STAN LEE'S MIGHTY 7 (2014)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

*JOKE SPOIILER JOKE SPOILER*

MIGHTY 7 was one of various superhero projects produced by Stan Lee's company POW Entertainment before the famed comics writer-editor passed in 2018. I have not become acquainted with all of these would-be franchises, but it's fair to state that none of them caught fire with the public. 

In the case of MIGHTY, this direct-to-TV feature was preceded by a magazine issued by POW and two other merchandizing partners (one being Archie Comics). The MIGHTY comic was supposed to come out for six issues but only three appeared, all written by the team of Tony Blake and Paul Jackson, presumably with input (but probably not an actual script) from Lee. (Blake and Jackson are also credited for the script of the video in the end credits.)

Comic book and video present the setup for the Mighty 7 in nearly identical fashion. Stan Lee drives out in the Mojave Desert, seeking to brainstorm some new superheroes for Archie Comics (a company for whom Lee never actually labored). A spaceship crashes, and the nonagenarian writer meets seven humanoid aliens from the planet Kring. All seven have super-powers, for reasons that are not sufficiently explained in either version, but like the original Avengers, they're something less than a knitting-circle. Two are "star marshals," and they're hauling the other five Kringians back to face justice for various crimes. Now, with their ship destroyed, the aliens have to settle for hanging out with the first Earthman they run into, even though his dominant desire is to market them all as "real-life superheroes."

I won't dwell on the seven aliens-- almost all of whom are voiced by celebrity performers. They patch up their differences really quickly and join forces in being Earth's real superheroes-- admittedly, the better to keep from being turned into lab animals. In the comic they all get weird alien nonsense-cognomens, but I think I prefer these to the "superhero names" that the script for the video almost exclusively uses. ("Laser Lord?" "Kid Kinergy?" Ugh.) But if the assembly of the heroic group is pedestrian, at least visually they look pretty good, and their diverse powers complement one another in three big fight-scenes. The animation is much more fluid than two rather stodgy cartoon-films I reviewed here, MOSAIC and THE CONDOR. 

One big change from comic to video is that in the comic, the first threat that the Mighty 7 must face is essentially a mad-scientist supervillain. The video improves on the comic's setup in that, early in the story, the aliens and their Earthling cheerleader discover that Earth has already been infiltrated by other aliens, a race of marauders called the Taegon. There's nothing memorable about these bargain-basement boogiemen, but had this pilot-movie spawned a series, the alien marauders might have made a better long-term threat than "the villain of the week."

Yet in a broad sense, the attraction here is not the heroes or the villains, but what the story does with the Legendary Stan Lee, who is of course voiced by the real celebrity. Naturally in neither medium does the script reference anything about Lee's real history, particularly with regard to his former employer Marvel Comics. The video presents Writer Lee loosely along the same lines as Lee's persona in vintage Marvel Comics: bombastic, self-centered, and egotistical, but still possessed of enough verbal style to make him charming. Most of the humor in MIGHTY is mighty ordinary, but the video does boast one joke I'll proceed to spoil.

The government is trying to locate the Mighty Seven, so they use a high-powered mind-reading device on Lee, to find out what he knows. But for some reason, even though the device can project Lee's memories on a handy TV-screen for the interrogators' review, all the memories come out in chronological order. And the only memories of which the audience learns are Lee's memories of creating hundreds and hundreds of superheroes, thus causing the interrogators no end of aggravation. I know it's not a great joke, but for me it carries a little added resonance. When I was reading Marvel Comics in my teens, I naively believed that the credited writer alone conceived all the characters in the stories. I certainly don't believe that now, knowing how important most of Lee's collaborators were to those many conceptions. But I still think that those hundreds of characters would not have been given what life they possessed without some partial creative input from Stan Lee.