Once upon a time, Hulu was to be the new home for a slew of adult-oriented Marvel content, specifically an edgy animated team-up show titled the Offenders. Starring a line-up of offbeat characters that included the likes of Howard the Duck, MODOK, Hit-Monkey, Dazzler, and Tigra, the concept never saw the light of day due to Marvel Television shutting down. MODOK and Hit-Monkey, however, managed to survive the ordeal.
I spoke to Hit-Monkey showrunners Will Speck and Josh Gordon today and asked about what exactly Marvel had in store for an original concept like The Offenders.
It was a very loose plan. It was the idea that there were a few sidelined characters that could, at some point, join up and that was the vision. One of the original concepts, when they pitched it to Hulu, was, “Let’s design four separate shows that don’t necessarily have plans to combine and find a way to combine them.” We were always in talks with the other showrunners like [MODOK executive producer] Jordan Blum to figure out where the points of intersection were. Stylistically and humor-wise, the shows were never created to resemble each other. We always thought that it was such a cool choice to combine the different styles.
From the sound of it, it kinda seems like Offenders would have been a show that was unlike any other superhero show currently out there. The idea they had in mind sounds very familiar to a lot of the Adult Swim mashups like Harvey Birdman, Attorney-at-Law and Space Ghost, Coast to Coast; an idiosyncratic marriage of polarizing premises to create a crazy blob of a show.
As fun as it would have been to see a stop-motion MODOK interact with a 2D Hit-Monkey, it’s hard to imagine a Feige-led Marvel brand agreeing to something this wacky. MODOK, for all its oddities, was actually a well-made show. Saving more of my elaborate thoughts in my review, I’ll say that Hit-Monkey was also a pleasant surprise.
