Welcome to Comic Book Legends Revealed! This is the seven hundred and twenty-second installment where we examine comic book legends and whether they are true or false.

Click here for Part 1 of this week's legends. Click here for Part 2 of this week's legends.

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COMIC LEGEND:

Carol Danvers was almost on the X-Men in a cartoon series in the 1980s

STATUS:

True

Famously, Ms. Marvel showed up in the X-Men Animated Series in the 1990s, with her back story and how she was connected to Rogue (former CBR writer, Brett White, wrote a great article about this episode on Decider the other day).

That episode was Carol Danvers' cartoon debut. However, it was almost beaten by a cartoon from a decade earlier, a cartoon where Carol would have been a member of the X-Men!

In the third season of Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, the heroes team up with the X-Men (who had made a handful of appearances before this point due to Iceman and Firestar being former members of the team in this cartoon continuity) in "The X-Men Adventure"...

The episode was intended to be serve as a backdoor pilot for a possible X-Men cartoon series in 1983 (or whatever, 1984, I guess, you know what I mean, some time after that episode aired). That did not happen, but had it gone through, the plans were to also add Videoman, a character who had appeared in a previous episode of Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends to the team...

as well as Carol, who would be called Lady Lightning, presumably because of the lightning bolt on her costume at the time.

Comics Scene #11, from 1983, explained, “The proposed X-MEN show from Marvel almost made NBC’s schedule and would have featured Storm, Colossus, Nightcrawler, Cyclops, Ariel, Lady Lightning (an animated version of Ms. Marvel which has been kicking around for years), Thunderbird (back from the dead and able to change into any animal-form) and Videoman (???). Also the action would have them as students at Professor X’s high school. The show was passed over in favor of more Smurf-like shows."

Oh man, can you even imagine what Carol Danvers' comic book career would have been like if she had debuted on a network cartoon series as Lady Lightning? Obviously she would have been turned into Lady Lightning in the comics, as well. Would she ever have become Captain Marvel? Fascinating stuff.


Check out my latest Movie Legends Revealed - Did Brie Larson Really Say That Captain Marvel "Wasn't Made For" Captain Marvel?


OK, that's it for this week!

Thanks to the Grand Comics Database for this week's covers! And thanks to Brandon Hanvey for the Comic Book Legends Revealed logo, which I don't even actually use on the CBR editions of this column, but I do use them when I collect them all on legendsrevealed.com!

Feel free (heck, I implore you!) to write in with your suggestions for future installments! My e-mail address is cronb01@aol.com. And my Twitter feed is http://twitter.com/brian_cronin, so you can ask me legends there, as well!

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batshark

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Here's my book of Comic Book Legends (130 legends. -- half of them are re-worked classic legends I've featured on the blog and half of them are legends never published on the blog!).

The cover is by artist Mickey Duzyj. He did a great job on it...

If you'd like to order it, you can use the following code if you'd like to send me a bit of a referral fee...

Was Superman a Spy?: And Other Comic Book Legends Revealed

See you all next week!