31 Years Ago, A Cult ’90s Cartoon Premiered and We Need a Modern Reboot to Make Fun of the MCU — Explained
The world is ending. Again. A supervillain audiences are supposed to empathize with can only be stopped by opening a portal to another dimension. That’s where an alternate version of a dead hero is apparently the key to saving this reality. Unfortunately, nobody knows which superhero they’re supposed to be saving, because understanding the situation requires watching three movies, two streaming series and a post-credits scene from something released four years ago. But, hey, if audiences are buying tickets, then it’s doing something right.
The MCU has also made superheroes part of global pop culture, but that scale comes with a cost. There’s no denying its great success with interconnected storytelling, but it’s also stirring up a major challenge. Marvel Studios has created a sprawling mythology of sequels, spin-offs, reboots, variants and competing timelines. And the bigger the universe gets, the harder it becomes to make any of it feel coherent. At this point, it would be fun to find a satirical character who could point at the whole increasingly tangled machine and poke fun at it.
The Best Superhero Reboot that Should Satirize the MCU
Modern franchises have transformed comic-book storytelling into an ecosystem. Characters cross between movies and television. Heroes die, return, become variants and occasionally meet younger versions of themselves. Actors are recycled into various characters without even so much of a hiccup. Every mysterious object might be setting up the next phase, and every ending can become the beginning of another franchise. It’s impossible to predict, especially since Marvel officially rewrote the rules of the MCU’s timeline.
What’s missing is a comedy that doesn’t just make fun of superhero stories, but actively refuses to let them remain coherent. Something fast, chaotic and completely uninterested in respecting the rules of the cinematic universe. Something that can see a multiverse and respond not with another three-hour explanation, but with a punchline. Fortunately, television has already given us the perfect candidate. If the MCU has become too complicated to parody, perhaps it’s time to unleash the one character who was never particularly interested in following a plot in the first place: Freakazoid!
Why Freakazoid! is the Perfect Superhero Reboot to Parody the MCU
The best thing about Freakazoid! is that he doesn’t need to understand the rules of the superhero universe to destroy them. The 1995 animated series focused on a hero who could barely stay inside his own story. He’d get busy breaking the fourth wall, addressing the audience, and veering wildly off course whenever the opportunity presented itself. That makes Freakazoid less a traditional hero and more of a character who could explore the infinite multiverse of the MCU. Freakazoid is also similar to a certain character named Deadpool, who’s been teased as being in Avengers: Doomsday by none other than Ryan Reynolds.
A modern reboot could put that chaos to work against the MCU’s most recognizable habits. A villain could spend five minutes explaining the rules of the multiverse, only for Freakazoid to interrupt and ask whether there is a shorter version. A supposedly shocking character death could be immediately ruined when he points out that the actor is already filming the sequel. As the credits begin to roll, Freakazoid could pop onto the screen and tell the audience to go home because there isn’t a post-credits scene. Even the endless parade of reboots and variants could become part of the joke. Every time a new version of Freakazoid appears, the original simply declares him “the cheaper one.” The key is that Freakazoid wouldn’t be mocking the MCU from the outside. He’d be dropped directly into its machinery and pull every lever he could reach. Heck, even Spider-Man has become responsible for inventing the MCU’s most deadly weapon – so there’s no reason Freakazoid can’t see what chaos he can cause..
And maybe that’s why Freakazoid is the perfect character to unleash on the MCU: he could acknowledge the absurdity everyone else has to pretend is normal. The X-Men are being rebooted again, after years of Fox keeping mutants out of the MCU by controlling the film rights. Johnny Storm became Steve Rogers. Thanos became Cable. Now Tony Stark is Doom. At this point, Freakazoid could look at the entire franchise and ask, “Are there any rules here?” Then he could ignore the answer and run with it. Because if the MCU is going to keep getting bigger, stranger and more complicated, it might as well have a hero who knows that sometimes the funniest way to make sense of it all is to make even less sense.
