The Super Hero Squad Show Hulk Smash!   Starring (voice): Charlie Adler, Steven Blum, Dave Boat, Grey DeLisle, Alimi Ballard, Mikey Kelley, Tom Kenny and Stan Lee Clear Vision RRP: £12.99 MAR1051 Certificate: U Available 11 October 2010

Next up, from Clear Vision and the bottomless vault of Marvel, comes The Super Hero Squad Show - Volume 2 (in this instance named Hulk Smash!), the humorous animated series. This time there are five episodes on one disc, with a total running time of 1 hour 51 minutes. For anyone who missed my review of volume 1, the premise follows Iron Man, Wolverine, Thor, Hulk, Silver Surfer, Falcon and Reptil who protect Heroville from their S.H.I.E.L.D. carrier headquarters. Their primary goal is to recover the fragments of the all-powerful Infinity Sword, also sought by Doctor Doom and his cronies.

In Oh Brother!, Loki, Thor’s evil half brother starts a battle in Asgard as a distraction whilst he recovers a fragment of the sword; in From The Atom...It Rises!, a super criminal called Scorpio steals information on an atomic particle collider from Stark Industries, but who is he?; in Night in the Sanctorum, the Enchantress causes Falcon to crash the carrier, and the Squad are forced to look for somewhere else to spend the night; in This Forest Green, Doom uses a scientist’s shrinking ray to send his cronies on to the carrier to steal a fractal; in O, Captain My Captain, Wolverine leaves the Squad and joins Captain America’s team - only to find they do things more than a little differently.

Once you get used to the extremely unusual format of this show, and in particular an almost toytown visage to all proceedings, you soon realise that this is more than competently put together. In fact, the balance is very clever. The probable reason why Spider-Man is absent from The Super Hero Squad Show is that all the other characters wise-crack in a similar manner. The humour hits the mark far more often than it misses it, and the characters are very well realised, with Thor being vain and long-winded with his ancient speech (thees and thous), Hulk being a likeable but destructive big kid, and a perpetually brooding Wolverine. Night in Sanctorum is the best example of a perfect episode; very funny, with each hero showing his true character. This series has really grown on me.

8

Ty Power