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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mel O&#039;Drama" data-source="post: 314316" data-attributes="member: 23">What If…? What If… The World Lost Its Mightiest Heroes?It’s difficult for me to be critical of this series because if the story fails I can fall back on enjoying the aesthetics. The Avengers, as presented here, look great. It’s interesting to see them almost reverse-engineered: they’re animated versions of real life actors playing comic book characters, and it feels as though it contains the best of both worlds. Seeing these still recognisably based on the actors but also in most cases as accurate visual representations of their comic book counterparts shows how right the films have got it. Natasha’s rarely looked better.The down side of this is that it does seem slightly jarring if an actor doesn’t look like their comic book character. An animated Bruce Banner modelled on Mark Ruffalo just looked odd to me. Ruffalo’s Bruce has simply never felt right, and this live action to comic version reinforced a key reason (though by no means the only one). It felt a bit wrong, too, to see Ruffalo’s iteration of Bruce retconned into scenes based on The Incredible Hulk. But glass half full, it’s also great to see Betty Ross return to the MCU thirteen years on. Even though Betty, like Bruce has been recast, acknowledgement that the character exists feels more meaningful off the back of watching Shang-Chi where I was pleased to see IH characters becoming more fully integrated into the MCU. Once again, Thunderbolt Ross returns. The “greatest hits” theme continues from the previous two episodes, with alternative views of scenes from several early MCU films (The Incredible Hulk; Iron Man 2; Thor) with comfortingly familiar settings. The Isabela’s Diner scene between Coulson and Nick Fury was a favourite. It was moody and atmospheric, and reminded me of The Consultant One-Shot (I’m not sure if it was meant to be the same diner, but given the time in which both were set I’d say there’s a good likelihood). The plot itself was fine, I suppose. It’s good to see “bad” Hank Pym as Yellowjacket given that character’s slightly chequered history. Regarding the motivation, if Hope joining S.H.I.E.L.D. was  mentioned earlier in the episode I missed it, so that aspect felt like a bit of a cheat. All the same I enjoyed reviewing the incidents from earlier in the episode and seeing how Hank had been behind them all.  Once again, a good number of MCU actors appear. A couple of recasts, but again they weren’t too jarring. Even though I was fairly sure Scarlett Johansen wasn’t voicing Natasha, the voice used here felt closer to how I’d imagined Natasha to sound when reading comics, so it was done well. </blockquote>

Verification: What month follows July?