When you consider the fact that the Thing cartoon, with little Benjy Grimm using a magic ring to transform into the Thing, was picked up and lasted a season, it really makes you wonder what kind of superhero cartoon would not get made. Well, here are five odd animated superhero TV show ideas that never made it to series.
1 The X-Men. Of the shows on this list, this is the only one that actually had a pilot that aired on television. Entitled “Pryde of the X-Men,” this was a fairly strong adaptation of the X-Men as they existed in the early 1980s. In any event, the animation on the series was excellent and the choice of characters was also quite impressive—in fact, the popular X-Men arcade game of the early 1990s was based on the characters in this pilot. However, the personalities of the characters tended to be a bit campy and perhaps the most notable problem was that they decided to make Wolverine Australian. The sound of Wolverine talking like Crocodile Dundee was extremely jarring for most fans. Of course, the amusing irony is that Wolverine was eventually quite successfully portrayed on film by Hugh Jackman—who is Australian. Still, the failure of this show led to the later success of the 1992 series, so all’s well that ends well.
2 Daredevil. During the early 1980s, after the success of Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, Marvel looked to release a new cartoon series, and this time the subject was to be a hero who had yet to appear in his own cartoon series—Daredevil. The approach, however, was a bit…interesting. The series was to star blind attorney Matt Murdock and his Seeing Eye dog, who would fight crime as Daredevil and Lightning, the Super-Dog! Mark Evanier later noted that he worked on the show and by the time he was finished with it, while Murdock still had a Seeing Eye dog, it did not help him fight crime. Sadly, nearly just as soon as the people at ABC decided to order the series they quickly changed their minds and dropped it.
3 Wonder Woman and the Star Riders. In 1992, DC and Mattel got together and discussed creating a new toy line of “action figure Barbies” based on Wonder Woman. It had been a while since the last major girl action figure line (the He-Man complementary line, She-Ra), and Mattel figured it would be worth a shot. So was born Wonder Woman and the Star Riders! The basic gist was that Wonder Woman, Dolphin, and Ice (plus two superheroines original to the show) would ride around on flying horses and help stop the bad guys. The legendary DC artist José Garcia-López actually designed the characters. A prototype of the toy line was produced for the 1993 Toy Fair, but the line, and the proposed TV series (which apparently never went past storyboards), fell apart. The canceled toy designs were recycled as part of the Tenko and the Guardians of the Magic toy line, and the characters actually did appear once: in a tie-in comic with Kellogg’s Mini Muffins!
4 Captain America. During the mid-1990s, Marvel began work on a Captain America animated series with legendary writer Steve Englehart at the helm. It was set during World War II in Europe, but amusingly enough, the bad guys were not allowed to be called “Nazis.” Red Skull was the bad guy still, but he could not be called a Nazi and, of course, no swastikas were allowed to be shown. Englehart recalled that Marvel’s mid-’90s financial problems (the company eventually declared bankruptcy toward the end of the decade) ended the series.
5 Gotham High. Comic book artist and writer team Celeste Green and Jeffrey Thomas sent DC a pitch for a Batman cartoon featuring all the major characters as teenagers in high school together. DC editors liked it enough that they asked Green and Thomas to develop it further, but ultimately it never made it to air. I wonder how you would go about sending the Joker to detention.