The Yoda of all that is good with superhero legends has finally come down from his well deserved throne to produce a new animated TV movie with, you guessed it, super-powered beings. It’s refreshing to see new faces, a new storyline, and a different format shown on the small screen. Stan Lee’s Mighty 7 is based on a digital comic book, self titled “The Mighty 7”, published in March 2012 to be developed into a six issue miniseries, but only three were printed in the hopes that this series would be developed into an animated series or a movie trilogy. I guess they opted for the animated movie. This project is the first of three full-feature length animated movies. The animation is done with a combination of a digital comic-like style that uses airbrushed techniques to give the characters and the background a dreamlike feel to it. Pretty cool, huh?
Although the storyline is not unique, it is still enjoyable to watch the heroes open a can of frakking whoop ass on the evil aliens. Also, this is the first time that the godfather of comics put himself in the storyline. Although his acting could use more practice, he did have some funny lines in the show. The characters in the digital comics had a more colorful choice of names compared to the ones in this movie. In the digital comics, their names like Vanisher; is changed to Micro, voiced by Darren Criss; Hip Hop, is changed to Rollerman, voiced by Flea; Silver Sparrow is replaced with Silver Skylark, voiced by Teri Hatcher, and High Rise is changed to Kid Kinetic, voiced by Sean Astin. Strong Arm (Armie Hammer), and Lazerlord (Christian Slater) remained the same. Each actor uses their talent and experience to make their characters shine. Michael Ironside and James Belushi round off the cast as the antagonists of this storyline. Ironside voices the evil alien Taegon military general, Xanar, and James Belushi voices Mr. Cross, deep top-secret men in black agent who is determined to protect the earth from anything alien. Michael Ironside has always been my favorite bad guy from television. His voice gives a perfect gritty tone to Xanar’s voice. James Belushi’s maniacal, crazy style to the paranoid government agent is right on target to how the government would react if aliens are here.
The breakdown of this movie is: Stan Lee encounters an alien space ship, filled with alien criminals and alien jailers, who gets inspired to create a new comic book with alien superheroes. The bad guys, Taegon alien race, are planning to conquer Earth, and last but not least the government is hot on the trail of Stan Lee and his merry band of alien misfits.
If this movie gets turned into a series, I hope the storylines get more complex, and start to dig more into the back story of each character, I believe these characters will grow on you. Just one criticism, please give Stan Lee acting lessons. I think he is great writer when creating comic books, but he is not an actor. I look forward to seeing the next animated feature of this trilogy.
~The TruthSayer
