Welcome to the 12th Annual CSBG DC/Marvel Character Tournament!
Last year, we took off because the real world March Madness did not take place, so we felt it would be uncouth to do a tournament when the real tournament didn’t happen, so we’ve been doing the tournament for even longer than 12 years, but this is the first time we’ve done one since 2019!
This time around, you will be voting for your favorite DC or Marvel live action television series. Amusingly, this was also going to be the tournament last year, so the delay has changed the list dramatically, as WandaVision, Superman and Lois and Stargirl all debuted AFTER last March! Notably, though, I will not be including Falcon and Winter Soldier, as its FIRST episode only dropped TODAY, so that seems like too little to actually cover for something like this.
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The rankings were mostly determined by the use of IMDB user reviews, which turned out to be EERILY in line with the voters back in 2019 when we did superhero cartoons (the first time I can recall a tournament where all four #1 seeds made it to the Final Four). This time around, I made a few more changes, as it was just way too unreasonable for Batwoman, for instance, to be the lowest rated show out of ALL of the shows listed. So I made some judgment calls occasionally with the rankings.
Obviously, there have not actually been 64 television series about Marvel and DC characters just yet, so I had to make some adjustments in order to get to 64. The biggest adaptation, of course, was to add TV movies to the list, as well. The interesting thing, though, is that I would bet dollars to donuts that a number of these TV movies were intended as pilots for TV series that just never came out (which is why so many of the TV movies are awful, as they were so bad that they never got made into TV series and were thus only released as TV movies). How, then, do you differentiate them between other pilots for TV series that WEREN’T made? In that sense, I went with whether they were actually actively released as TV movies as opposed to either never airing (like the Agents of SHIELD spinoff, Most Wanted) or airing as part of a DVD release (like the Adventures of SuperPup). So don’t get me wrong, there really is not much difference between, say, the David E. Kelley Wonder Woman pilot and the Power Pack TV movie. They were both failed TV pilots, but the Power Pack one got a legit TV movie release while the Kelley Wonder Woman pilot did not.
Other tricky shows that were included on the list is Mutant X, which is technically a Marvel show, despite not actually having anything to do with Marvel Comics at all. Similarly, Supaidâman is a Japanese licensed production, but since it WAS an official license, I think it was fair enough to count it. Supaidâman made it over one of two tricky webseries, Agents of SHIELD: Slingshot, which was a webseries starring Slingshot of Agents of SHIELD, a similar release to the Cisco Chronicles from the Flash, little webisodes starring minor characters that weren’t BAD, but no one really watched them so I dropped them in favor of more prominent releases. Two of the odder, but still prominent, releases that made the list are Legends of the Superheroes, the shlocky pair of TV specials that were sort of a live action counterpart to the then-popular Super Friends animated series but also mostly an excuse to get Adam West and Burt Ward into their Batman and Robin costumes again. Similarly, one of the #16 seeds this year is It’s a Bird…It’s a Plane…it’s Superman!, a TV special version of the short-lived Broadway flop by Charles Strouse that somehow PREDATED Strouse’s biggest hit, Annie, which was ALSO based on a comic. Can you imagine having a big flop with a comic book musical and ten saying, “Hey, I know, let me do another musical based on a comic strip!” Also, Reb Brown starred in two Captain America TV movies, but I’m just counting them together. So when you get to the Captain America part of the voting, keep in mind that you’re voting for that TV movie series as a whole there. Other vaguely tricky shows include Nightman, which was an Ultraverse character who got his own series after Marvel purchased Malibu, Spidey Super Stories, which was a show within a show, as a feature of the Electric Company, the Wonder Woman Cathy Lee Crosby TV movie was obviously a pilot, of sorts, for the Lynda Carter Wonder Woman series, but it is so distinct that I have no problem counting it separately, and I guess Powerless, set in the DC Universe, is like Mutant X, a DC series without really coming from DC Comics.
1 Watchmen 2 Wandavision 3 Daredevil 4 Flash 5 Legion 6 Adventures of Superman 7 Batman 8 Wonder Woman 9 Incredible Hulk10 Lucifer 11 Jessica Jones 12 Punisher 13 Doom Patrol 14 Agent Carter 15 Human Target (2010) 16 iZombie 17 Black Lightning 18 Arrow 19 Stargirl 20 Pennyworth 21 Supergirl 22 Gotham 23 Superman and Lois 24 Preacher 25 Agents of SHIELD 26 Luke Cage 27 Smallville 28 Legends of Tomorrow 29 Batwoman 30 Runaways 31 Titans32 Cloak and Dagger 33 Lois and Clark 34 Constantine 35 Defenders 36 Swamp Thing (2019)37 The Gifted 38 Flash (1990)39 Krypton 40 Secrets of Isis 41 Human Target (1992)42 Shazam! 43 Iron Fist 44 Amazing Spider-Man 45 Swamp Thing (1990) 46 Powerless 47 Birds of Prey 48 Supaidâman49 Blade 50 Superboy51 Spidey Super Stories52 Helstrom 53 Nightman54 Mutant X 55 Doctor Strange 56 Inhumans57 Captain America58 Wonder Woman (Crosby) 59 Generation X60 Man-Thing 61 Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD 62 Legends of the Superheroes 63 Power Pack 64 It’s a Bird… It’s a Plane… It’s Superman!
Here is the bracket.
You can click here to get a full-sized image of the bracket. Is it amusing that I’ve been doing these things for 13 years and I’m still using the same bracket template from 2008? Sure, but hey, if you can find a better bracket template, feel free to send it to me.
The first two regions will be going up soon and then the next two regions will be tomorrow (and we’ll hit the Round of 32 on Sunday and Monday). Have fun!
Click here to vote in the first two regions.
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