Digging up some old DVD’s I own at my house, I found a pair of interesting old forgotten ones with pictures of the Avengers on them… and I had a vague recollection of watching these at some point in the past, back in 2006 when the Marvel Cinematic Universe was still a burgeoning franchise, and the premiere Marvel Comics movies and cartoons were still Spider-Man and the X-Men. I knew of the Avengers, because even in 2006 I was already kind of a geek, but I merely knew about them from reputation, seeing them by proxy showing up every now and then in a Spider-Man comic or two, with the biggest exposure I had to them being the Ultimate Alliance game, and Hulk’s 2003 movie. Hell, Iron Man hasn’t even had his first debut yet, and in my head he was just a B-lister that showed up in Ultimate Alliance!Ultimate Avengers: The Movie 2006 Movie Download.
So yeah, they made this pair of movies, very loosely based on the very first Ultimates comic run (which I’ve never read), presumably to cash in on the hype as the live-action movies started to build up towards the huge Avengers movie in 2012. And… the first of the two, Ultimate Avengers… is an interesting one, following a lot of the same beats that its 2012 live-action counterpart would, but diverging wildly in others.
For one, Ultimate Avengers is honestly primarily a Captain America movie. All the other cast members have adequate screentime (other than Thor), but ultimately, it’s more of Captain America’s day in the limelight, and honestly, it’s something that is pretty smart, giving the movie a bit more of a focus on one of the characters as opposed to delving too deeply into the origins of everyone else. And it’s not like they aren’t explored, but without the benefit of them getting individual movies (or episodes) before, it’s smart not to over-extend the movie’s run by diverging our attention to seven different origin story.