We all know MODOK as the evil genius super villain. But what happens to that giant brain when he goes home? That was the pitch behind Marvel’s MODOK, a new stop-motion animated show coming to U.S. streaming service Hulu which debuted its first footage at New York Comic Con 2020.
Co-created by Patton Oswalt and Jordan Blum, MODOK is one of the few surviving Marvel shows in the wake of Marvel Studios one again gaining control over television. Originally, there were numerous Marvel shows coming to Hulu, MODOK among them, but now it’s basically just this one (and the soon-to-debut Helstrom). And it’s kind of easy to see why.
Here’s the full panel with clips right at the start, and again at about 7:30 into it.
As you can see, the show splits time between MODOK running the evil corporation AIM and his home life. At home, Aimee Garcia (Lucifer) voices his wife Jodie, Ben Schwartz (Parks and Recreation) plays son Lou, and Melissa Fumero (Brooklyn Nine-Nine) is MODOK’s daughter Melissa. Lou got Mum’s looks, aka human, and Melissa got Dad’s, aka giant brain.
On the panel, Blum and Oswalt said that Marvel was very open to letting them use lots of different characters and ideas from the whole history of comics. That includes “X-stuff” and other things they never expected Marvel to OK, but they did.
Beyond that, what surprised me most about our first look at the show is just how…freaking weird it looks. It’s animated in stop motion by the same company that does Robot Chicken, Stoopid Buddy Stoodios, and my colleague Charles Pulliam-Moore hit the nail on the head when he said it reminded him of MTV’s Celebrity Deathmatch. Blum and Oswalt seem to be going for that level of meta-weirdness, and what better medium to do it in than stop motion?
Marvel’s MODOK does not yet have a release date.