Doctor Strange is about to become the focal point in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. After playing a key role in the record-breaking Spider-Man: No Way Home, the master of the mystic arts will take center stage in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. The movie promises to change Strange and the MCU itself while also introducing key characters like the Illuminati and America Chavez.

Doctor Strange's moment in the sun is a long time coming, and not just because he was created by Steve Ditko and Stan Lee in 1963. Strange was among the handful of Marvel Comics characters who made their live-action debut long before the MCU was a gleam in Kevin Feige's eye, in his case, in a live-action drama on network television. Unlike his Defenders teammate The Hulk, Doctor Strange's first attempt to go mainstream didn't take, despite Lee's best efforts.

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By the time The Incredible Hulk television series debuted on CBS in 1977, Stan Lee was established in his role as Marvel Comics' media pitchman. That eventually paid off in his dual roles as an executive producer on all of Marvel's movie adaptations, not to mention all those cameos. Before it did, Lee had to contend with years of compromised Hollywood adaptations of his co-creations.

Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno in The Incredible Hulk TV series

The Incredible Hulk was the biggest success story of the early attempts to adapt Marvel characters to live-action. Running for five seasons, The Hulk TV series was a legitimate hit with the wide, general audience that was network TV viewership in the '70s. While it had a lack of fidelity to the comics that would make modern MCU fans cringe, it was a triumph for comics adaptations.

Other attempts to create Marvel adaptations for CBS were not as fruitful. While Marvel's flagship character's sole live-action series drew strong ratings, The Amazing Spider-Man was canceled by CBS after 13 sporadically aired episodes. Lee called the process of adapting Spider-Man "a total nightmare" in a 1985 Comics Feature interview.

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Lee had a better time working on Doctor Strange, which attempted to follow the established practice of introducing a Marvel hero with a movie-length pilot episode. Lee served as a consultant on the project, and it wasn't a vanity title. Lee said in his Comics Feature interview that Strange was the TV project he had the best experience working on, likely because it allowed him "the most input" during its creative process.

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Lee's enthusiasm for Doctor Strange's TV debut was not contagious. The show bombed in the ratings, ending Strange's hopes of going to series. While Lee's point that it had to compete with the cultural phenomenon that was Roots is well taken, the pilot had problems that would have hampered it no matter what its competition was.

While it had a significant special effects budget for the time and medium it appeared in, Doctor Strange wasn't able to capture the biggest draw of its source material. The mindboggling visuals artists like Ditko and Gene Colan created in Strange's comics couldn't be replicated on television in 1978. It took until 2016 for Marvel Studios to do the character justice on the big screen.

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It also didn't help that the movie failed to do much with its 93-minute runtime to hook viewers. Retro reviews have called Strange out for feeling more like a medical procedural than a superhero story. Peter Hooten's Strange has been criticized for being "barely there" and a sidekick in his own show, which doesn't make a strong case for following his continued adventures. Even the legendary Jessica Walter, playing sorceress Morgan le Fay, could only do so much with what she was given.

Despite that, it's hard to argue that Doctor Strange's failed attempt at a TV movie wasn't ahead of its time. The general public simply wasn't ready for something as, for lack of a better word, strange as the adventures of Marvel's premiere mystic. It would take decades for "normies" to take an interest in Strange and other powerful comic book mages like Wanda Maximoff. In the end, TV's Strange hobbled so that his cinematic descendant could eventually run.

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