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what if iron man crashed into the grandmaster
Television

What If…Iron Man Crashed Into the Grandmaster? review S2 E4

Jeffrey Lyles , , , , , ,

After last night’s blending of the MCU and another revered franchise, What If…Iron Man Crashed Into the Grandmaster? sets the series back on track.
It’s not a complicated formula — change one aspect of a significant MCU film and explore the fallout.

In this case, it’s what happened if Iron Man didn’t return to Earth after teaming with the Avengers to defeat the Chitauri.

Instead of getting rescued by The Hulk, Tony Stark goes through another portal and lands on Sakar, home world of the Grandmaster (Jeff Goldblum).
This relatively minor change has huge repercussions.

First, Iron Man beats Thor in arriving on Sakar and being forced to participate in the gladiator arena. Mick Eingert does a mean Robert Downey Jr. impression getting the tone, cadence and sarcastic line delivery down just right. That helps provide a fairly authentic MCU experience with Iron Man as the featured character.

A nice amount of the Thor: Ragnarok stars return to provide welcome voice performances. Goldblum stands out because The Grandmaster is such a weirdly eccentric character. And just for kicks, this episode establishes the backstory of Gamora (Cynthia Kaye McWilliams) as a major adversary in a prelude to her appearance last season.

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This isn’t so much a Gamora origin story, which still wouldn’t be a bad idea for an episode, but it fleshes out her backstory somewhat.

Tony Stark in this kind of environment is a blast with his snark working overtime. This new planet and characters to interact with provides Iron Man the opportunities to dabble into some different tech and seek out new, albeit very familiar recruits.

Writer A.C. Bradley thankfully doesn’t just stick to Ragnarok’s gladiator battles going into other arena style combat competitions as well. This helps provide some massive, sprawling battles.

The animation was much smoother and better laid out than the previous episode likely aided by the mix of complementary colors.

What If Tony Stark Crashed Into the Grandmaster makes a few small series of events colossal ones for Iron Man while providing greater backstory, character moments and some big-time action sequences.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Photo Credit: Disney

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