MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, psychological, sociological*
Both this TV cartoon and AVENGERS ASSEMBLE were launched in 2013, the year after the MCU culminated its "Phase One" sequence of films with THE AVENGERS. Both animated serials followed the template of the MCU AVENGERS in terms of mixing heavy-action sequences with lots of comedy relief-- as indeed the Classic Marvel comics had. ASSEMBLE enjoyed six seasons while SMASH only got two. But with the former show, credited showrunner "Man of Action" ended up producing a show with merely superficial humor and characterization-- unintentionally presaging the rot that would overtake the live-action MCU by Phase Three. With the latter program, showrunners Paul Dini and Henry Gilroy accomplished more in two seasons than Man of Action could have done with twice as many episodes. In short, Dini and Gilroy captured the fun of early Marvel comics.
Though both shows were free to pick and choose from the vast array of heroes and villains in Marvel's complex continuity, SMASH has much more fun with their choices, while with ASSEMBLE, every reference feels a lot like homework (a common complaint about the later MCU, by the way). What most surprised me about SMASH was how interesting they made all the HULK continuity from the 21st century iterations, few of which I've visited. Naturally a cartoon made for commercial TV had to change some things. SMASH's Red Hulk, though he has the same basic origin as the comics-version, is much less of a physical threat, while the barbaric powerhouse Skaar is not literally the Hulk's progeny, though there's a loose figurative filial relationship between the two. In the comics Hulk's perennial sidekick Rick Jones was only briefly changed into the monstrous "A-Bomb," but the cartoon's A-Bomb is more of a juvenile joker as well as a hypester, turning his exploits with the SMASH team into the stuff of podcasts. She-Hulk stays pretty much the same, strong and sassy, while the Big Green Guy manages to be a "smart Hulk" who doesn't come off as a cloying castration of the original hero's monstrous appeal.
I won't review all 26 episodes of SMASH's first season, for though I enjoyed them all, they could be fairly criticized for a certain sameness. Their best feature is, as I said above, the writers' ability to peg particular parts of the Marvel mythology and give them added appeal. I can't exactly quantify what SMASH does right and ASSEMBLE does wrong, except to say that the choices of SMASH don't seem nearly as predictable. For instance, thanks to a time-travel jaunt, the Hulk, a sixties co-creation of Jack Kirby, brings back to his time a big crimson dino called Devil Dinosaur to serve s pet-- the original "Devil" having been one of Kirby's 1970s creations. I enjoyed the episode "Deathlok" less for the presence of the titular cyborg hero than for the fact that the evildoers were the shapechanging Skrulls, whom the MCU tried to recast as some sort of put-upon marginalized alien race. And then there's "The Hunted," in which the Not So Jolly Green Giant gets stranded on Marvel's version of Monster Island, which plays host to over a dozen weird creatures culled from Marvel's "monster books" of the 1950s and 1960s. Of course, a lot of ideas don't work at all, like a bizarre plotline in which the ADD-afflicted A-Bomb tries to study the mystic arts under Doctor Strange. But usually even the episodes with hokey plotlines have some funny bits in them. Voicework is uniformly fine, with the standouts being Fred Tatasciore as Green Hulk, Clancy Brown as Red Hulk, and Eliza Dushku as "Too Sexy for Your Party" She-Hulk.
Interesting, in that the Hulk used to appear in a UK comic called Smash! back in the '6os.
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