Following in the tradition of its movies, its ABC TV series “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” and Netflix TV shows, the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s next expansion will be into the young-adult/teen market via a pair of new shows set to air on the Freeform network.
For those not in the know, Freeform is a basic cable channel owned by ABC/Disney, one with an audience that skews heavily towards women aged 14-36. That’s a pretty big demographic range, and one superhero comics have traditionally had difficulty reaching. It’s also one that, through its upcoming “Cloak and Dagger” TV series, as well as the already-commissioned Squirrel Girl and the New Warriors project, Marvel’s TV department has its sights squarely set on.
While the Squirrel Girl/New Warriors series is still in pre-production, with no actors cast as of yet, the latter has already filmed its pilot episode. Interestingly, it did so not in LA or New York or the Marvel Cinematic Universe base in Atlanta, GA, but in Louisiana’s city of New Orleans.
This is quite a change from the source material. When Tandy Bowen and Tyrone Johnson, the runaway teenagers who would eventually become Cloak and Dagger, first debuted in 1982’s “Peter Parker, The Spectacular Spider-Man” #64, the pair had already made their way to New York City. Although they were from vastly different backgrounds, and different parts of the country, the pair were equally vulnerable to exploitation, and soon came into the clutches of a criminal gang developing a new synthetic form of heroin. The drug killed most of the other runaways it was tested on, but gave Tandy the ability to produce daggers of light, while Tyrone’s teleportation abilities were linked to something called the “dark force dimension.”
Judging from the trailer, while it doesn’t seem that the show’s writers will be slavishly faithful to this origin story, it doesn’t seem like moving the action from NY to NO will detract from the tale’s core. Indeed, the while street-level drug crime was seen as an emblematic New York City problem in the 1980s, nearly 40 years later, the US government has identified a growing problem with opioid abuse across most major cities in the United States.
The location shift gives audiences a glimpse of part of the Marvel Universe, and of America, that is seen on screen far less often than the mythical realms of Asgard or the sci-fi cities of Xander Prime, let alone the over-exposed metropolises of New York and LA. The move also gives “Cloak and Dagger’s” story its own space, far from the clutter and the clamor of the multitudes of superheroes already established across the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Not that connections to this universe will be totally shunned; such links will almost undoubtedly play a major part in the series, a point underlined in the show’s first trailer through the neon billboard for Roxxon, the giant multinational energy corporation that stands as shorthand for the amorality of corporate greed across the Marvel Universe, Cinematic or otherwise.
Interconnectedness has long been a key hallmark of the Marvel Comics Universe. It’s been baked-in since its very beginnings in the 1960s, with heroes regularly often “crossing-over” into each other’s territory. Spider-Man contacting the Fantastic Four in search of a job, Reed and Sue’s wedding, not to mention all the fights and misunderstandings. Crossovers large and small all played an integral role in building a larger coherent shared superhero universe.
This philosophy-cum-promotional tactic has also served as a foundation of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which started with a small number of linked superhero “origin” films that eventually moved on to the massive crossover/team-up that was the first “Avengers” movie. Jeph Loeb, Marvel Executive VP, Head of Television probably sums up the approach best in his oft repeated phrase: “It’s all connected.”
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