Though we’re still several months away from Marvel Studios dropping their next batch of films on us, first in line when the time comes will be Captain Marvel, which will serve as the much-anticipated big screen debut of Carol Danvers. But while the upcoming Brie Larson-led flick will surely work wonders in raising the profile of this long-running comic book heroine, Carol also came pretty close to getting her first ever solo series for the small screen.
It was storyboard artist Ben Bates who proposed a Captain Marvel animated show before he even knew of the upcoming flick. Having worked on the animated Avengers Assemble and Guardians of the Galaxy shows, Bates put together a 5-minute proof of concept for project, featuring Carol calling on the help of her friend Spider-Woman to stop a plane from crashing.
Bates’ video comes with the following description:
“Before I knew a movie was coming out I developed a series idea for Captain Marvel. The concept was to do the first board driven Marvel cartoon and after approaching the Big Boss at Marvel Animation with the idea he asked for an animatic to act as proof of concept. I wrote, drew, and hired voice actors to create what you see here. This is the “rough” version of the animatic. A completed version to understand the full story that, had the pitch been successful, I would have cleaned up the drawings to make it prettier looking.
Unfortunately Marvel was uninterested in receiving ANY pitches and no one ever even saw this animatic haha.”
Judging by this crude test run, the project may well have resulted in a fun, zippily stylized show with a silly sense of humor, but for now, we’ll just have to settle for the big-budgeted MCU alternative. Still, if Captain Marvel does well enough when it hits theaters on March 8th, 2019, there could soon be a fresh audience out there clamoring for more Carol in whatever format they can get.