Original Run: August 11th, 2021 – current Created by: A.C. Bradley Directed by: Bryan Andrews Written by: A.C. Bradley, Matthew Chauncey Based on: Marvel Comics Music by: Laura Karpman Cast: Jeffrey Wright, various
Marvel’s What If…? is like all things MCU since Avengers: Endgame, a mixed bag of good and stupid.
So let me start by saying that I did enjoy some episodes of this show, while others were absolute shit like the one that sees Black Panther become Star Lord, which doesn’t make a lick of sense and also had a side plot about Thanos not committing universal genocide because T’Challa simply talked him out of it. That episode made me facepalm, repeatedly, so hard that I broke my nose about seven times.
Anyway, it’s clear that Disney is using this show to push certain social narratives without really caring about what that does to the continuity of the second greatest franchise they’ve ever had. But just like the once greatest franchise, Star Wars, Disney is out to wreck this one too.
So for the positives, I mostly liked the Peggy Carter episode, as well as the Doctor Strange one. While the T’Challa one was, hands down the worst, the others weren’t too bad, they just didn’t do much for me.
I was most excited to see that they would do with the Marvel Zombies concept, as some of those comics were fun as hell. Well, I’m glad that they tried something original with it, story-wise. However, it just didn’t hold my attention and was really underwhelming.
Also, I’m not big on the animation style. I really didn’t like it at first but my brain did adjust to it fairly quickly. The main problem with it, is that it looks almost too generic and in the Marvel Zombies episodes, for instance, I had a hard time telling some characters apart because they looked too similar.
When Disney first announced all the Marvel shows that would be coming to Disney+, this is one of the ones I was most excited for. I have loved the What If? comics since I started reading comics. Out of all of the issues that exist with great premises and alterations to continuity, I found it really disappointing that these were the stories they went with to kick off this series. But I guess I just shouldn’t expect much from Disney, at this point.
Original Run: November 12th, 2019 – December 13th, 2019 Created by: Leslie Iwerks Directed by: Leslie Iwerks Written by: Mark Catalena Music by: Jeffrey Kryka Cast: Angela Bassett (narrator), various
In the last few years, I’ve started to take many documentaries with a grain of salt. Reason being, they always have an objective and typically tend to lean towards their preconceived biases, ignoring things that may actually challenge or disprove their message.
This is especially true when a documentary about a subject is made by the subject itself. For instance, for those who know anything about the wrestling business beyond the WWE, when they watch WWE documentaries, they know that it’s from the company’s point-of-view and that they often times don’t tell the whole story, alter the story for their benefit or completely ignore or gloss over some of the darker, unpleasant things.
I’ve got to say, though, as dishonest and “woke” as Disney has become with their output, this seemed to be pretty straightforward and fairly objective. It also included many key people from Disney’s past and didn’t really seem to sugarcoat things or censor the talking heads who may have had issues with Disney after moving on by their choice or the company’s.
That being said, I enjoyed this quite a bit and binged through it over a rainy Sunday afternoon.
It talks about Disney’s Imagineers from their earliest days up to modern times. Each of the six episodes moves forward and covers a different era of the many theme parks, their creation at the earliest stages, their design and engineering challenges, as well as their birth into the world and how they were perceived by the people who worked on them, the company itself and the public, who just want the best experience money can buy.
My only real complaint about this, and it’s probably just my personal preference, is that I wish they spent more time on the earliest stuff. I honestly don’t feel like one episode on Walt Disney, the man, and the genesis of the original Disneyland was enough. Granted, each episode could’ve been beefed up to two hours apiece and I’d still find this enjoyable.
The Imagineering Story is pretty damn cool if you’re into this stuff.
Also known as: Cruella de Vil (working title) Release Date: May 18th, 2021 (Hollywood premiere) Directed by: Craig Gillespie Written by: Dana Fox, Tony McNamara, Aline Brosh McKenna, Kelly Marcel, Steve Zissis Based on:The Hundred and One Dalmatians by Dodie Smith Music by: Nicholas Britell Cast: Emma Stone, Emma Thompson, Joel Fry, Paul Walter Hauser, Emily Beecham, Kirby Howell-Baptiste, Mark Strong, John McCrea
Gunn Films, Marc Platt Productions, Walt Disney Pictures, 134 Minutes
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“They say there are five stages of grief. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. We’ll I’d like to add one more… revenge.” – Cruella de Vil
Cruella is two movies trying to be one movie. Hell, maybe it’s even three movies.
That being said, I do like the film in spite of my better judgment but I’ll explain why while also pointing out the myriad of things wrong with it.
To start, this is just another soulless attempt at Disney trying to cash-in on an old, beloved franchise by making a live action adaptation of some part of it. In the case of this film, it’s a “prequel” of sorts to the 101 Dalmatians franchise. Like some other live action adaptations Disney has done, as of late, this tries to tell the origin story of one of the studio’s most famous villains. But really, this just shows how Disney is out of ideas and how it really keeps trying to inject identity politics into everything it touches now.
Additionally, this is basically trying to capitalize off of the success of 2019’s Joker by taking it’s general concept, switching genders, switching franchises, not going for an R rating and trying to pass it off as something fresh, cool and unique. Let’s also ignore that Warner Bros., who put out Joker, have also put out three movies with his psycho, villain, girlfriend Harley Quinn.
Also, this shows modern Disney’s problem with morality. In almost everything the studio puts out now, it gives audiences situations where it’s obvious that their writers don’t understand the basic concept of good versus evil. I’ve seen this in all the Disney+ Marvel shows and they also did it twice with Maleficent in her two live-action movies that try to justify her villainous behavior and make her the tragic victim.
Cruella is a mess and to be honest, I don’t know where to start with it and I’m not going to cover all of its problems other than to say that the biggest problem of all is that Disney very clearly wanted this to be a “girl power” movie and wanted it to work no matter what, so they forced it into existence without much thought in regards to story, character development, logic and again, morality.
So looking at the story, this movie just does things because it needs the story to work with the studio’s agenda remaining intact. It insults the intelligence of viewers with intelligence and hopes that they don’t start asking questions as the film tries to rush from point-to-point.
Like why does Estella/Cruella essentially have a dual personality? Why did the villain lady agree to see Estella’s mother during an opulent ball the poor mother had no business at? How did Estella get to the fountain in London on her own? Why is Estella as Cruella suddenly a complete bitch to her best friends? Why do the friends stick around? Why does villain lady not recognize Cruella’s posse when they’re front and center at every fucking public troll? Why did Cruella never actually hate the Dalmatians and basically adopts them? Why was her necklace a key to a box that revealed her secret identity that a stranger had and why was the adoptive mother given the secret key necklace when she knew the truth, anyway? There’s a lot more but I’ll leave it at that.
A lot of those questions tie directly to the problem with character development. But honestly, it’s like this movie completely ignores who Cruella de Vil was in the original animated films and even those Glenn Close live-action movies. Cruella is 100 percent evil. She’s a woman that wants to kidnap puppies, kill them and make clothes out of them.
In this movie, we just have a chick with a temper that discovers that the boss she idolizes is the same woman that had her dogs push her mother off of a cliff. Cruella never hates the dogs, though. She kidnaps them to upset her rival and she jokes about making a handbag out of them but by the end of the film, they’re part of her entourage like her own non-Dalmatian mutt.
Now I can suspend disbelief in Estella/Cruella having a dual personality without much explanation but Estella is a pretty kind person that loves her friends, who are essentially her adoptive family. So with that, it’s hard to believe that she would suddenly be a cold bitch to them and just treat them like low level henchmen. Additionally, why the fuck would these two guys, who grew up with her, take her shit? I’d ask if they’re that cucked but I know the answer is “yes” when this is a modern Disney movie.
Moving on to the logic problem, I’ve already kind of hit on that point with the other issues but it is a problem for this film when a viewer isn’t the type of person to just take what’s being spoon-fed to them from sequence-to-sequence. This movie moves at a pace too quick for the casual viewer to really think too deeply about the details and that’s deliberate. It’s similar to how the Disney Star Wars movies are, in that they just quickly move from one thing to the next thing without allowing you to take in the details and ask questions. Again, Disney just needs the story to work to make their point, even if it’s not logical and a bit of a mess.
As far as morality goes, this wants you to cheer this woman, who is doing bad things because the story’s villain is worse. But what you really have is two villains. Still, Disney doesn’t fully commit to the bit because in 2021, you can’t have this woman killing puppies or even implying as such, other than her throwaway joke that immediately draws the ire of her two best friends.
What we end up with is a character that shows the audience that it’s okay to be a vengeful, selfish bitch, as long as you don’t go completely bad. What completely bad is, I don’t know, but neither does Disney. And at the end of the film, you’re left with a character that still really isn’t Cruella de Vil, she’s just some stylish punk rock chick that destroyed her rival and took her empire because the story needed to end, I guess.
Now after all that, if you’re still here, you’re probably assuming that I hate this movie. Well, I don’t. I still liked it in spite of all its problems, which shows me that this could have been a great film on its own, apart from being tied to the 101 Dalmatians franchise and carrying Disney’s woke message.
Had this not been forcibly tied to the Cruella character and just been a movie about a woman who discovers her idol murdered her mother, we could’ve had a really good movie about two feuding fashion industry rivals.
Emma Stone and Emma Thompson are absolutely superb in this and without them, this movie probably would’ve been total shit. But damn are they good, especially in the scenes they’re in together. Additionally, all the other key actors are great and it kind of makes me sad that they didn’t have a script or story that could’ve maximized their talents even better.
I also loved the style of this movie. It primarily takes place in 1970s London, has a punk rock edge to it, but it also takes from 1920s-1940s fashion and architecture, mixes that in, giving the film an unique, somewhat otherworldly, but “lived in” feel. It’s a visual feast and I got lost trying to absorb the details of it all.
In the end, I wish this was just it’s own movie, not tied to a preexisting franchise. I wish it tried to make more logical sense and developed its characters better. It had all these things working for it but Disney’s soulless overproduction of everything it puts out derailed what could’ve been the best film they’ve produced in years.
At this point, though, Disney doesn’t care about quality. They only care about their agenda and the bottom line. But we’re now getting to the point where their agenda will start diminishing that bottom line, regardless of what the Disney owned media wants you to believe with their puff pieces and excuses.
Original Run: June 9th, 2021 – current Created by: Michael Waldron Directed by: Kate Herron Written by: various Based on: Marvel Comics Music by: Natalie Holt Cast: Tom Hiddleston, Owen Wilson, Sophia Di Martino, Sasha Lane, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Wunmi Mosaku, Eugene Cordero, Tara Strong (voice), Jack Veal, DeObia Oparei, Richard E. Grant, Jonathan Majors, Jaimie Alexander (cameo), Chris Hemsworth (cameo, voice)
I’ll start this by saying that I mostly liked Loki but it was really a very mixed bag with a lot of wasted time on unimportant shit but it also established a kind of cool and interesting new pocket of the Marvel Cinematic Universe that will have much larger implications on the rest of the franchise going forward.
With that, Loki seems like it actually effected the larger MCU in a way that other Disney+ shows like WandaVision and The Falcon and the Winter Solider tried to do but failed at. Or I should say that they did make some changes but they seem a lot less meaningful in regards to what fans will actually care about in the future.
Loki‘s changes to the larger landscape appear to be pretty f’n major. Plus, it looks like we’re getting Kang the Conqueror and have already met a version of him in the finale. Considering that Kang is one of my all-time favorite Marvel villains, I’m glad that he is now being introduced and in a way that doesn’t just waste him like other major baddies such as Red Skull and The Mandarin.
I do have to point out one major flaw, though, and that’s the fact that Loki often times felt like a side character in his own show. Maybe calling the show “Loki” was a mistake and they could’ve used a more creative title while letting it be known that he was heavily featured in it. But marketing is marketing, I guess.
For the most part, I enjoyed the cast in this. I loved the chemistry between Tom Hiddleston and Owen Wilson, which had to carry the first two episodes. Additionally, I enjoyed Sophia Di Martino as the female variant of Loki. Granted, this show felt much more about establishing her going forward, as Disney (no surprise) is pushing really hard for diversity in the future of the MCU, regardless of the source material they’re pulling from.
While it’s true that there have been female Lokis in the comics, those stories are very different, as are those characters. However, the way that they introduced this change in this show, works for this universe and honestly, I’m not opposed to it and in the end, I like this variant of Loki. I also like that she choses to be referred to as Sylvie, as she wants to distance herself from her past.
The biggest issue I have with this show is that it wasted a lot of time and had way too much filler. If all that stuff was whittled down and condensed, this could’ve just been a movie and maybe it should have been and I think Hiddleston’s Loki probably deserved his own film by this point.
Still, I liked some of the concepts and ideas explored in this. The biggest high point for me was the fifth of the six episodes, which showed a bunch of Loki variants, one of which featured veteran actor Richard E. Grant in the original comic book costume from the ’60s. As a true Florida Man, I also enjoyed the alligator Loki.
The final episode was too drawn out, like the show, but I like how things ended, how the future of the MCU is sort of a clean slate and the fact that Kang has been pulling some major strings throughout its history. It’s sort of the reset the franchise needs following Avengers: Endgame.
However, even with a clean slate, I’m pretty sure that the future of the MCU is going to be massively disappointing. But honestly, Endgame is sort of where my brain jumped off of the train. I’m going to take everything with a grain of salt in this phase and beyond.
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Talking Pulp 
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