So It’s Come To This: Squirrel Girl In A TV Show
In this day and age, it might be more difficult to name established superheroes who DON’T have their own TV shows or movies, either existing or in production. ABC has an Agents of SHIELD spinoff on the way called Inhumans, Hulu is putting together an adaption of Runaways and Fox has something called The Gifted. Freeform is working on a TV version of Cloak and Dagger, and today they announced another show based around Marvel’s New Warriors (who are a superhero gang of teenagers; think Teen Titans Ripoff). The channel wouldn’t confirm who was going to be on the team, save one member: Doreen Green, AKA Squirrel Girl.
I’m sure the show will have some other characters on it, but Freeform was right to get Squirrel Girl out of the way as quickly as possible, because that’s going to dominate conversation until the show comes out. Doreen was introduced to the Marvel Universe as a joke, but it was a joke that grew in popularity as the industry drifted further away from the “way too serious” 1990’s. Squirrel Girl’s power is the ability to talk to squirrels. That’s it. The punchline is that nobody has ever beaten her in battle, ever.
Squirrel Girl has gone up against some of the most feared enemies in the Marvel Universe, guys like Thanos and Galactus, and beaten them all using only squirrels. Spider-Man, Iron Man and Wolverine have all had their share of failures (the current Wolvie is dead, in fact), but Squirrel Girl never loses. Ever. The title of her ongoing comic, The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, pretty much advertises this.
It’s because of this that you can’t use Squirrel Girl in any “grim and gritty” storyline; it just wouldn’t work. There’s also the fact that she always wins, eliminating any possibility of suspense. We take it, then, that New Warriors will not be a serious superhero series…which would be fine with us; there are already plenty.
This isn’t Squirrel Girl’s first TV appearance. She first showed up last July on Disney XD’s Ultimate Spider Man: Web Warriors, taking Spidey out for a burrito run.