Back when it was announced that Joshua Fine was leaving Marvel Studios, I sent him an email asking if he would consent to a (hopefully not!) final interview on diverse subjects about Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes. He consented, and *insert Rod Sterling voice here* present this for your approval!
Q. In your time at Marvel Studios, you’ve basically had your hand in everything -- from AEMH to the W&tXM, from Spectacular Spider-Man to the Fantastic Four?
One of my favorite stories from college (completely true)
happened late one night in the spring of my sophomore year at NYU. It was
probably about 1am the night before I had a midterm in some gen-ed class that I
really didn’t care about and I should have been studying. Instead, I was hunched
in front of my computer, circles under my eyes from lack of sleep, because I had
been marathoning the entire second season of
X-Men: Evolution which I’d never seen
before. I only stumbled across the series while looking for episodes of the 90’s
X-Men, but after watching a few episodes, I was hooked. My roommate (still one
of my best friends) shook his head disparagingly at me and asked, “Dude… which
do you think is really more important? Passing your
required class, or watching X-Men
cartoons?”
I failed that class.
My time at Marvel started shortly after that. My junior year
in college I did a summer internship at Marvel Studios. This was back when they
were in a tiny little office with about 11 full-time employees to 8 interns.
Back then the office was small enough that the interns actually got a chance to
interact quite a lot with the top executives. I was able to help out Avi Arad
and Kevin Feige when the first Fantastic Four movie was in development.
Spider-Man 2 had just come out, and the Marvel animated films with Lionsgate
were just getting off the ground. I ended up working on several projects in
animation for Craig Kyle, who sort of took me under his wing.
As I was finishing up my last year studying screenwriting, I
got an amazing once-in-a-life-time-don’t-blow-this-or-regret-it-forever type
opportunity. Craig, who I’d staid in touch with asked Chris Yost—then story
editor on Fantastic Four: World’s
Greatest Heroes to give me a call and offer me the chance to write an
episode for the series. That episode was ‘Hard Knocks’ featuring the Hulk.
Now, I’ll openly admit that Hulk was never my favorite
character growing up. Actually, I found him outright boring. I was drawn to
Marvel and comics in general (as were many of my generation) thanks to the X-Men
and Spider-Man animated series of the 90s. The concurrent Hulk series of the
time just didn’t do it for me. Never saw the appeal. But let me tell you… when I
got offered this episode, I made Hulk my best buddy ever. And it’s sort of
funny, because Hulk and I have hung out A LOT during my time at Marvel.
A few weeks after I turned in my first script, Chris called me
back and offered me another episode. This was really the first indication that I
hadn’t totally blown it. That episode was ‘World’s Tiniest Heroes’ featuring
Ant-Man (do you see an ironic pattern developing here?) While I was still
working on that script, Craig called me and asked me to come work for him full
time. I packed up shop (actually everything was still in boxes from my college
move-out) and shipped myself out to LA in September of ’05.
At that time, Marvel had just changed offices (literally the
day before I started) to a much larger location in
Looking back, while it was exhausting work, I’m definitely
glad that I got to work on so many projects. I racked up more experience (and
more credits) than I think most producers would in twice the amount of time just
because of all the different shows we were juggling simultaneously.
Q. So, inquiring, gossip-hound minds want to know! Why did you make the decision to leave? Did it have anything to do with Todd Casey coming over from DC?
It did have something to do with Todd Casey insofar as he was brought in to
fill the development position that I had already decided to vacate. Our time at
Marvel only overlapped for a couple weeks, but he seems totally cool and I have
a feeling he’ll do some good things for Marvel Animation.
There were a multitude of reasons why
it was the right time for me to leave. The three big ones were that:
1) I moved to LA originally to be a
writer. It’s what I studied, what I know, and (believe it or not) what I’m best
at. I followed the opportunity to become an animation producer because it
presented itself—and I don’t regret a minute of it. I had fun, I learned a ton,
I was able to meet and work alongside some of the top talent in the medium, and
I’m incredibly proud of the work we did. But producing wasn’t ever really my
passion. Writing is. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to keep doing work in the
Marvel Universe from that side of things.
2) The second big
reason was that I was—in all sincerity—exhausted. Unless you’ve worked in TV
before, it’s hard to describe just what a grind it is. It really is a tireless
job, and as a Supervising Producer, if you want your show to be great, you
really have to put in the time—all the time—to make sure every single aspect of
it is great. In the last ten years, I’ve gone straight from a rigorous prep
school experience to an intense (and wonderful) writing program at NYU Tisch,
straight to free-lance writing (literally the week I finished school) straight
to a full-time job at Marvel. And from there I just kept repeatedly diving in
way over my head so that I could learn how to swim faster. I started producing
Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes
when I was only 24 years old, while most of my friends were still trying to
decide what field they wanted to go into. This was a good time for me to take a
breather, step back, look around, and figure out what I actually want to do in
the future.
3) The timing, with respect to the
show, was good. I wouldn’t abandon the show that I love (and have slaved over)
or the fans who love it, unless the timing made sense. The first fourteen
episodes of Season 2 were already completely finished (and most of my favorite
episodes of the series as a whole are within that bunch) along with a couple
scattered episodes later in the season that were produced out of order. The
remaining episodes were all in various stages of post-production. No decision
had yet been made about Season 3, but the time was drawing near when I’d
probably have to dive back into development on either Season 3 or a new show. I
sort of stepped out of the fog of non-stop work for a moment as things were
lightening up and realized that I needed a break for awhile. I’ve long wanted to
spend some time travelling the world and this just seemed like the optimum time
to hand the show over to other capable hands. Starting this fall, I’ll be
spending a year travelling all over the world, spending some quality hours—for
the first time in a long time—in that
universe that’s not the Marvel one. (For the record I mean the
real world, not the DC Universe.)
Q. Who is taking over your job, or is that a moot question until Season
Three?
A combination of people. Kalia Cheng,
one of the unsung heroes of Marvel Animation today, has taken over most of my
responsibilities on wrapping up Avengers season 2, alongside Supervising
Director Frank Paur, who’s still hard at work. Kalia’s sort of been the Maria
Hill to my Nick Fury. But, you know, without that severe case of the grumpies.
Maybe Amora / Loki is a better analogy.
And as mentioned above, Todd has come
in to oversee any new projects that get up and running.
Q. What exactly does a Producer do? Can you walk us through the steps?
Interestingly, I just answered this on
another interview I just recently finished. Please don’t take offense, but I’m
going to copy my answer here, because I’m not sure I could come up with a
clearer or more thorough explanation!
It varies from medium to medium (live action vs. animation,
film vs. TV, Marvel vs. anywhere else) and even from show to show, but I’ll do
my best to explain. This will be a good exercise, since most of my family still
has no clue what it is that I actually do.
The short version
is that a producer is responsible for making sure that the show is good. Plain
and simple. If the show isn’t good, it’s probably the producer’s fault. This
isn’t to undermine the contributions of the rest of the creative team in any
way, it’s to say that the producer is
responsible for the contributions of the rest of the creative team. The
level of involvement in any of these areas can vary depending on the producer
and on the project, but some of the things that fall into a producer’s camp are:
In the creation of
a series there are an immense number of moving parts. It’s a producer’s job to
keep track of them all and to really have a view to the big picture, while still
being as involved as possible on the little stuff. I like to say that if a
show’s great, it’s because everyone on the team, from the designers to the
directors to the actors to the writers did an outstanding job. If it isn’t, it’s
because the producer didn’t get them
to do an outstanding job. A lot of it is catching mistakes or contradictions
within an episode or the big picture of the series, or just pushing artists to
do the best work that they can do; coming up with creative ideas in a pinch and
bringing that overall vision to the table.
A lot of people might be reading this
and wondering… well then, what does a director do? Because in live action movies
a lot of this is as much the purview of the director as anything. In TV in
general and especially in animation, a lot more of this falls into the lap of
the producer (though there’s still plenty of overlap.) You still have a
Supervising Director who’s responsible for the direction of the series as a
whole as well as episodic directors, who are responsible for individual
episodes.
The way it’s broken down in a lot of
our projects, the creative staff is sort of split in two with the Story Editor
(and his or her writers) on one side, and the Supervising Director and the
Directors, design team etc. on the other. It’s a gross over-simplification, but
one way to think about it is that one side is responsible for the story, while
the other is responsible for the visuals. And the producer lives in both worlds
making them mesh.
Many folks are probably wondering what
distinguishes the different kind of producers, and again it varies a lot, which
is why there’s no straight-forward definition. But some rough guidelines:
In addition to
those responsibilities, as Director of Animation Development for Marvel I also
had a whole slew of executive responsibilities. These can basically be summed up
by saying that that part of my job was about making sure that Marvel and its
business partners were getting everything they need out of the shows and from
the production. This included (at times) preparing pitches and presentations to
help sell shows to networks, working with our licensing division to help create
style guides (that show how the characters and branding should appear on
licensed product), working with partners like Hasbro to make sure that the shows
meet their needs, working with broadcasters (once the show has been placed) to
make sure they understand / are aware of what the show is / what it has to offer
/ what special event programming might be possible. Working with videogame
partners and our publishing division on certain synergistic opportunities.
Cross-pollinating ideas with the guys on the live action side. Getting up in
front of 2000 people at San Diego comic-con to get them excited about
Wolverine and the X-Men season 2
(whoops). And all sorts of other assorted tasks.
Q. If AEMH Season One was your “Formation” season, and Season Two was your
“Cosmic” season, how would you characterize a theoretical Season Three?
Hahaha, oh man. Season 2 hasn’t even started yet and
everyone’s already fishing for info on Season 3. I won’t pretend that I didn’t
have ideas for possible seasons 3 and 4 pretty well mapped out, but even if a
third season were to move forward, it’s unlikely that it would have any
resemblance to the day dreams rattling around in my head. For one thing, most of
the original creative team has already moved on to other work, including Chris
Yost—who (from what I hear) is kicking ass in the Marvel writer’s program.
That said, I’ve gotta give some juicy
little tidbit to make it worth reading this far into the interview right? Okay,
in my original four season plan, Season 3 was going to be the ‘Magic’ season.
Chew on that!
Q. Once upon a time, there was said to be a plan to have AEMH and Wolverine & the X-Men share a common continuity. What can you tell us about that?
It’s a pretty good
story. Wolverine and the X-Men season
1 had wrapped up production. Supervising Producer Craig Kyle and moved on over
to the live action division, where he was already producing the Thor film that
just released in theaters. After a long wait, I finally got the green light to
start development on Wolverine and the
X-Men season 2. With Craig otherwise indisposed, I became the defacto
Supervising Producer for season 2. Greg Johnson and I, along with the late (and
amazing) Boyd Kirkland, got together and started working on the series bible
along with the first 8 scripts of the season.
I happened to be
simultaneously working on a show called
Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes, and in my devious fan-boy mind, I saw an
opportunity to create a new Marvel Animated Universe. So we planted some
connectivity seeds early in Avengers—a reference to the MRD, a shot of Wendigo
escaping from a S.H.I.E.L.D. super-prison. James Howlett on a WWII mission with
Cap.
Likewise (but unbeknownst to the world
at large) I was simultaneously working on the other side of things. Here’s a new
tidbit—Greg and I had started to flesh out plans for another Wolverine black ops
mission for S.H.I.E.L.D. where he would team up with then S.H.I.E.L.D. agents
Hawkeye and Black Widow (yeah, it was going to take place before the events of
AEMH.) I had vague notions about Hank McCoy paying a visit to fellow biologist
(and fellow Hank) Hank Pym.
But the financing fell out from
underneath WX season 2 before my mad machinations got too far along. You won’t
see anything further in Avengers: EMH that confirms continuity. And—I could be
wrong about this (I’m sure someone will be more than happy to point out if/when
I am) I don’t think you’ll see anything to openly contradict it either. Don’t
take that as a sign of who might be appearing or what might happen—I promise, it
tells you nothing.
But basically, if fans want to believe they exist in the same universe, they can. If they don’t, they can do that too.
Q. Do you think Spectacular Spider-Man might have joined that same continuity, had it continued?
Further into my deep, twisted scheming, I did have some thoughts on how to get Spec Spidey in on the fun. It would have had to be handled delicately and in the most oblique possible ways, because Spectacular was a show run by Sony and legally we couldn’t do any kind of blatant cross-over. But that show’s next season became a no-go right around the same time as Wolverine’s. So all those MAU rattlings got filed away for a rainy day.
Q. What plans did you want to execute in the AEMH but didn’t have a chance?
Guest stars? Villains?
One that I’ve already mentioned of course
is Taskmaster. He’s on of my favorite Avengers Universe villains, but we just
didn’t find the right place in the first season or two to showcase him. Same
goes for Mad Thinker. Chris and I were really close a couple of times to having
him as the headlining villain of an episode, but each time we just couldn’t
quite make it work. I’m glad Chris was able to get him into one of the tie-in
comics.
There are several heroes that I was specifically saving for Season 3. Given my clue above, you might be able to guess some of them. Same goes for villains. The Avengers universe is so huge, with so many great stories to revisit… there was just no way to get it all into two seasons. But we do cover a heck of a lot of ground, and I’m proud of the way it came together.
Q. What is next for Joshua Fine? Vegas?
Ironically, you’re not far off with
your guesses. I’m taking a year off to travel the world. I’ll be keeping a blog
as I go, which I’ll make sure fans are aware of in case you want to hear all
about my misadventures in the real world. From now on I hope to be doing lots of
writing—for animation, for videogames, for comics, prose, poetry, tv, movies,
Marvel, not-Marvel. You name it.
It’s been a privilege to create for
you and I hope you all continue to follow my work. I’ll try to bring the same
level of quality that Avengers has to everything I work on.
Q. What is your greatest regret regarding AEMH? W&tXM? Spectacular
Spider-Man? Fantastic Four?
I don’t have too many regrets. Like
everyone, I wish that all of those shows could (have) continue(d) forever. But
I’m proud of what we did do. I’m especially proud that each one of the projects
I worked on is pretty radically different from one another. To folks on the
outside looking in, it may all just look like “Super Hero cartoons” but
hopefully those who have seen all of these shows can now see just how far that
definition can be stretched in different directions.
Q. What was your favorite project that ended up not being made?
Wow, that’s hard one—I worked on a
bunch! The one that’s probably my favorite is one that I actually can’t talk
about, since it might see life at some point (and it’s not something you’d
expect in your wildest dreams.) From what I can talk about, I’d say development
of a Thor series that wasn’t to be. It was before the live action got up and
running, and ultimately, I think, just not the direction that the franchise
would ultimately take. But there was some neat stuff in there.
Q) I know you’re probably not going to answer this (spoilers and all), but
in this, the Cosmic Season, do we get any mention of Nova or the Nova Corps,
especially as regards the Guardians of the Galaxy?
Oh man, I really would like to answer
that question, because the answer is kind of fascinating. Ask me again at the
end of Season 2.
Q) Is it true that Loki knows where Jimmy Hoffa is buried? He seems to be
behind everything else.
It’s not a secret that the super-smart
villains are my favorites. I love working with the guys, like Leader and Mad
Thinker and my favorite of all, Loki, who have things figured out twenty-six
episodes ahead of time. Guys who have their hands in everything.
Q) It was implied, but never explicitly stated, that Loki caused the failures of the super-prisons. Was it indeed him, or is that still a mystery?
[SEASON 1 SPOILER AHEAD – DO NOT READ UNLESS YOU’VE SEEN THE END –
IDEALLY BECAUSE YOU’RE FROM
Yes, Loki caused the Super-Villain
breakout. We threw out a ton of red herrings in the first several episodes, but
despite all that, we didn’t seem to really fool most of the hardcore fanbase. I
think it was probably a bigger and more fun mystery for those that hadn’t
experienced the Marvel Universe before.
But for dedicated Avengers fans,
Chris’s and my devotion to the original books sort of worked against us on this
one. (Sort of like the way the same fans were screaming “triple agent!” at Black
Widow the moment her micro-episode ended.) This was our way to have a bigger
over-arching plot and mystery for the season, have a huge, action-packed,
chaotic premiere, and also still have Loki be ultimately responsible for the
formation of the Avengers. That’s some serious simultaneous cake having and
eating going on.
But, and I’ll emphasize this because
there are some dots that fans still haven’t fully connected yet, Loki is
indirectly behind even more than he’s been accredited. And this isn’t a
wait-and-see scenario, as there’s one important point that won’t be spelled out
in later episodes. Good hunting (or epileptic trees-ing as the case may be.)
Q) Its been said that the previously planned materials for a Hulk series and a Thor series were leveraged and folded into the AEMH material. Did that change what you folks had planned, or was it done early enough such that there was no actual change, as such?
I had finished developing a series
called Hulk: Gamma Corps awhile back, which just didn’t seem like it was going
to get the full green light to production. But some of the character designs (by
Ciro Nieli) and a few of the concepts—specifically the mechanics of Leader’s
transformative gamma energy and booster packs—were really cool. In addition to
featuring Hulk, that series was going to have Hawkeye and Black Panther in it.
It would have been a shame to see all that good work go to waste, so—given some
of it as a jumping off point—we got the powers that be to green light an
Avengers series.
Less than I expected actually made the
jump from Gamma Corps to Avengers. Hulk’s, Hawkeye’s, and Panther’s designs all
have similarities to their looks from that show, but they all got redressed to a
more classic Marvel Universe take. I will say though that part of the appeal of
having a whole Gamma Prison as one of our four prisons, and of doing a big
two-parter with Leader and his horde stemmed from the work I did on Gamma Corps.
A lot of the details didn’t make the jump, but I think the reason Leader turned
out as cool as he did and as prominently as he did in season 1 owes its origin
to Gamma Corps.
The Thor series played less of a role here, although I won’t say no role. After Tales of Asgard, Greg Johnson and I had a lot of brainstorm sessions to flesh out a thorough vision of the nine realms. What does each realm look like? Who are its denizens? How are they connected? I had a hand drawn map hanging on the wall of my Marvel office for a long time with a lot of this information, which was eventually tapped by one of our amazing painters to create the way-too-brief Asgardian map of the realms that you see overlayed on Thor’s face in episode 024. That thing was absolutely beautiful. I’ve gotta track that down actually, it’d make a great featurette.
Q) The Black Panther and Captain
For Iron Man and Hulk, we were following pretty tightly on the heels of the
theatrical continuity. It didn’t really feel like we needed to retread those
stories yet again, especially since we didn’t really contradict them. We could
pretty much point to those movies and say “there’s the origin.” Showcasing their
actual origins also wouldn’t have set up the Breakout in the most efficient way,
which was a bigger priority.
For Thor… well, he doesn’t really have an origin. He is who he is. He didn’t
become that by a radioactive hammer bite or anything. Then again, another way of
looking at it is that the entirety of season 1 is Thor’s classic origin story.
Thor’s arc for the season is the same as it was in the early books—finding
humility amongst mortals. We handle it a little differently for the sake of the
Loki plot twist, Thor has exiled himself to Midgard out of arrogance (arrogantly
believing he’s the only one who can protect the fragile mortals) rather than
being cast out by his father for the same reason. But the connection is
definitely there, as his exile is still the result of an argument with his
father. I’d also like to think that Odin had a pretty good sense of the lesson
Thor needed to learn. Listen to his argument with Thor in episode 002 and the
resolution at the end of 026 and realize, Odin was right.
Cap could have gone either way, but his brief news-reel origin helped us in a
bunch of ways. It helped set the tone for the WWII era episode, it helped us set
up Kang watching archival footage, and it explained exactly who Cap was, since
he wouldn’t be showing up again until later. It also let us do some nice
bookending with the newsreel of the Cap / Bucky statue that would play a part in
episode 009.
Black Panther’s origin was integral to his arc and to episodes that the whole
team would be involved in down the line. In and of itself, it’s also one of the
most touching Black Panther stories we could tell, so why
not do it?
Ant-Man and Wasp is probably the biggest question mark. At the end of the day, I
think the literal origin of Ant-Man discovering Pym particles wasn’t as
important as just setting him up as a cool character that you want to see more
of. And again, setting up events that would become relevant later for the
Avengers. Of those above though, Ant-Man and Wasp are the only ones that we
later considered flashing back to an origin for—or at least an explanation of
how and when they met. This was very nearly the subject matter of episode 015,
but the episode was already pretty crowded and something had to give.
Follow me on Twitter @Josh_Fine for more random tidbits as I
think of them!