TVSquad

One question I've had with the Disney acquisition of Marvel is how the House of the Mouse is going to deal with certain un-P.C. franchises. The one which came to mind was the comic series Marvel Zombies, which deals with an alternate Earth in which all superheroes were turned into flesh-eating undead and consumed the rest of the world's populace.

While I don't think I"ll be getting my answer anytime soon (perhaps the zombies will simply get locked in the Disney vault), some animator decided to redo the introductions to the 1960's Marvel Comics television cartoons in the zombie style. The original cartoons were essentially stop-motion comics of the original Lee/Kirby works. It's rather impressive how accurately the animator duplicates and parodies the original intros.

These videos can either be taken with humor or disgust as Zombie Captain America decapitates several soldiers and the heads of Norse Gods are thrown around. I leave it to you to judge for yourself. The videos are after the jump.

[via Topless Robot]

While this news doesn't only affect television, it does affect the industry enough to warrant a mention since both companies have historically had a television presence. Disney has purchased Marvel Entertainment for about $4 billion.

So does this mean we'll be seeing Spider-Mickey cartoons in the near future? Beats me. There are certainly benefits to Disney's acquisition. Marvel is predominately known as a comic book company and that market has been shrinking. However, the visibility of its characters has been growing due to the myriad of Marvel movies out there.

I'm sure words like 'synergy' and 'downsizing' are going to be used when describing this situation in the future. Will there be layoffs at Marvel? Should editor-in-chief Joe Quesada fear for his job?

My biggest concern is content interference on the part of Disney and the "toning down" of the more adult storylines and characters at Marvel in an effort to maintain the corporate image of its new parent. One can only hope that Disney lets Marvel be Marvel.

• TV Land has a Third Rock from the Sun marathon all night.
• At 8, Food Network has Easter Unwrapped.
• Nickelodeon has a new iCarly at 8, followed by new episodes of True Jackson, VIP and The Naked Brothers Band.
• At 8:30, FOX has a new Cops, then a new America's Most Wanted.
• At 9, CNBC has a new Suze Orman Show.
• Lifetime has the movie Nora Roberts' Tribute at 9.
• Sci-Fi has the movie Thor: Hammer of the Gods at 9.
• Also at 9: Hallmark has the movie Love Finds a Home.
• At 10, BBC America has a new Graham Norton Show.
• At 11, FOX has a new Mad TV.
• At 11:30, NBC has a new Saturday Night Live, with Zac Efron.
• At 1AM, Cartoon Network has a new Bleach.

Check your local TV listings for more.

After the Thor movie is released in 2010, Marvel will be doing a follow-up by releasing an animated Thor series on television. The series doesn't yet have a channel where it will be broadcast, but given the big Marvel hoopla nowadays, it probably won't be a problem to find one.

Granted, Thor isn't one of Marvel's top tier, like Spider-Man or the X-Men, but he's easily in the second tier. Given Marvel's current strategy of a shared universe of movies leading to The Avengers movie, the character will only get more popular over time.

To me, the classic Marvel cartoon remains the Spider-Man one from the 60's, but Marvel had a bunch of other cartoons in the 60's of the original Avengers characters, including Thor, based on the Kirby comics of the time. They each had some memorable, albeit brief, opening jingles. After the jump, I've included the one for Thor. Sing it! "Cross the Rainbow Bridge of Asgard..."

Javier Grillo-Marxuach, a writer and supervising producer for Lost, is really expanding his horizons. On top of co-writing two episodes this season, Orientation and Collision, he also hosts a regular Lost video podcast and regularly posts updates on The Fuselage. He's also been writing an indie-comic called The Middleman, which apparently got him noticed by Marvel Comics. He's working on the Super-Skrull miniseries, an old school villian who once battled The Fantastic Four, Thor and Captain Marvel. Grillo-Marxuach is re-working Super-Skrull, to transform him from a villian to a hero. There will be four issues, starting in March.

Grillo-Marxuach said, "It's nice to do The Middleman, which is my own thing, but it's really cool, much in the same way as my work on Lost, that I get to be part of something much bigger."