Marvel’s Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur premiered Friday on the Disney Channel following rave initial reviews from critics, resulting in a perfect score on review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes.
Praised for its comic-faithful animation style and heartfelt storytelling, this overlooked venture into animation by Marvel Studios is slowly but surely winning the hearts of fans across the board. For those who are now obsessed with this very peculiar dynamic that joins 9-year-old genius Lunella Lafayette (aka Moon Girl) and her telepathic dinosaur best friend Devil, you are in luck, because this isn’t the first of its kind to be introduced in Marvel television.
Gertrude Yorkes and Old Lace
Much like Lunella and Devil, Gert and Old Lace are also psychically linked best friends who protect each other as they go on world-saving adventures. This duo was introduced in the Runaways series created by Brian K. Vaughan and Adrian Alphona, first published in 2003. The 2017 Hulu series Marvel’s Runaways stays pretty faithful to the source material, casting Ariela Barer as Gert.
In the show, Gert is an irreverent 16-year-old, who is interested in counter-culture and social activism, and guided by an unwavering moral compass. Her status as a social renegade at school makes the teen come across as angry or unfriendly, even though she’s deeply dedicated to helping others. Gert has romantic feelings for the school jock Chase Stein, who couldn’t be more different from her, but he’s interested in the prototype beauty queen Karolina Dean. Of course, all these initial images of the different teenagers are eventually deconstructed to reveal much more complex personality traits as the show develops across three seasons.
Both in the comics and the series, with some small differences, Old Lace is a genetically modified Dinosaur, more specifically a Deinonychus, created by Gert’s parents to protect their family. Her name is inspired by the 1944 film Arsenic and Old Lace. Through their bond, Gert and Old Lace can feel each other’s emotions, and if one gets sick or hurt, so does the other. Gert is the only person who Old Lace responds to, making the dinosaur a pretty powerful and loyal weapon against most enemies.
Together they’re part of a teenager superhero team-up called Runaways, the children of villainous parents, themselves members of a criminal group named Pride. Like their name suggests, Gert, Old Lace, Karolina, Molly, Chase, Alex, and Nico run away from home after their parents frame them for the murder of their latest victim. They then have to navigate the tension that was left between the group of friends following the death of Nico’s sister Amy years prior, while trying to stop their parents from hurting anyone else.
All three seasons of Marvel’s Runaways are available to stream now on Disney Plus. Marvel’s Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur air weekly on Disney Channel, with the episodes arriving on Disney Plus from Feb. 15.