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Every generation has their favorite Spider-Man television show.
Batroc is a laughable character. I'm the one who always makes fun of him.
I'm not sure that, for a lot of people, the real world is an easy place to live in. And yet we still soldier on.
How Cable survived Second Coming and what his responsibility is to his daughter, Hope, may have something to do with the Avengers.
It's such an enormously challenging process to make any kind of television. It's stressful and works towards getting the best out of creative people.
While we do have 50 years of terrific Avengers stories, many of which our writing staff has written, along the way, this has to live in its own world.
We always have a little comedy. It's the Marvel secret sauce. I think it's what helps Marvel resonate with the audience, that, yes, we're in the joke, too.
Marvel is at its best when we see how an ordinary person has something extraordinary happen to them - whether it's Tony Stark or Bruce Banner or Peter Parker.
One of the things that makes this show unique, in terms of an experience, is that when you do a show that has a large cast, scheduling is a very difficult thing.
I went to Columbia film school; that's where I met Matthew Weisman. We then became writing partners, graduated, and moved out to Los Angeles. I didn't know a soul.
Every generation has their favorite Spider-Man television show. For a lot of us, it's the one that has the song, 'Spider-Man, Spider-Man, does whatever a spider can.'
We all have things in our lives that are terrible: you apologize for them; you wish you never had you name on it. But 'Teen Wolf' is something that I'm very proud of.
But, at the end of the day, we want to have a show where we can focus on these individuals and their relationships with each other. That's really what the show is about.
What's true of the Marvel brand is that we're not as invested in the cape and the cowl as we are in the individuals. That goes all the way back to Stan Lee, from the very beginning.
Believe it or not, every Marvel character is someone's favorite character. There's a fan out there who absolutely believes that their character should have their own television show.
We want to be able to let the audience get to know these folks. One of the things about The Avengers, over the last 50 years, is the fun of changing up the gang and bringing in new characters.
We knew that, in doing something that's based around the world of the movie and how popular that is, we really wanted to do the biggest show that we've ever done, in terms of the look of the show.
We think that helps bring it up to a place where our storyboard writers then get the opportunity to be able to take that energy and really bring it to the show. I credit that entirely to our cast.
As we've often said, to the world at large, Marvel looks like a giant octopus that's out to swallow the galaxy - which, by the way, we are. But we are, in fact, a rather small and intimate company.
The Marvel catalogue of 9,000 characters really is that rich. It isn't just a bunch of guys running around with capes and cowls who have secret identities and fight across the street from each other.
For Marvel, we've never looked at any of our characters in terms of gender, race, or religion. It truly is about, who is the best character for the story? If that character happens to be a woman, fantastic.
What Cable is up to is not something that can be done quietly. It will raise the interest of some pretty important people and leaders in the X-Men community will have to step in at some point in the storyline.
Putting any show on television is a challenge. I've been very lucky to work with incredible showrunners on 'Smallville' and 'Lost' and 'Heroes.' I hope to bring a lot of those lessons to Marvel live television.
I started working as a movie writer and a movie producer... all the way back to 'Teen Wolf' and 'Commando.' All of those experiences, plus working both at DC and at Marvel - each of those things are bricks in the wall.
I really do see everybody at Marvel Television as storytellers. They might have different titles, but whether they're actors or they're showrunners or they're somebody that answers the phone, all of them are storytellers.
When I grew up reading comics, the part in the Marvel universe that was so exciting was that you could have a battle going on in 'Iron Man' and then, suddenly, Thor would fly overhead, and you realized, 'Oh, it's all one place.'
The Winter Soldier (Sebastian Stan) has done things that are far more heinous than anything Grant Ward has ever done as far as we know, and yet, at the end of the movie, you're rooting for him to come back on the side of the angels.
It really showed that you can do a major motion picture, from the folks at Marvel, that has multiple characters on an epic scale. On top of that, it also showed us that one of the most important elements is a certain kind of levity.
Marvel is really about the stories of Peter Parker and Bruce Banner or Jessica Jones. These are - I'm hesitant to say the word, but - real people with real problems whose power comes, to use the great expression, with great responsibility.
The best thing I can say about 'Teen Wolf Too' is that it's the only time anyone ever referred to me as Preston Sturges. Leonard Maltin wrote that 'Teen Wolf Too' made 'Teen Wolf' look like Preston Sturges. I've always prided myself on that.
In terms of whether or not you'll see other heroes along the way, you absolutely will. But, one of the things that makes our Avengers show unique is that this is our cast. We want to be able to focus on this group, much like they did in the movie.
For those of you that have been following Ultimate Spider-Man, you know how we took that show and brought it to the next level of what Marvel Television is doing. And Hulk and the Agents of S.M.A.S.H. was the next level of what we wanted to get to.
Again, I want to give credit where credit is due to our voice director, Collette Sunderman, who is someone that works out an incredible juggling act. I refer to it as juggling cats with vertigo, and the cats don't have vertigo, but the juggler has vertigo.
When we approached the Man of Action guys, we said, "We're not really interested in what's come before, except in the way that we want to make sure that it feels like it's Marvel's Avengers Assemble. From that point on, this is your cast. Go to it and tell great stories."
If I were to take five comic books, from four different publishers and Marvel, and lay them out, even if you didn't know the characters, you would be able to take a look at that Marvel comic and go, 'That's Marvel.' There's something unique about the way the story is presented.
Marvel heroes, at their core, are people who are damaged, are people that are trying to figure out who they are in life. And that doesn't matter whether or not they're X-Men characters or they're Matt Murdock or they're Tony Stark or they're Peter Parker... That's where it starts.
The Marvel cinematic universe and the Marvel animation universe are things that are very true, in terms of the DNA of what it is. But if, at the end of the day, all we're doing is telling stories that have appeared in the comic books already, then we're not really challenging anybody.
The thing that makes us root for Spider-Man as he swings across the city is that he's either having the time of his life or worrying about whether he'll be able to get a good grade on that English paper or whether or not he's going to make it home in time for Aunt May to make his dinner.
There is no one who is more conflicted in the Marvel Universe, in my opinion, than Matthew Murdock. Is he his father's son, or is he the son of his father? Is he someone who is going to solve the world's problems in a court room, or is he someone who is going to solve the world's problems with his fist?
While I talked about comparisons between Cap and Cable, there's also a parallel with Tony Stark. Iron Man thinks of himself as a 'futurist,' Cable is from the future. Both have been at war with their own bodies. We look for characters with touch points to Cable. Their legacy means an enormous amount to him.
It's the interaction between those characters that really makes that movie as special as it is, and I'm proud to say, as you probably know, it was the highest grossing film of 2012, it's the highest grossing film that Walt Disney has ever put out, and it's the third highest grossing film ever, in the world.
One of the things that I really admire about the Marvel motion pictures is that, in one year, 'Captain America: The Winter Soldier,' which was a taut political thriller, and 'Guardians of the Galaxy,' which was a cosmic comedy, came out, and they could not be more different, and yet they both felt very Marvel.
I want to give credit where credit is due to Eric Radomski, who is the head of our production for Marvel Animation and who also happened to direct the pilot as well, has been the supervising producer on the show and has really been just looking at every single way that we can just plus up. This is a great-looking show.
Not only do we have the handsomest voice cast out there, along with the very lovely Black Widow, we also have an incredible voice cast, in terms of being able to handle the drama, the fun, the excitement and the promise that Marvel brings to every single one of our projects, which is epic adventure on the human spirit.
The challenges in taking any IP into any other platform are best met by empowering the individuals that can work best in that area and that is one of the things that I really admire about Marvel as a company. They go out and find the best people, whether it is to draw a comic book or create a television series or make a movie.
This is, in fact, the biggest show that Marvel television has ever taken on, in the animation world. We had a real challenge that was posed to us, and that was this little, tiny art-house movie that came out last year, that I don't know if you saw, called Marvel's The Avengers, written and directed by our friend Joss Whedon, and it really set the template.
There were radio shows where you actually got to hear people play off of each other and get that immediate magic that goes on. And rather than doing what a lot of shows do, where an individual comes in, reads their part, and you edit it together later on and try to build a performance, we're lucky because this is really very much a theatrical performance that is going on, every single week.
Cable is not a robot. The metal in his body is actually organic tissue. Ed and I have talked about this a lot. We liken it to a cancer that changes your body's cellular structure. Last time we saw him, his arm had been severed. It's back with a kind of force that will play a major role in this storyline. This is a battle inside Cable's body that he has waged since the first time he appeared.
Any platform that you use to tell stories helps you regardless of the medium regardless if they are bedtime stories that you tell your children or comics or film. Specifically what makes comics unique is that they are a storytelling device that forces you to think both visually and economically. Some might say you are limited by your imagination, but that is not true because someone has to draw it.
When we first sat down and talked about how much of the show we were going to do based on the movie, there are certainly things you can see right away, but we wanted to make sure that the audience who maybe never saw the movie or has maybe never seen any of the Marvel characters before - and I know there's three of them left on the planet - could have someone that could be their eyes and take them in.