S03.E01: What If?…The Hulk Fought the Mech Avengers?

[chitowngirl]

A whole new team of Mech Avengers battle an accidentally enhanced Hulk.

[thuganomics85]

Episode starts with Mech Avengers and ends with an actual Hulkzilla.  Yep, that's about par for the course for What If?!

Okay start, but it didn't quite grab me like the other premieres.  Did like that in this universe, Sam and Bruce were the ones who met and became friends since I don't remember them ever really interacting much in the actual films.  But all of the fight sequences and whatnot were just generic and similar to ones I've seen before.

Anthony Mackie's voice work was pretty good here, and it's cool that he's on the show for the first time.  Teyonah Parris stood out as well.  Sebastian Stan seemed bored though.  The rest made the most of their few dialogue exchanges: hope we get more Shang-Chi/Simu Lu and Moon Knight/Oscar Isaac in future episodes.  Noticed both Nakia and Melina were played by other performers, so I guess it's a no go for Lupita Nyong'o and Rachel Weisz (even though the latter did an episode last season.)

I wonder how The Watcher will factor in this season?

[baldryanr]

It would be interesting to poll the audience and ask them what the merging mecha reminds them of.  Is is Voltron, Power Rangers, or something else?

[AnimeMania]

Jeffrey Wright as The Watcher 
Anthony Mackie as Sam Wilson / Captain America 
Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner / Hulk 
Teyonah Parris as Monica Rambeau 
Sebastian Stan as Bucky Barnes 
David Harbour as Red Guardian 
Oscar Isaac as Moon Knight 

[arc]

Aw man, that 1980s-looking cartoon has very, VERY Japanese Super Robot designs. Like, Grendizer esp for Thor, but they all look vaguely in that Super Robot style.

The comics have also done giant robot stories, not necessarily in What Ifs. But I always have the same problem: why would Thor be piloting the robot themed after Thor? What power is Thor adding to it? Couldn't any non-powered person pilot it? And why would the giant robot's hammer have Mjolnir's power? And given that Thor is as powerful as the story needs him to be -- he's given Celestials pause and even (in a far future story) killed a weakened Galactus. Now of course I can understand why Hawkeye or Iron Man would pilot giant robots to fight kaiju.

Photon's mech is straight out of the Zone of the Enders game.

Alright, gattai action! This reminds me of one criticism of Pacific Rim: why did humans build robots the same size as the kaiju, and which had more or less even odds to win or lose, instead of a great big super-giant robot that could easily win every fight?

Also, and I realize this is also a problem with the anime that inspired this episode, I've never liked that when a super robot combines, that there are four-plus pilots who somehow aren't superfluous to the action now.

Hulkzilla!!!

OK, overall fun but stupid. Not the best kind of stupid fun, but it was alright.

But that said, the show has really not made the best use of their actors, who are mostly the same actors from the live action MCU. Ruffalo has a distinctive voice, but the rest of them barely even sound like themselves, and even the visual likenesses aren't really on point. It also doesn't help that the dialogue is clunky as hell.