Ranking Every Marvel Animated TV Series From Worst To Best
5. Iron Man
I know there's a lot to be said about X-Men's intro (and we'll get to that in a bit), but I really do think we should consider nineties Iron Man as being the champ of the comic book cartoon intro.
I mean, you can totally ruin (or improve) the whole aesthetic by superimposing Yello's 'Oh Yeah' over the sequence instead of those banging vocals, but it's still a brilliant opening to what was a regularly enjoyable animated series. Hawkeye and Julia Carpenter (the second Spider-Woman), made regular guest appearances, and there was a healthy dose of villainy to go around too, epitomised in full by the Mandarin and characters like M.O.D.O.K. (a big floating Krang-like head, if you didn't know).
It's a pretty cheesy version of Iron Man, but the show still brings the essence of the comics into its animation. Tony still has all his armour, the Mandarin is still... Mandarin-y, and there's even a moment where he busts a suit out of a briefcase ala the one good scene from Iron Man 2, so all's good really.
WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well.
In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.