Thursday, December 17, 2015

The Matt Signal Advent Calendar 2015 Day 17: Marvel’s Super Hero Squad Show “Mental Organism Designed Only for Kissing”


Marvel’s Super Hero Squad Show
“Mental Organism Designed Only for Kissing,” Season 1, Episode 14, 2009

Dan Says:

As gateways for younger viewers go, Marvel’s Super Hero Squad Show, which ran on Cartoon Network from 2009-11, was a lot of fun. It pulled from a deep bench of classic Marvel characters and stories, always kept things light and, when necessary, peppered in fart jokes.

The basic premise of the show was that all the superheroes (except Spider-Man, who never appears) lived in their own city, the mayor of which was Stan Lee. Just over a heavily fortified wall was Villainville, where Dr. Doom spent all this time plotting, yelling at his henchman and generally being a real crankypants. The main hero characters are Iron Man, Wolverine, Thor, Hulk, Falcon, and Silver Surfer, replaced by Scarlet Witch in Season 2. The main villains are Doom, the Abomination, and MODOK.

In this episode, Amora the Enchantress comes to Doom claiming she can make Thor fall in love with her, thus allowing him to be turned to Doom’s devices.

When asked what Amora gets out of the deal, she flashes back to high school, when Thor was in a garage hair metal band with the Warriors Three and she had a huge crush on him. As they play, Thor demands more cowbell. That level of humor, clearly presented for the parents watching with their children, is prevalent throughout the series.

Unrequited love apparently is rampant on Asgard. Skurge the Executioner is in love with the Enchantress, who is in love with Thor, who is infatuated with the new-in-town Valkyrie.

(It should be noted that Thor offers to take Valkyrie, or Val, out for shawarma, three years before the Avengers were seen exhaustedly stuffing their faces with it on film.)

Amora’s love spell goes wrong amid a battle between goodies and baddies, leading Ms. Marvel (Carol Danvers, who hadn’t yet been promoted to captain) to fall in love with MODOK. Within the world of the show, Ms. M is a high-level SHIELD agent often portrayed as being in a bad mood, and MODOK is an incompetent giant floating head with a voice like a malevolent chipmunk. A montage shows the two sharing root beer floats, running/floating through fields and making goo-goo eyes at each other against a fake Beach Boys song that’s a lot funnier than my description of it.


Their relationship makes Ms. M a liability, however, and SHIELD sends Hawkeye to take her out. The Enchantress, grossed out by what she’s done, provides him with an arrow that can break the previous spell, setting everything to rights, which is to say Ms. M comes to, beats the crap out of MODOK and throws him in jail. Roll credits.

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