Every Marvel Cartoon On Disney+ Ranked Worst To Best

Disney+ launched with a staggering amount of content, but for superhero fans, the real draw came from the surprisingly deep archives of Marvel programming. Sure, having all the MCU films was nice, but we've all seen those a dozen times. Getting the chance to dig through almost every animated series that the House of Ideas has ever produced, though? That's the most exciting thing you can offer an obsessive Marvel fan.

The completists out there are going to watch it all eventually, but for those of you who don't want to sit through 40 years worth of Marvel cartoons, we've done the work for you to determine what's actually worth your time. From the dregs of the Avengers' battle armor to  Spider-Man's bizarrely fascinating trip to Counter-Earth and all the adamantium claws you can handle, here's every single Marvel cartoon on Disney+ ranked from worst to best. 

The 1981 Spider-Man cartoon is in a weird sort of limbo when it comes to its place in Spidey's small-screen legacy. It doesn't have the goofy meme potential (or kickass theme song that's still being used today) of the 1967 Spider-Man cartoon, and it doesn't have the high energy and weird complexities of the 1994 show. It's not even the most enjoyable cartoon with the word "Spider-Man" in the title that was on TV in 1981. 

None of that really makes it bad (it's fine). but it certainly doesn't help that there are five other Spider-Man shows available on Disney+ right now that are more fun to watch, with three more they could potentially add in the future that, bare minimum, would be a little more interesting. Still, if you've managed to get through every other Spidey cartoon on there and still haven't satisfied your craving, you could do worse than to sit down with the Dr. Doom episodes, or the one where Spider-Man has to fight a rodeo. Then again, if you watch 130 hours of Spider-Man cartoons and still want more, maybe just... try something else? They've got Star Wars on there, that's pretty good. 

You probably already know this, but the '90s X-Men cartoon was, to put it mildly, massively popular. It was so huge, in fact, that two years after it came out, there was a cartoon devoted to almost every other corner of the Marvel Universe, too, with what you could very accurately describe as varying degrees of success.

The most variable: 1994's Fantastic Four. As one half of the Marvel Action Hour, a block with Iron Man that was hosted by Stan Lee, the show was devoted largely to pretty strict adaptations of the Lee/Kirby classics that formed the foundation of the Marvel Universe in the '60s, and featured guest appearances from Daredevil, Black Panther, and more. Unfortunately, having some of the best source material in comics to work with didn't mean that the show itself was actually very good. Unlike its contemporaries, it feels like a throwback, with plots and voice acting that seem like they're straight out of the early '80s and Masters of the Universe — a show that was itself partly inspired by Kirby's work.

If it had aired ten years earlier, FF '94 would've blown everything else away, but in the mid-'90s, well, even the people at Marvel Comics didn't like it. In Fantastic Four #396, from January of 1995, Tom DeFalco and Paul Ryan gave comics readers a scene in which Ant-Man watched an episode of the "crummy" new FF cartoon and told the Thing "forget about being attacked by your old super-villains — you'll be destroyed by the ratings!" Ouch.

It might be difficult to believe when you're looking back from an era when Tony Stark was essentially the main character in a franchise that spread across 23 blockbuster films, but back in the '90s, calling Iron Man a cornerstone of Marvel's B-list would've been pretty charitable. With that in mind, it might be a little surprising that he was the one — and not, say, Thor or Captain America — who got to join Spider-Man, the X-Men, and the Fantastic Four on TV. Then again, there has never been a superhero who was easier to slide right into a toy line built around highly specific suits of armor, and since selling toys was what this show was pretty clearly meant to do, maybe it's not that much of a shocker.

It's easy to assume that a sprawling action figure line was also the reason this show had such a huge cast. TV Tony was joined by an entire team based on a seldom-remembered comic book spinoff called Force Works, including War Machine, Spider-Woman, Hawkeye, the Scarlet Witch, and Century, who might hold the distinction of being the most obscure Marvel character to ever have a major role on a TV show. Regardless of the intent, the result was a show that might not be great, but is enjoyably weird. Seriously, this is a cartoon where one of the major recurring villains is MODOK, the Mental Organism Designed Only for Killing, who at one point is pushed around in a baby carriage as part of a disguise. Great? No. Worth watching? Absolutely.

It's also worth noting that Iron Man had a pretty incredible roster of voice acting talent. MODOK was played by Jim Cummings, likely best known as Winnie the Pooh, Spider-Woman was played in the second season by Mass Effect's Commander Shepard herself, Jennifer Hale, and James Avery added War Machine to his acting resume right next to Shredder and Uncle Phil from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. 

Picture, for a moment, the office of a network executive trying to decide what kind of cartoons they should be putting on TV for the next year. Someone walks in and says "Hey, there's an Iron Man movie coming out, so we should probably do something to capitalize that." The exec says "Iron Man? Is he popular with kids?" and the guy pitching the show nervously tugs his collar and says "Uh, not really, no, because this is 2008." "Fine," says the exec, "we'll do an Iron Man cartoon, but figure out some way to make him more appealing to kids. You have one hour." 

We don't know if that was the conversation that led to the creation of Iron Man: Armored Adventures, but we do know that Armored Adventures is exactly the show that would result from it. The big twist to get the kids into it is that instead of being an adult billionaire weapons manufacturer trying to atone for the sins of his past, this Tony Stark is a cool teen! As you may already know, that's an idea that went notoriously bad when they tried it in the comics about a decade earlier, and takes away Tony's entire established character arc while making him a rich kid who literally asks for more homework in the pilot. You know, just what kids like.  

All right, first things first: Spider-Man Unlimited is not a "good" show in the traditional sense. It's actually pretty bad in most respects, including some janky animation, subpar costume designs, and a premise that throws out most of the things people actually like about Spider-Man. It is also a fascinatingly bizarre piece of Spider-Man history that nobody ever really talks about, and you should absolutely watch it, at least for a few episodes.

The whole thing happened because Saban wasn't allowed to use any of the traditional Spider-Man origin stuff for their new show, since the Sam Raimi Spider-Man movie was already in production and Marvel didn't want to saturate the market on radioactive spiders and dead Uncles Ben. With that in mind, they instead went with a series that was a kinda-sorta-not-really sequel to the recently ended '94 Spidey cartoon, but with a sci-fi twist. See if you can follow this beautiful madness: When astronaut werewolf John Jameson's space shuttle gets a few unexpected stowaways, Peter Parker winds up chasing Venom and Carnage to a parallel Earth full of human/animal hybrids created by the High Evolutionary. To give him an edge on this strange Newer York, he steals a high-tech suit made of nano-machines that give him a Sailor Moon-style transformation sequence, and joins an underground resistance to free humanity from the domination of the animal hybrids. 

It is completely bananas, and probably won't surprise you to learn that it was canceled, with good reason, after a single 13-episode season. If you go into it expecting less of a good show and more of an overwhelmingly strange take on Spider-Man, however, you'll at least have some fun with how unbelievably weird it is.

If you're going to watch any of the Marvel cartoons that came out following the success of X-Men, it should almost certainly be Incredible Hulk. Just make sure you stop after the first 13 episodes.

More than any of the other Marvel shows, Hulk succeeds in the same way that X-Men did. Rather than stripping things back and simplifying them for its younger audience, it dove (gigantic green) headfirst into the more complicated parts of the Hulk's continuity that made him so compelling to readers. The multiple Hulks lurking in Bruce Banner's psyche, the enmity that Banner felt for his alter ego, and Thunderbolt Ross' insane, Ahab-esque pursuit of the Hulk were all elements of the show. It was also much darker and more violent than its contemporaries, something that producer Dick Sebast chalked up to the Hulk's monstrous power requiring the show to pit him against equally powerful monsters or giant robots, something network censors were a lot more tolerant of than violence against normal, non-irradiated humans. 

And then came season 2, and a shift in creators demanded by network execs that, according to Sebast, "had no feeling for what the Hulk was about or what was most important to an action-adventure show in general, or to Marvel fans in particular." He's not wrong. It's a shame, given how good the first season is — especially by 1996 standards — but the dramatic drop in quality makes a full half of the series a pretty tough watch.

There are a lot of Spider-Man cartoons out there, which makes it tough for a new one to figure out an angle that hasn't been done before. Ultimate Spider-Man tried to carve out a niche by doing what the MCU would eventually do and that the comic of the same title had done before: making Peter Parker a sort of hero-in-training working with S.H.I.E.L.D., and eventually giving him his own team of teenage heroes to pal around with. It's a solid idea that leads to some really good stuff, especially in the later seasons where they're pulling in elements like Agent Venom and doing a neat little TV version of Spider-Verse, but it doesn't always stick the landing. 

Honestly, your enjoyment of this one is going to depend quite a bit on your tolerance for the cutaway gags and anime-style Chibi-Spidey fourth-wall breaks. If you can find the fun in those, there's a solid Spidey series here that frequently feels like a classic Marvel Team-Up.

Marvel Rising doesn't really fit the definition that we've laid out for the rest of this list, since it's not actually a TV show like the others. Instead, it's a series of two-minute shorts and a full-length movie. Average it out, though, and it's close enough to count.

Besides, the format matters less here than the quality, and Marvel Rising has plenty of that. WIth a focus on newer characters like Ms. Marvel and cult favorites like Squirrel Girl and America Chavez, it feels fresh in a way that a sixth Spider-Man show just wouldn't. Plus, it's not afraid to go big; the movie starts out with standard-issue high school heroics and winds up in space with the characters palling around with a teleporting dog. The word that best describes it is "refreshing," and if you're looking for something that's not only good, but also doesn't feel like the same old show and focuses on the heroes who are defining this generation of Marvel Comics, it's the one to watch.

For a certain generation of fans, the '90s X-Men cartoon is probably the most well-remembered Marvel animated series of all time, and it's unquestionably the most influential. With a run that lasted for five seasons of shows that combined classic X-Men stories like the Dark Phoenix Saga with the over-the-top '90s aesthetic inspired by Jim Lee, this series set the tone for the next decade of Marvel animation and hooked countless kids on the superheroic soap opera of the mutant heroes who protected a world that hated and feared them. Also, as every single mention of this show on the internet is contractually obligated to point out, it had a killer theme song. 

As much as we all love this show, however, it's far from flawless. For one thing, it's distinctly just... weird. Adapting classic X-Men stories with a different lineup — usually substituting Rogue, Gambit, and Jubilee for Colossus, Nightcrawler, and Kitty Pryde — led to some bizarre plot holes. The show's adherence to strict Standards & Practices rules meant that it's yet another show where nobody could throw a punch, including Wolverine, a guy whose entire deal is that he has super-sharp knives on his fists. Even worse, it suffers by comparison to its contemporaries. X-Men debuted a month after Batman: The Animated Series, on the same network, and while BTAS still looks revolutionary, X-Men seems very much like a product of its time. 

So yeah, it's a little bit of a mess, but you know what? That's what makes it so fun to watch. Well, that and the voice acting that, even when it's bad, is somehow even better than good. In a time when the X-Men were on everything from comics that were selling millions of copies to canned pasta, this was the version of the team that defined the era. 

One of the problems of being at Peak Television is that it's really easy to miss stuff, especially when there's a whole lot of other media covering the same ground. With that in mind: hey, did you know there was a Guardians of the Galaxy cartoon that had like 77 episodes? And did you know that it's actually really good?

Part of it just boils down to the novelty at play, which comes through even though it's following pretty directly in the footsteps of the GotG movies, right down to a classic rock soundtrack that's doing the good work of getting children into Thin Lizzy. After all, there have been a lot more shows about Spider-Man fighting the Green Goblin than there have been about, say, Drax the Destroyer wrestling the Champion of the Universe or the messianic cult surrounding Adam Warlock. Even beyond that, though, it's got a ton of fun action centered on the Guardians pretty much wandering around the galaxy getting into fun, kid-friendly hijinx like being possessed by a brain-eating symbiote or journeying through the land of the dead. 

A lot of Marvel cartoons take inspiration from the comics. Not many actually improve on them. Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes is one of those rare few.

Like the New Avengers storyline from 2005, Earth's Mightiest Heroes opens up with a mass supervillain breakout. Like Secret Invasion, it involves a reveal that superheroes have been replaced by shape-shifting aliens bent on conquering the world. Like The Kree/Skrull War, it features... well, a Kree/Skrull war. All of those plots and more were lifted directly from the comics, but those in particular are way more fun to see on the show, for the simple reason that they're done really well. There's stylish animation, compelling characters, and ongoing plots that introduce major stakes and pay them off perfectly. 

If you really want to know how good EMH is, consider this: it has what may well be the single worst theme song of any show on Disney+ — which could put it in the running for the worst theme song of all time, period — and it's still worth sitting through it 52 times to get to the good stuff.