The Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes
The 100% Rotten Tomatoes Marvel cartoon fans still call the best Avengers series ever animated. Founding members one per episode, then the Kree Skrull war. 52 episodes, all on Disney+.
Cast & Key People
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Our Review
Marvel Animation made something special between the film eras and almost nobody outside the fan forums noticed. Earth’s Mightiest Heroes spends its first eight episodes introducing one founding member per week, Iron Man, Giant Man, the Wasp, Thor and Hulk, before the team forms, and then lets Captain America wake up in episode nine. Nobody had done that on television before, comic faithful and patient about origins at once.
The writers mined the Thomas and Conway era, the classic jailbreak arcs, the Kree Skrull war, and fed them into a serialized shape kids’ television rarely gets. The villains keep winning off screen while the heroes bicker. Loki runs the season like a chess player. And the theme song, a full rock track with lyrics about assembling, is the most earworm of any Marvel cartoon ever made.
Critics barely reviewed it (5 reviews, all fresh, 100% on Rotten Tomatoes) and audiences kept it at 8.3 on IMDb across two seasons and 52 episodes. It was quietly pushed aside for the movie tie in version of the lineup, which is the only wrong note in its story. If you only watch one Avengers cartoon, watch this one. All 52 episodes live on Disney+.
