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Every Marvel Release in 1966

1966 had just one Marvel release, The Marvel Super Heroes (1966), about 7h 35m of viewing. Here’s where it fits.

Every release this year came from outside the MCU: The Marvel Super Heroes (1966).

Marvel in 1966

Television, not film, was where Marvel's heroes first found a regular home. The Marvel Super Heroes debuted in first-run syndication on September 5, 1966, produced by Grantray-Lawrence Animation. It was the first TV series based on Marvel characters, and each half hour was split into three seven-minute segments.

The animation was about as limited as it gets: artists xeroxed panels straight from the comics and moved them just enough to suggest action. What the show lacked in motion it made up for in lineup. Captain America, the Hulk, Iron Man, Thor and the Sub-Mariner each got their own segments, which means four of the founding names behind the MCU's first decade were on TV more than forty years before Iron Man. Namor took longer to land on the big screen, finally arriving in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever in 2022.

For MCU viewers, the fun is in spotting how early the familiar names showed up. Thunderbolt Ross and Rick Jones hound the Hulk, Jane Foster turns up in Thor's stories, Iron Man fights the Mandarin decades before Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings handed that title to Wenwu, and Hawkeye and the Scarlet Witch join Captain America in his Avengers episodes. The theme songs are the other reason people remember it: fans of a certain age can still sing “When Captain America throws his mighty shield.”

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