The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes

I was in the mood for something episodic and comic booky so I booted the first disc of Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes up to the top of my Netflix queue.  I watched it with a little trepidation because Marvel's track record with animated series has not been great, in my opinion.

Add to it that Captain America is my favorite character and I think I prefer the Avengers over the X-Men and I was sure this series was going to suck.

I could not be wronger more wrong.  The first disc starts out by collecting the animated web shorts and telling background stories of the individual characters.  So the first episode is only about Iron Man, the second is Thor, then Hulk, then they start sharing some characters with episodes focusing half on a character like Black Panther and a little bit of Hawkeye.  I didn't realize these were web shorts until I looked up the series on Wikipedia.

By the time the series officially starts with Breakout (Parts 1 & 2), I was just dying for the characters to all come together and start kicking some ass - which they do!  I think one aspect I most enjoy is seeing characters come to animated life.  Mandrill is an incredibly boring character on paper but when you see him move around and use his powers in cartoon form...well, he's still boring.  But how cool!

They are really using a ton of characters so far in this series - everyone from the main Avengers to villains like Living Laser, Wrecking Crew and Doughboy (who?).  Only the first two discs are out commercially and available on Netflix but I just stumbled across the entire first season available via Netflix Instant about an hour ago.  A big bonus is that The Wife is enjoying the series.  Can't wait to see how the rest of Season 1 wraps up.  Great work, Marvel.