Marvel’s speculative What If…? series was always going to start with something retro. Director Bryan Andrews envisioned a story set during the 1940s involving Captain America and Peggy Carter at the dawn of what would become the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But this time, there would be a mind-melting twist.
That’s precisely what the animated show ended up doing with its first episode this week, imagining what could have transpired if Hayley Atwell’s Agent Carter had received the super-soldier serum instead of scrawny Steve Rogers. But years ago, in the early days of devising What If…?, Andrews had an entirely different curveball in mind when he presented a gallery of his own images to Marvel president Kevin Feige, illustrating just how far the series could go in pushing boundaries.
“It was also in the vein of doing something vintage and pulpy, because I love that,” says Andrews, who previously worked as a storyboard artist on the Avengers films, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Doctor Strange. “There were three heroes back-to-back, and they’re fighting, like, all the Nazis. It’s Cap with the super-serum, as we know him, Peggy Carter, just being her normal badass self because she doesn’t need the serum—and the Rocketeer.”
The Rocketeer takes flight.
DisneyYes, that Rocketeer, as in the non-Marvel comic book hero created by the late artist Dave Stevens, which was adapted into a cult-favorite live-action movie in 1991. The Rocketeer does take place during the World War II era, and Disney did release that film, which was directed by Joe Johnston, who also made 2011’s Captain America: The First Avenger. So there was plenty of connective tissue. But adding a new hero from an entirely different universe wound up being a dimension too far, even for a show like this.
“Kevin was just like, ‘Uh, yeah, no, no, we’re not gonna do that. But I like the drawing!’” Andrews recalls.
As exciting as that may sound to Rocketeer fans, there were good reasons for not going there, beyond copyright entanglements. “There’s a big can of worms because [Tony Stark’s father] Howard Stark is basically the Marvel version of Howard Hughes,” notes Andrews. The famed aviator and entrepreneur was a key figure in The Rocketeer story, played in the film by future Lost actor Terry O’Quinn. “If you have The Rocketeer in Marvel, does Howard Hughes exist?” Andrews asks. “But the multiverse is infinite! So maybe they both can exist at the same point in time, you know? I don’t know. Anyways, I tried.”
Now that the first season of What If…? is rolling out and a second season is already underway, Andrews and the show’s head writer, A.C. Bradley, took Vanity Fair on a journey through some of the other ideas that were too weird to live, but too fun to forget.
Captain Hydra
The hero and HYDRA, from Captain America: The First Avenger.
The set-up was simple: What if Steve Rogers had fallen off the train into a frozen wasteland instead of his friend Bucky Barnes?
This was another alt-version of the Captain America story line. The concept was proposed by Marvel as a test while recruiting a prospective head writer. “This was the story I had to pitch to get the job,” says Bradley, who previously wrote for the Netflix animated series Trollhunters and its alien spin-off 3Below.
As we know from the main story line, Bucky’s broken body was rescued by Hydra forces and fitted with a mechanical arm. He was subsequently brainwashed into becoming the merciless assassin known as the Winter Soldier. So how would that have played out if their subject was already the super-soldier Captain America?
“My idea was, if Steve fell off the train, we would jump forward in time,” Bradley says. The Steve Rogers version of Winter Soldier would not slyly operate in the shadows, but instead aggressively and openly pursue the cause of his new evil overlords.
“Steve Rogers is the kind of man that when he believes something is right, he goes to the ends of the Earth to do it,” Bradley says. “But he actually is not a very good soldier. He doesn’t follow orders.” As we saw over and over again in the movies, Cap follows his own lead. “So if he’s brainwashed by Hydra to believe that Hydra is right, he’s going to go full throttle,” Bradley says. Rather than become a mere agent of that evil organization, he would have ascended to be its commander—Captain Hydra.
In Bradley’s take on this alt-universe premise, Peggy, Howard Stark, and Bucky would have joined forces to take down Captain Hydra with the help of a fourth accomplice. (No, not the Rocketeer.) “The fun twist is that it would have been Red Skull, who has now been replaced by Captain Hydra,” Bradley says. “They would have had to stop [Rogers] and then make him remember who he really is.”
In addition to a good guy going bad, this story had that secondary twist: a villain going good, albeit for selfish, no-good reasons. It’s a decent concept, but it was too close to the Peggy-becomes-Cap story line that Marvel actually wanted to do.
The happy ending: Bradley’s take was sharp enough to win her the head-writer job.
The Young Iron Man Chronicles
Young Tony Stark and his father Howard Stark from Captain America: Civil War.
“I always wanted to do a story looking at the relationship between Tony and Howard Stark,” says Bradley. “I’ve always been fascinated by the notion of the sins of the father playing out in the son, and also that age or that moment when a child sees their parent as an actual person, flaws and all, for the first time.”
Her inspiration for this abandoned What If…? story line came from yet another universe, this one a Lucasfilm TV series from the ’90s. “I’m a big fan of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, and I’m a huge fan of that first 15 minutes of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” she says. That sequence in the Steven Spielberg movie featured River Phoenix as a Boy Scout version of the future archaeologist, scrapping with looters and setting up the combative relationship with his father (Sean Connery) that would unspool later in the film.
This Marvel father-son tale involving Iron Man and his dad would have been something similar, with a young Tony Stark clashing with the dynamic, entrepreneur father whose absence is key in the official Marvel story line. Bradley wanted to see actual sparks fly between them, and perhaps set Tony on a different course.
“At the end of the day, Tony Stark is the guy who was never supposed to be the hero, becoming the hero,” she says. The real promise of this alternate story line might have been showing us who Tony was before he put on the cynicism that became his very first, unseen armor.
The Noble Loki
Deleted scene from Thor: The Dark World.
One unbreakable restriction the What If…? creators had to accept was that they had to avoid focusing too much on characters who were already leading their own Disney+ shows. That meant no Wanda or Vision, no Falcon or Winter Soldier, and no Loki either.
But when Andrews crafted his original concept-art pitch for Feige, he didn’t know that—and he concluded with a startling image: “We had Loki with Thor’s hammer, like Loki was worthy.”
As Marvel fans know, only the absolute purest of hearts can lift Mjolnir, the Thunder God’s signature weapon, and that is not a descriptor that has ever fit Tom Hiddleston’s trickster villain. But that’s what made the notion so appealing. After all, Thor went through his own period in which he was unworthy of his own weapon, and a deleted scene from Thor: The Dark World featured Loki imagining himself summoning the hammer.
“At first it seems superficial, but how do you get to that point without changing who he is?” Andrews says. Loki’s duplicitous ways were a survival mechanism in the prime MCU story line. He was always treated as an outcast by his adoptive father, Odin, who snatched him away from his natural father, the warrior king of the Frost Giants.
Loki holding the hammer means something major has changed. “You’re given a thousand questions to answer. It’s like, Oh, did he stay a Frost Giant? Was Odin not a dick and taught him better? You know what I mean? There are so many aspects of that life you can explore,” Andrews says.
While the image of Loki triumphantly wielding Mjolnir was alluring, the story line was nixed due to the existing Hero Loki tale that was in the works. “They didn’t want us to go there because basically they were doing that in the Loki series,” Andrews says.
Kafkaesque Spider-Man
For more than a century, Franz Kafka’s 1915 novella The Metamorphosis has unsettled readers with its story of an ordinary man who wakes up one morning to find that his body has morphed into the repellent form of a giant insect. He suffers unspeakable anguish; his family is disgusted, horrified, and ashamed; and it all ends tragically.
Stan Lee’s take on Spider-Man imagined the fun side of possessing the characteristics of an arachnid, but Bradley proposed a What If…? story in which Peter Parker’s radioactive spider bite transformed him into a living nightmare rather than a superhero. “When you’re given the entire toy store to play with, you start thinking, What do I actually want to write?” she says. “I would love to write something that was darker, that’s a little bit more angsty and horror-based. So I was like, Ooh, what if there was a *Metamorphosis–*meets–Spider-Man story that’s really dark body horror?”
The reaction from Marvel: No.
“It would have been hard-R for a show that probably your kids will end up watching,” Bradley says. “It was a little too dark. So I was like, Okay, that’s fine. Can I do zombies? And they said yes, you can do zombies.”
The term “body horror” naturally conjures another master—director David Cronenberg, particularly his 1986 take on The Fly, in which Jeff Goldblum’s scientist merges his body with the genetic elements of a house fly to become a revolting, mutant monster. “It was definitely Cronenberg. It was definitely me wanting to go real dark,” Bradley says.
Her goal was to show the bleaker version of a teenage hero who rises to the occasion and saves the day. “I wanted to strip that apart. Like, what if the gift you’re given is more of a burden that actually is tearing you apart? How do you cope? How do you survive? How do you still stay a 16-year-old kid when you’re dealing with something far bigger and darker than yourself?” Bradley says. “I wanted to take Peter Parker and put him through the ringer.”
Romancing the Infinity Stones
Scene from Iron Man 3.
Tony Stark got to venture into deep space (and nearly died there as a result), but this What If…? story line would have imagined more of an adventurous rom-com with Iron Man and Pepper Potts galavanting through the galaxy. Its inspiration was a 2,900-year-old epic poem.
“I pitched a big, romantic space-opera episode that was basically The Odyssey but with Pepper and Tony,” Bradley says, adding sarcastically: “Of course, The Odyssey is what really resonates with viewers today.”
While this concept might have harnessed some 1980s-era Michael Douglas–Kathleen Turner energy, the Pepper–Stark animated adventure never achieved liftoff. “It ended up being too big of a story. And there are so many other aspects of Tony Stark to play with,” Bradley says.
She declined to say which far-flung characters they might have encountered in this particular space opera, but she did cop to one ridiculous *Rocketeer–*level effort to add a character from another franchise to What If…?.
“I would pitch Star Wars characters,” Bradley said. “That was me half the time having a joke, and also just really liking Mark Hamill, having worked with him on Trollhunters. Sometimes you would push the crazy ideas just to see if there was any movement.”
But there wasn’t. So don’t freak out, internet: Luke Skywalker will not be igniting his lightsaber alongside Iron Man.
“That was mostly me having a laugh,” Bradley says.
— Searching for the Truth About Anthony Bourdain and Asia Argento
— How Never Have I Ever Tore Up the “Immigrant Mom” Trope
— What Black Widow’s Final Minutes Mean for the MCU’s Future
— Can Hot People in Animal Masks Find True Love on Sexy Beasts?
— The Best Shows and Movies Coming to Netflix in August
— The Poignant Story Behind Anthony Bourdain’s Favorite Song
— How Brad and Angelina Inspired Loki’s Finale
— The Ballad of Bobby Darin and Sandra Dee
— From the Archive: Richard Gully, the Man Hollywood Trusted
— Sign up for the “HWD Daily” newsletter for must-read industry and awards coverage—plus a special weekly edition of Awards Insider.
"story" - Google News
August 13, 2021 at 01:53AM
https://ift.tt/37FiFua
What If Marvel’s ‘What If?’ Had Covered These Abandoned Story Lines? - Vanity Fair
"story" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2YrOfIK
https://ift.tt/2xwebYA
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "What If Marvel’s ‘What If?’ Had Covered These Abandoned Story Lines? - Vanity Fair"
Post a Comment