Marvel's M.O.D.O.K. is a reminder that there’s a lot of potential in leaning into Marvel Comics' weirder side

NBC News

The Hulu animated series starring Patton Oswalt as an inept supervillain and recent divorcé is quirky and well worth watching, says Ani Bundel. "The Marvel Cinematic Universe has become the dominant superhero franchise at the box office, but the aforementioned flattening of its universe and the tendency for the blockbusters to play it safe has created a perception among some fans that Marvel Comics has always been a world of samey-same type stories: superheroes, usually white and male, taking out their issues on bad guys instead of the therapist’s office," says Bundel. "In reality, though, Marvel Comics' 80+ years of stories encompass a far wider-ranging oeuvre, with experimental and downright weird stories in myriad resetting universes that made comic offshoots (like Spider-Ham, aka Peter Porker, recently seen in Into the Spider-Verse, and Howard the Duck, which once got made into a movie) seem perfectly logical. The show Marvel’s M.O.D.O.K. illustrates that those parts of the Marvel universe deserve their chance to shine too and that not every show in the Marvelverse has to speak in one voice. The new stop-motion series, which stars Patton Oswalt as the voice of the titular character, is both as ridiculous as it is quirky and a smart alternative for Marvel fans who’d like a break from those big-screen stories."

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• M.O.D.O.K. wants to be similar to Harley Quinn in its embrace of quirky, cartoonish, oddly relatable villainy: "On a moment-for-moment, joke-for-joke basis, M.O.D.O.K. sometimes comes close to comparable impact, though it fails to find the same emotional core, despite some effort," says Daniel Fienberg, adding: "The expressive and colorful blend of stop-motion puppetry and computer augmentation will be familiar to any fans of Robot Chicken, and it isn’t at all surprising that M.O.D.O.K. also hails from Stoopid Buddy Stoodios. The rapid-fire punchlines and proliferation of pause-or-miss-them background Easter eggs have that feeling as well, so if maybe Marvel’s M.O.D.O.K. falls short of Harley Quinn territory and lands smack-dab in the middle of Robot Chicken country, that’ll be more than enough to guarantee a devoted fandom."
• M.O.D.O.K. is Marvel's attempt at The Venture Bros.: "The Venture Bros. began in 2004 as a Jonny Quest parody that lampooned science fiction pulp-action tropes while focusing on the bumbling adventures and dysfunctional family of a failed super-scientist, as well as his complex relationship with his costumed nemesis," says Samantha Nelson. "As the series went on, it expanded its scope to mock Marvel Comics characters, including the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, and Kingpin, while delivering some remarkably sharp storytelling that blurred the lines between heroes and villains. That’s pretty much where Marvel’s M.O.D.O.K. starts. The stop-motion animated show, which releases its 10-episode first season on Hulu on May 21, isn’t as sharply written as The Venture Bros., but it aspires to that same zany mix of sitcom and satire, centered on a pathetic, unsympathetic protagonist."
• M.O.D.O.K. has no interest in holding your hand through its many, many, many nods to the comics: The show chooses instead to "assume that anyone interested in watching a show about a guy called M.O.D.O.K. who is just a big head in a little flying chair with tiny arms and legs will (at the very least) be willing to tolerate some goofy comic book nonsense," says Sam Barsanti. "That willingness to embrace the Marvel mythology is one of the two best things about the show, the other being that the Marvel mythology itself is rarely the whole joke. In other words, this isn’t a licensed Robot Chicken spin-off (though it comes from the same studio and certainly shares the same aesthetics) or a Family Guy-style series where the characters are just joke machines who barf out set-ups and punchlines. If anything, M.O.D.O.K. is more in line with the absurdist character-based humor of something like American Dad! or Rick And Morty, where instead of being a bunch of nonsense where nothing matters, it’s a bunch of nonsense that takes itself seriously. Some of the Marvel stuff is used to set up jokes that comic fans will appreciate more than others (famously annoying villain Arcade shows up and shouts 'I hope you like being confused!' while laying out his needlessly complicated evil scheme, which is perfect), but that comes more from the show emphasizing a playful take on what these iconic characters are like more than just trying to score points with the nerds."
• By the middle of its 10-episode first season, M.O.D.O.K. becomes genuinely funny in its own peculiar way: "Unlikable characters start to grow on you," says Bob Strauss. "And the insane plots, subplots and narrative issues — many of them inspired distortions of what goes on in the serious Marvel Cinematic Universe — grab one’s imagination. In other words, this one is worth watching, too. Damn you, villainous M.O.D.O.K.!"
• Getting approval of Marvel cameos didn't go as planned for M.O.D.O.K. co-creators: When co-creators Jordan Blum and Patton Oswalt approached the decision makers at Marvel, they asked for the best-of-the-best heroes and villains -- and got nearly everything they asked for except three lesser-known characters. "We got all the A-listers we wanted," Blum said. "There’s a very funny episode that Patton wrote, that’s set at the Bar With No Name, and it’s got a lot of the D-List and deep cuts from the Marvel handbook. We wanted Stilt-Man as the bartender so he could kind of stilt up to get the top shelf liquor and then come back down, but they were like ‘Stilt-Man is off limits!.’ It was like him, Turner D. Century, and Paste-Pot Pete. Those were the three that you can’t touch!”
• Why Patton Oswalt and Jordan Blum chose M.O.D.O.K. for a Marvel animated show: "I have loved the character since I first saw him. It’s that Jack Kirby design, where he’s this big, floating head monster, and yet he’s also incredibly human in the way that Stan Lee wrote him," says Blum. "He is this guy who sees himself as this Dr. Doom elitist villain, but deep down, he knows he’s not, and it drives him crazy. His ego always gets in the way of his plans to conquer the world, and I think that’s very relatable. But, besides the visuals, we haven’t seen a world of villains explored and that led us to ask questions like, “Where does this guy go after he finishes fighting Captain America?” I’ve always been fascinated by the oddballs of the Marvel universe who don’t quite fit in, and I think M.O.D.O.K. is the ultimate supervillain underdog." Oswalt adds: "We love the backbenchers. The idea of a C, D-list supervillain who is just as upset at the other supervillains as he is (at) the heroes because he thinks he should be at the top rank of villains. He’s someone who is genuinely hyper-intellectual but has no emotional intelligence. Having him on the screen trying to conquer the world felt very timely and like a fun sandbox to play in."