Marvel Entertainment has announced plans to develop a new series, the “Marvel Super Hero Squad,” for broadcast in 2009. The first season of 26 half-hour episodes features a variety of Marvel heroes including Iron Man, Captain America and the Fantastic Four, all living in a “caricatured Super Hero City” where they frequently do battle with Marvel villains like Doctor Doom and Magneto. The series is meant to target 6 to 8 year-olds and is currently looking for a network to broadcast. Marvel is currently producing the series “Wolverine and the X-Men” and “Iron Man: Armored Adventures” for Nicktoons.

Call me crazy, but I’ve got a really bad feeling about this, and it all comes down to a concept we like to call “brand confusion.” When I was a kid (9 or 10, just above the target demographic for “Marvel Super Hero Squad”), we had “X-Men: The Animated Series” and “Batman: The Animated Series,” two shows I will still watch if I catch them on TV. There is no doubt in my mind that shows like this are what drove me to the comic store, mainly because the weekly adventures of my favorite heroes were not enough. Marvel is angling for this exact effect, except they’re doing it by appealing to the most exclusive crowd there is. Eight-year-olds are very temperamental, and while they may enjoy the show and buy all the toys for the first couple seasons, they’re going to become ten-year-olds who think the show is lame and stupid in a very short time. Producers may think they can “graduate” the kids to shows like “Wolverine” and “Iron Man” when they outgrow “Squad,” but that won’t happen. Because “Squad” is for kids, the general mindset will be that all of the characters in the show are only interesting to kids. They may think the incoming crop of six-year-olds will want to watch the show as they get older, but by the third season, you won’t be seeing many new viewers because shows’ followings drop off over time, not the other way around.

X-Men: TAS and Batman: TAS were successful because both managed to maintain a mature and complex plot structure while still being colorful and action-packed enough that a five-year-old could sit and watch the show and be entertained. Even if the majority of them wouldn’t admit it, teenagers watched “X-Men” because the narrative was that engaging. Some of us knew that the comic plots were even more in-depth, which is what drove us to the rack, but I still remember feeling alienated when I picked up a book that said “X-Men Adventures” and got a comic adaptation of a TV episode I had already seen. Don’t think this same effect won’t happen when either an older kid picks up a “Marvel Adventures” comic thinking it’s mainstream continuity or a younger kid picks up a regular “Iron Man” comic and has to ask his mom what it means when Tony Stark calls himself an alcoholic. I agree that something must be done to interest younger viewers in comics, but skewing the demographic too young will ultimately alienate an entire generation of might-be comic readers before they even start earning allowances.

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