Marvel Animation had a super fun panel at D23 this weekend but none of the footage was released online. Which is a bummer. We were all ready to get that first trailer for Eyes of Wakandaand Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man out into the world.
That didn’t happen. What did happen is we got a few quick glimpses at those shows, as well as X-Men ’97 season 2–which featured brief shots of Wolverine returning and the iconic Frank Quitely suits from his and Grant Morrison’s run on New X-Men–and What If…? season 3, which featured a new team of Avengers including Riri Williams, Moon Knight, Sam Wilson, and others flying mech suits that formed together into their very own version of Voltron. Eyes of WakandaRyan Coogler’s new animated series then introduced us to its unique aesthetic, blending CG animation with a hand-drawn look. The brief footage shown to attendees focused on a new character named Noni, jumping across huge pirate ships trying to retrieve a mask with green eyes, protecting a purple stone.
All of which was awesome. But, for us, the two biggest highlights came with our first look at the intro to our Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Manand the news that Marvel Zombies is returning in animated form, which had been rumored, as well as footage of it.
Starting with Spider-Manthe style of Friendly Neighborhood reminds me of a 1950s cartoon in the best possible way. It began with Peter Parker’s first day at school. Aunt May drives him up, and out of nowhere, a huge green portal opens up in the sky. Out drops a massive symbiote being–Venom-esque, but with a mane of fur and horns–and he’s ready to raise havoc, when two magical beams wrap him up. It’s Dr. Strange. Peter is amazed at this magical wizard guy who appeared out of nowhere but, the creature escaped. The creature starts to approach a fellow student when Peter throws a brick to distract him. “Hey ugly,” he says and Strange grabs him again. “Good save kid,” he says. As this is happening, we see a small spider let itself down from the portal.
Strange pulls the creature back up through the portal but as it closes it cuts the spider’s web and it lands on Peter’s shoulder. Peter goes up to the girl he saved and we see, in a three way frame, his face, her face, and the spider crawling into his shirt. She introduces herself and Peter lets out a wail. She’s offended but then he passes out. This goes into a killer credit sequence set to a very catchy rap song, complete with all manner of comic book panels and stylization.
Things pick up a few months later with some villains sporting high tech appendages attempting a robbery. In swings Spider-man, in a very homemade suit with tubes running from a tank on his lower back to his wrists. He attempts to stop them but gets hit hard and a voice starts talking to him. It’s Norman Osborne (voiced by Colman Domingo), who says he was monitoring him and can offer help. He gives him advice on how to stop the villains, it works, and the day is saved… foror now.
The panel then ended with the news that Marvel is making a four part, Marvel Zombies animated series that’ll debut sometime in the future, which will amp up the violence from prior animated Zombies material like that in What If…? with a TV-MA rating. The Zombies footage began with helicopters flying over a city, firing down and killing zombies. On the ground we see Shang-Chi and Katy in their valet outfits (it sure sound like they were voiced by Simu Liu and Awkwafina, or at the least very good soundalikes) fighting a bunch of zombies. Down drops a man sporting some very bright rings on his arms. “Who is that?” Katy asks. “It’s my Dad,” Shang-Chi says. Wenwu starts kicking ass with the Ten Rings, including killing one zombie that was the size of Godzilla. In his amazement, Shang stops fighting and is bitten on the arm. It’s over for him… that is, until, Wenwu sends the rings to him which stop the infection from spreading. Doing that, however, opens himself up and he’s killed by zombies. “Remember what your mother taught you,” Wenwu says as he dies. Katy and Shang, now in possession of the rings, escape on the helicopter.
“Five years later” is shown on screen in a nice little Endgame nod. The world is now post-apocalyptic and, driving through a wasteland, are Shang and Katy, listening to themselves cover Journey tunes on “Zombie Apocalypse Radio.” They’re in a pink highlighted sports car. Shang’s right arm has the rings on it still protecting him from a killer infection. Like a scene out of Mad Maxthey lead a massive convoy including a truck driven by Jimmy Woo (voiced, we think, by Randall Park–again, that or a good soundalike).
A group of bad guys–zombies we assume, but the lead rider was a Skrull–attempt to attack the group. It does not go well and Shang and Katy fire the rings at them, one by one, picking them all off. “We’re so badass,” Jimmy says.
Marvel was about as keen on sharing any estimated release windows for its upcoming animated shows as it was sharing all the above-described footage publicly, so suffice to say, we’re not sure just when to expect any of this to make its way to Disney+. But we’d have to imagine Friendly Neighborhood and Eyes of Wakanda will come first out of anything we saw today. We’ll bring you more on Marvel’s animated plans as soon as we learn them.
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