This week: The Falcon's animated costume!
The 90s were a bit of a golden age for animated series based on comic books. But that doesn't mean they were all good. For every Batman: The Animated Series, you had a Spider-Man: The Animated Series, and for every Spider-Man: The Animated Series, you had a Spider-Man Unlimited. And near the bottom of pretty much everyone's list is Avengers: United They Stand.
Avengers: United They Stand aired on Fox Kids in 1999. Even I could tell as a kid that it wasn't up to snuff. The animation was cheap, the stories weren't memorable, and it was the definition of "toyetic" (focusing design and story on how many toys you can make out of it), giving the Avengers entirely unnecessary battle armor to wear.
Another potential knock against it is that it didn't include "The Big Three": Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor. Iron Man is somewhat understandable because he had a show earlier in the decade so there may have been rights issues, but Cap and Thor? If anything was keeping them from the show, I'm not sure what it was, and considering they both guest-star near the end of the season, the creators probably just didn't want to use them. Now that's not necessarily a problem for me; I'm a huge fan of giving lesser-known characters the spotlight and letting them become well known characters. Heck, the MCU is built on that idea. But you have to have the stories to back it up, and this show didn't.
What does all this have to do with the Falcon? Well, even without taking the battle armor into account, nearly all of the Avengers got new designs. This is his classic comics appearance, although he's had several outfits along the same lines:
And this is how he looked on the show. Similar, but noticeably different. The Falcon appeared with this design in the first episode of the show, "Avengers Assemble, Part 1" (October 1999).
The costume made its debut in Captain America #25 (November 1999, a month after the debut of the show) and stuck around until at least Captain America #34 (August 2000). As the show's last new episode aired in February 2000, I can't imagine it lasted for much longer than that. Notice it's not exactly the same - all the blue parts are now red.
This outfit is the only one from the show - that I know of - to transfer to the comics, and I'm glad it did. I think it looks great, and it shows that, even though that art style itself wasn't that great, it doesn't means the actual designs weren't either.
No comments:
Post a Comment