I wasn’t even into the comic version of “Secret Invasion” so I really don’t care about the show itself.
What’s that you say? The creators of the show insist they didn’t even look at the comics and just made an original story whole cloth? Well, that’s even worse. It’s the continuing trend of Marvel Studios not caring about the source material, which is just alternate incentive not to watch it.
Face it, with me this show is “damned if you do, damned if you don’t”. The comic version was a reset button. “Hey, know that character you (or the current writer) didn’t want to die? That was a Skrull and the real one has still been prisoner the whole time. That other character you’ve complained was out of character for so long? Also a Skrull. Basically, if we can’t use robots or clones, we’re just going to use Skrull sleeper agents instead.” Meanwhile the MCU version has the Skrulls being allowed to stay because the Kree were so very evil…except that when it comes to the Kree/Skrull War, BOTH sides are so very evil. None of them have been the good guys as a group. So Secret Invasion is I guess when the MCU characters finally find that out…except the only Marvel characters I’ve seen from movies are Nick Fury and an armorless James Rhodes, at least in the promotional stuff.
I can’t go over the quality of the show itself for these reasons. Even if I had Disney+ I couldn’t tell you if the show is any good. I can however look at the intro and ask…was this really the best you could do?
Is it terrible? No. I’ve looked at far worse intros just looking at Marvel shows alone. This is actually the first Disney Marvel intro I’ve gone over because the only with an intro in the past decade is Spidey & His Amazing Friends because Disney Junior shows still remember the importance of intros. However, I wasn’t a fan of the two former Netflix Marvel show intros. This suffers from one of the same problems: trying to look too artistic, which actually got them into trouble.
When the intro first came out the assumption was that this was another example of AI art, kind of like when Corridor Digital attempted AI animation to debatable success. That at least rotoscoped actual actors and was an experiment. You would think someone with Disney dollars wouldn’t need to use AI…except I’m not sure Disney even has an animation studio anymore. Most of their shows aren’t even made by Disney and certainly isn’t in any of the traditional Disney art styles. You may have Disney characters, like the Ducktales reboots or the various Mickey Mouse related shows, but their either computer generated or done by other studios. With the rest of their content Disney is more like the distributor. Their most popular show is an Australian import they had nothing to do with. Their focus is live-action and tossing out their animation legacy, as I got into last week. And you know they aren’t going to use Marvel artists because Marvel Studios doesn’t care about Marvel Comics, that “lesser medium” they’re stealing ideas from.
However, I guess there are like eight artists involved in making the intro, but what do they do? If they’re just adding the animation elements or are the ones putting in “Samuel L. Jackson Nick Fury as a painting” into the program I’m not impressed. If they’re actually making all the art with no AI then I’m impressed. Any mixing of the two will vary depending on how much actual work was put into it.
I guess the intro is pushing the idea of “shapeshifting aliens” even if you didn’t see or know about the plot of Captain Marvel or like me you know about the comic characters…though frankly those aliens only bear a passing resemblance to a Skrull from the comics. No, my biggest issue is that it’s too long. The music is trying to be epic but also downplaying itself and the visuals are just there to be artistic. Compare it to something like an early X-Files intro.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vpqffgak7To
It has the same atmosphere that I think the Secret Invasion intro is going for, and I’m pretty sure this is an early intro, when Fox had a budget slightly above first-run syndication. This intro had to push more paranormal elements than one alien shapeshifting race of infiltrators and does it well in more than half the time. They only had two regular cast members but the Secret Invasion intro still feels more like a TV movie intro than a TV SERIES intro. Some of these credits belong at the outro or those in-episode credits unique to that episode. We also don’t see any of the characters, and yet each actor or actress had to have one credit per showing. They show us Mulder and Scully alongside the names of their portrayers. You could have put the various performers names together in a way that still looked artistic rather than one at a time.
Again, it’s not the worst intro done for this series, but it’s not a very good one. It’s very pretty and that’s all it has going for it, whether done by hand or by machine. If by hand, it does show how far artistic programs have come. If they just went over AI art to make it move and warp that’s rather weak for what they should have available to them, or would if Disney hadn’t gone full corporate Hollywood by this point. I’ve seen way too many intros in my life to be impressed by Secret Invasion. To quote one of the other Disney+ Marvel shows, “do better”.
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