I betragtning af det enorme omfang af Marvel-produktioner, der udkommer hvert år — både i biograferne og på Disney+ — kan det hurtigt blive overvældende, som om fans får serveret lidt for meget på én gang. "Marvel-træthed" er efterhånden et reelt fænomen, men måske tager vi det lidt for givet, for så sent som for et årti siden, mens filmene ganske vist var populære, var Marvels tv-side langt mindre kendt.
Bortset fra Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. og et par mindre spinoffs blev Marvels tidlige tv-projekter primært lavet til Netflix, som tog The Defenders-holdet og præsenterede en mere rå og mørk version af New York end den, der blev vist i biograffilmene. "Netflix lavede ikke showet. Marvel Television lavede showet." Men hvordan opstod det hele egentlig? Vi fik for nylig mulighed for at tale med den legendariske forfatter og tidligere chef for Marvel Television, Jeph Loeb, på San Diego Comic Con Málaga, hvor han forklarede, hvad der skete bag kulisserne.
"I remember saying that the movies look very red, white and blue. And I don't mean that in any kind of patriotic sense or American sense. I said, really, what I'm talking about is, is that Iron Man is red. Captain America is blue. And if you look at what New York looks like, it's a very shiny white light. The Avengers Tower was this white light and the streets were clean and everybody was walking around like it was the safest place on Earth, living in New York," begyndte Loeb.
"And I wanted to do a story that took place in Hell's Kitchen. And I said to everybody, take a look at the movies that were made in the early 1970s by Martin Scorsese, whether it was Taxi Driver or Billy Friedkin who did the French Connection. I said, they were shot in a part of New York that you didn't want to go into. And I said, when you look at the colour scheme on our shows, I want the blue to be so faded out that it sort of looks like steel and that the yellow is more like the amber on a taxi cab when the light headlights are coming around at night and that there's steam coming out of the street because we're in Hell's Kitchen. So Hell is below us. And that set a tone and it basically said, look, it doesn't mean we're not going to do jokes. It doesn't mean that we're not going to have that Marvel special feel to it. But we are going to be a little bit more violent and we are going to be a little bit more like the comics."
Loeb talte derefter om, hvordan Netflix kom ind i billedet og hjalp med at realisere drømmen om en mere jordnær og barsk Marvel-verden.
"And I'm very grateful to the people at Netflix. And I'm really super grateful to the upper management at Marvel who said, go ahead. Because the movie people looked at us like we were gum on their shoe," fortalte Loeb.
"And so my boss of the television division would say to me, 'just keep telling everybody it's all connected'. So that's what I did. It is all connected. These stories are all there. Now, is it ironic that five years after I left, that as though they're Indiana Jones and they found these stories that nobody ever thought of? When I was there, when they would say to us, 'we're never going to make these stories'. And now they're making the stories. Because at the end of the day, it's not about the stories. It's about the writing. It's about the actors. It's about having someone who believed in what it was that we were doing."
Loeb afsluttede med at fremhæve nogle af de folk, der hjalp Marvels Netflix-projekter med at nå de højder, de gjorde - heriblandt stjerner som Charlie Cox, Vincent D'Onofrio, Krysten Ritter, Mike Colter og Jon Bernthal, som alle enten allerede har debuteret i MCU's nyere tv-serier eller rygtes at gøre det i den kommende Daredevil: Born Again sæson 2. Loeb konkluderede: "They're still friends. And I still care about them enormously."
