Membership:
"Sizzle," "Smash", "Streak,"
"Swoop" THE ALIENS
Membership:
"Sizzle," "Smash", "Streak,"
"Swoop"
Purpose: Unrevealed (speculatively: to protect the innocent while trying to find a way to return to the stars)
Aliases: None
Affiliations: "Skipper"
Enemies: "Dexter," "Sinister", "Snoopy"
Base of Operations: Unrevealed
First Appearance: Comics Feature#33 (January-February 1985)
History:
(Comics Feature#33) -
(speculation/extrapolation from concept art) After crashing their
spaceship on Earth, a group of stranded aliens posed as a team of
athletes while also acting as superheroes. They struggled to keep their
secret from a nosy female reporter, and fought a
cybernetically-augmented human scientist and his equally sinister cat.
Comments:
Created by unspecified members of the Marvel
Productions staff, which included Stan Lee, Scott Shaw, Larry Houston,
Will Meugniot, Bob Richardson, Dick Robbins and Bryce Malek. Stan was
the creative director and chief pitch man, so it's very likely he was
part of the development, if not the originator of the concept.
"In the summer of 1980, Marvel
Entertainment Group President James E. Galton and Marvel Comics
Publisher Stan Lee,...traveled west from their New York corporate
headquarters to establish an animation studio in Los Angeles. In
conjunction with the Emmy and Oscar-award winning animator David H.
Depatie and his longtime production associate Lee Gunther, Galton and
Lee formed Marvel Productions, Ltd.... The primary reason why Lee and
Galton wanted to start a production company was that they had been
repeatedly disappointed with the ways in which other producers had
portrayed the Marvel Comics characters in cartoons, live-action TV and
feature films, and they felt they could do a more accurate job of
bringing their characters to the large and small screen." - Robert
Strauss, Comics Feature#33
If the idea of Marvel setting up a Marvel
studio to make movies around their characters so they could do a more
better and (generally) more faithful versions of them sounds familiar,
then it should, because that's basically the story of how we've ended up
with the MCU. Naturally, Stan Lee had the idea decades earlier, though
with far more mixed results, not least because while they developed
ideas, they were then still trying to get other studios to buy them and
pay to turn the ideas into finished products. They had numerous
live-action movies in early stages of development - Captain America,
Doctor Strange, Fantastic Four, Roger Corman's Spider-Man and X-Men are
mentioned in Strauss' article in Comics Feature - but the only one
mentioned that actually made it to the screen during the lifetime of
Marvel Productions was...Howard the Duck. They also got ABC sold on a
live-action Daredevil series to the point where a pilot script was
completed, but it was in animation that they had the most success, both
with Marvel characters (1981's Spider-Man, Spider-Man and His Amazing
Friends, 1982's Incredible Hulk, and later Pryde of the X-Men) and
developing cartoons on behalf of others (Dungeons and Dragons, G.I. Joe,
Transformers, etc.). However, more successful doesn't mean completely
successful, and there were still a lot of ideas that never made it
beyond the development stage. There's not a ton of information available
on most of these, but the article in Comics Feature#33 did at least
provide concept art for a few, and snippets have emerged over the years
from those who were involved in the development stage.
The Aliens are an example of these. Afaik,
literally all we know about them comes from the single image used on
this page. The history above is a best guesstimate/extrapolation from
the four panels that ran under the main team image, and the character
names are all totally unofficial placeholders I've used to make it
easier to talk about the characters, rather than constantly describing
them. If we ever get more detailed information about the characters, in
particular their names, the placeholders will be replaced by the actual
names.
Profile by Loki.
CLARIFICATIONS:
The Aliens has no known connections to:
One of the Aliens, "Sizzle" could fire bolts of energy, perhaps electrical, from his hands. --Comics Feature#33
|
One of the Aliens, "Smash" looked like he was superhumanly strong. --Comics Feature#33
|
One of the Aliens, "Streak" seemed to be able to run at superhuman speeds. --Comics Feature#33
|
One of the Aliens, "Swoop" could fly. --Comics Feature#33
|
"Skipper" was the coach to the Aliens' human identities. They seemed to frustrate him, and he probably didn't know their true nature. --Comics Feature#33
|
"Snoopy" was spying on the Aliens.
Comments: I'm assuming she was probably a reporter, but she might have been a spy, or just someone really nosy. --Comics Feature#33
|
"Sinister" was an evil scientist with an equally
evil cat, "Dexter."
Comments: The above history is purely speculation based on the single image of him. I'm guessing evil based on the disguise and angry expression. Being bald tends to be a visual shorthand in cartoons for being supersmart, plus the computer (?) behind him also suggests scientist. Additionally, while it is possible he was an extraterrestrial too, the fact that he and the cat both have identical types of bumps on their heads makes me think he was a scientist who experimented on increasing intellect via brain implants, testing the process first on his cat and then, when that succeeded, on himself. --Comics Feature#33
|
Appearances:
Comics Feature#33 (January-February
1985) - credits unknown
First Posted: 08/05/2021
Last updated: 08/05/2021
Any Additions/Corrections? please let me know.
Non-Marvel
Copyright
info
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Marvel Characters, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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