1-1-1: Marvel Zombies

2025, 4 episodes - Disney+
Created by Brian Andrews and Zeb Wells

The What 100:In an alternate reality, a zombie plague has ravaged the earth. The survivors are few and the struggle grows increasingly dire. The zombies are not just mindless, hungering hordes, but being controlled by the Scarlet Witch. Despite seeking complete assimilation the witch has set her focus on Ms. Marvel Kamala Khan who seems to be more important than any other survivor, and not just because Kamala has the maguffin that may just cure the whole thing.

(1 Great) It's no secret that for many Avengers: Endgame was a definitive stopping point and that the MCU has largely been pointless excess since. The "Phase 4" expansion, introducing new characters across movies and television, and introducing new "grand arc" threads of the multiverse proved too much for not just much of the general audience, but also too much for Marvel Studios to replicate the success of the past.

But for all the wobbliness of Phases 4 and 5 (and the uncertainty of Phase 6) what has never failed the Marvel Cinematic Universe was great casting. Marvel Zombies, an animated series spinning out of an episode of the animated multiversal anthology What If?, puts a spotlight on all those great casting choices, starting with Iman Vellani, who has never been anything but spectacularly charming and delightful in the role of Kamala Khan. (Also, in recent years in the Marvel Comics, Ms. Marvel has been portrayed as one of the main survivors of many different possible apocalypses, so it's nice to see that into play here as well).

The series opens with Kamala, Hawkeye Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld), and Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne) finding food and resources while dodging regular zombies as well as "turned" superheroes. They discover a Pym-particles-shrunken unit that may just be Earth's last hope at salvation and they meet the Blade Knight (a Blade-Moon Knight hybrid, designed to be Mahershala Ali's Blade-that-never-happened, but voiced by Todd Williams) who helps them on their journey to try and find a rocket that will get them into space. Along the way they meet Russian heroes Yelena Belova and Red Guardian (Florence Pugh and David Harbour) as well as Shang-Chi(Simu Liu), his friend Katie (Awkwafina), Jimmy Woo (Randall Park) and the silent assassin Death Dealer. They hitch a ride on the floating prison, the Raft, operated as a survivor's community by Baron Zemo (Rama Vallury subbing in for Daniel Bruhl) and John Walker (Wyatt Russell). Eventually they meet up with Spider-Man (Hudson Thames, voice mimicking Tom Holland) and head-in-a-jar Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) and make their way to New Asgard seeking the assistance of Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson).

I don't usually write so much plot in a 1-1-1 review, but this is just a super-stuffed four 20-ish-minute episodes that really explore the post-Endgame MCU, but in a very different capacity. It's all built out of Phase 4 -- so no She-Hulk, no Fantastic Four, no Thunderbolts, no Red Hulk -- but just looking at that superstar voice cast just showcases how stacked Phase 4 really was, and that's not even talking about Zombie Namor, or the setpiece of zombie Captain Marvel fighting Ikaris from The Eternals in a seemingly endless battle. This is a butcher looking to use the whole cow.

(1 Good) Animated movies and tv often struggles with creating action sequences that truly pop, mainly because in animation nothing is real or tangible, and often the animators are limited by time and budget (and sometimes technology) into how much effort they can put into a sequence to give it some physical weight. As well, you can do anything in animation, and sometimes that limitlessness means that there's no reference point and creating something out of nothing can lead to messy sequences that move awkwardly or don't feel human enough. Marvel Zombies does struggle with these problems at times and also overcomes them other times. As such there's some wildly thrilling sequences of heroes facing incredibly overwhelming odds against them, swarms of zombies, regular and superpowered, that just spell doom before them.

If there was any doubt that this would be a "soft" show because it's MCU and the MCU is for kids...well, it's not so soft. It's tepidly gory, but there's still gore, and the oppressiveness of this nihilistic scenario was still enough to give Lady Kent nightmares after only one episode.

But at least once per episode I couldn't help but react out loud, either in appreciation or shock or surprise as to something happening on screen. The Pymed-up zombies in the Shang-Chi flashback were astounding, as was the Captain Marvel/Ikarus backdrop, and the Blade Knight is such a fabulous extension of both Blade and Moon Knight (F. Murray Abraham returns to voice Khonshu). This whole series really impressed me...

(1 Bad) ...Except I don't really understand what game Wanda was playing. I don't really understand why Kamala was so important to her. Kind of the whole build-up of the series was around this confrontation between Kamala and Wanda and I don't think I understood the purpose of it.

META: Zombies, the took a little break for a while, but with 28 Years Later and Marvel Zombies they're back in the spotlight again. Let's hope this doesn't spark another zombie trend though, because zombies get overexposed and derivative real quick. 

I read the original Marvel Zombies mini-series when that debuted 20 years ago, and it was a gross, fun, funny romp through a po-ap Marvel Universe. But then the powers that be at Marvel started milking that property on a regular basis and I don't think I followed along past a few issues of Marvel Zombies 2 in 2007 which were really bad.

This was super fun, but it could have been a movie.

[Poster talk... the ten Marvel Zombies posters all feels pretty drab to me. there are ones that are show-focused which center largely around Scarlet Witch as the queen of the dead, and there are the parody posters mimicking The Avengers, or Ant-Man or Age of Ultron posters with the undead, even though Cap and Iron Man and most of the others aren't in the series in any meaningful way. they avoid altogether promoting the show with any of the Phase 4 characters, which I guess reflects how the studio thinks the audience feels about those characters, which is too bad, because I think these are some of the best MCU characters and deserve to be celebrated. gimme a Kamala poster, a Kate Bishop poster, a Blade Knight poster, a poster spotlighting the zombie Namor attack...so much cool shit happens in this series with great characters, that it's a real shame they focus more on looking back on many of these posters)