The supervillain M.O.D.O.K. may not be as popular as Thanos, but he’s actually been around since 1967. Created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, M.O.D.O.K. is short for Mental Organism Designed Only for Killing. While the acronym sounds pretty scary, his appearance is anything but—I mean, it’s not likely you’ll cower in fear when you spot what’s essentially a floating head on a huge levitating chair (okay, so that does sound creepy). Because his presence doesn’t exactly strike as much fear into the hearts of many as Thanos’ or even Galactus’ does, it only makes sense for his TV show to be an animated comedy.
And what better way for his story to be told than through Patton Oswalt’s comedic genius?
Now, while it doesn’t seem likely that M.O.D.O.K. will be joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe any time soon, stranger things happened before. Right now though, what we do know is that the show is going to be a little bit of a satire for existing franchises. Oswalt and series co-creator Jordan Blum spoke at the New York Comic Con in October 2020, with Blum saying, “We were lucky because our show is its own animated world. It’s a satire of all the stuff that’s come before it – from the comics, the movies. So we pulled from everything. We took an attitude that was similar to Into the Spider-Verse or LEGO Batman where we’re like, ‘it all counts, let’s pull what we need for the stories, and then carve out our own little section with AIM and MODOK.’ And Marvel was great about giving us a lot of the toys.”
He also goes on to say, “Like Patton was saying, we have A-listers, D-listers, and people you would have to dig deep in the Marvel Handbook to even find existed. With all those characters, there’s so much comedy built into them and using them in these big sci-fi stories that are kind of grounded in these very human relationship stories.”
The story will revolve around the mundane everyday events of family life in the midst of running an evil organization, which is always hilarious—M.O.D.O.K.’s home life in the New Jersey suburbs hardly paints a serious picture. What’s even more exciting is that the show will supposedly incorporate X-Men characters here and there.
“I cannot believe the Marvel toybox stuff they let us play with. We pitched some characters, some even in the X-Universe, we were like ‘We don’t know if they’re gonna say yes to this,’ and they were like ‘Yeah, go ahead. Again, I don’t want to say who, but there were a couple Jordan and I were thinking ‘Oh, I don’t think they said yes to. Let’s write this but have backup because they’ll realize,’ but no, we got them,” says Oswalt.
That said, with its possible release date for early 2021, there’s still a lot to do—but right now, we do know that Aimee Garcia will be playing as M.O.D.O.K.’s wife, Jodie. Melissa Fumero co-stars as M.O.D.O.K. and Jodie’s daughter, Melissa, while Ben Schwartz plays M.O.D.O.K. and Jodie’s son, Lou.
