Review: Avengers Assemble "Guardians and Space Knights"

Well, the title ended up being a lie. That's a point against this episode already. Seriously, can Marvel just pay the licensing or whatever and get the rights to ROM back?

Y'all can just bite his shiny metal @$$.

Plot
Because the Guardians of the Galaxy had previously been introduced to the Marvel Animated Universe in Ultimate Spider-Man, there was more freedom to tell a story here. The story in question being yet another episode about Iron Man. Even when there's a whole 'nother team guest starring, it's still all about Iron Man.

Unfortunately, like with almost every Iron Man-centric story in Avengers Assemble, it hit the same main note: Trust. Weirdly enough, it seems as though the moral of the story is both to trust your team and to trust the loose cannon. An odd combination, to say the least. It almost works, but the writing doesn't quite manage to tie everything together.

There are parallels between the Guardians and the Avengers that could be exploited a bit more, the "trust" theme could have gone just a bit deeper... It just seems like the writers were hesitant to make the Guardians too antagonistic. I'm not sure how this episode could be directly improved, but it think one more round of rewrites could have tightened the themes at work.

Animation
While the actual business of animating the illusion of life and motion into two-dimensional characters was fine, I take issue with Iron Man's herald design. It's. Boring. When all is said and done, it's just golden Iron Man armor. Yawn. Even She-Hulk got a nifty little redesign when she became the Emerald Emissary. Why not have a metallic Tony Stark with a supernova in his chest instead of an arc reactor?

Have a little imagination, is all I'm saying.

But no. All we get is gold Iron Man armor. You know, Tony Stark canonically has armors with built-in roller skates. Therefore, I hereby declare that my throwaway joke from my "Galactus Goes Green" Recap about Galactus getting a golden herald with roller skates has come true! Truly, I am a visionary.

Characters
No one will ever say the this show will be known for how it's characters evolve over the course of time. Having said that, I kind of like Hawkeye's very minor subplot. At the beginning of the episode, Hawkeye is very critical of Tony's alleged plan. But at the end, it's Hawkeye who convinces the others to trust Tony.

He also teams up with Groot.

Like I said, it's very minor. But it's a nice touch to the episode nonetheless. One more rewrite, and the episode could have been an interesting character study about Hawkeye learning to trust the Avengers as implicitly as he does Black Widow.

Speaking of her, she's not in this episode. I'm not surprised, but I'm still disappointed in this show. Remember how EMH had Widow, Wasp, Ms. Marvel... Good times.

I'm absolutely sick of harping on how Black Widow gets treated like crap, but I'm going to keep doing it until the writers get it through their heads that just because you have a single minority team member in each episode, that doesn't mean every single other character can be both white and male. Even the original Avengers had the Wasp consistently, and that was done in the oh-so-sexist sixties. You guys have no excuse.

Guardians
They did little but hamper our heroes before teaming up with them. Their presence could have been replaced by Skrulls, the Nova Corps, or any other cosmic team.

It feels like the writers were struggling a little bit to fit in the Guardians, which is why I believe this was a mandated appearance designed to boost interest in the film adaptation. I also believe this because I'm a dang cynic after losing EMH.

Groot was a lot bigger back then.

Last time they appeared in the MAU, they were freedom fighters. Here, they're evacuating a planet. While I do believe this is something they would do, I'm just not sure they have the means or the opportunity, what with that freedom fighting, and all.

Now, as I've taken this look at the Guardians throughout these various shows, I haven't gone over the voice actors, aside from noting that Star-Lord was Master Chief in "Michael Korvac." This is because the VAs get changed more often than James Bond's actor. The most I can say about the voices in this episode is that Rocket Raccoon doesn't have a British/Australian/Brooklyn accent. (Sorry, Billy West. Still a fan of Skeets!)

Next time for the Guardians of the Galaxy, it's back to Ultimate Spider-Man for more about how Nova's so gosh-darn great.

See you then.

Next time for the Avengers, it'll probably be yet another episode about how Iron Man needs to learn to work with a team.

See you then.