Hulu kills M.O.D.O.K.
The streaming service did what so many rival supervillains could not, keeping Patton Oswalt's M.O.D.O.K. down for good
Tragic news in the supervillain community today, as Variety reports that M.O.D.O.K. has now been converted to M.O.D.O.F.G.C.B.H, i.e., the Mental Organism Designed Only For Getting Canceled By Hulu.
That’s right: The stop-motion animated series has been killed off at the streaming service after only a single season on the air, doing what so many rival supervillains, would-be Scientists Supreme, and time traveling duplicates or corporate shenanigans could not: Defeating M.O.D.O.K. for good.
The series, based on the oddball Marvel villain of the same name, was produced by Stoopid Buddy, the same studio behind stop-motion animated hit Robot Chicken on Adult Swim. The show starred Patton Oswalt as M.O.D.O.K., leader of the nefarious A.I.M., who has to balance his ambitions to be the world’s best supervillain with his desire to have a normal family life.
There were a few different things that elevated M.O.D.O.K. above typical animated superhero fare, really, the most prominent being that the people writing the show, including Oswalt, were clearly obsessive Marvel fans delighting in getting to cram as much comics weirdness as they could into every episode. (Nowhere else are we likely to get appearances from the likes of Hexus, The Living Corporation, or Angar The Screamer—the latter voiced by a game Bill Hader. We might get a version of Arcade and Murderworld somewhere down the line, depending on the fates of Marvel’s X-Men properties, but probably not one as gleefully weird as M.O.D.O.K.’s.)
It was also just aggressively inventive and funny, something demonstrated in an early clip that showed a battle between M.O.D.O.K. and A.I.M. rival Monica Rappaccini, which was essentially a good old fashioned “wizard’s duel” sequence, except with absurd stop-motion super-science in the place of magical spells.
Oswalt eulogized the series briefly today on Twitter, calling it “a great experience.”
The series co-starred Aimee Garcia, Ben Schwartz, Melissa Fumero, Wendi McLendon-Covey, Beck Bennett, Jon Daly, and Sam Richardson.