If series seems like the most natural fit for any potential cross over with the Spiderverse series and that in turn may lead to the Spiderverse version of Miles Morales crossing over into live action.
If that were to be opened we have to examine the possibility that a cartoon look may just be another multiverse variant style and we could end up with a future MCU film going all Who Framed Roger Rabbit and giving us a live action Ant-Man (for example) in a cartoon world. Time will tell, but we won’t know anything for certain until we’ve seen the What If series which starts this week on Disney Plus on August 11th.
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