Why do people pretend like Iron Man was this obscure character before the first MCU movie?
Like sure, it's true that the MCU movie was the first live-action appearance of Iron Man and the only non-comic book dedicated Iron Man media before the movie was that goofy 90's cartoon and that animated movie released like a year before the MCU movie, so he was obviously not as important Spider-Man, The Hulk, Fantastic Four, the X-Men or even Captain America.
But he did get a segment dedicated to him in the 60's Marvel ensemble cartoon, he was a character in three Spider-Man cartoons, two Fantastic Four Cartoons, one Hulk cartoon, one Avengers cartoon and several video games. Not to mention how Marvel was actually confident to pitch TV shows about him the 80's and the mere fact that dedicated media about him was in fact made. Technically speaking, IMAA and EMH were in development before the MCU movie got released. Not to mention the fact that the character was getting regular publication for like 46 years before the movie came out.
>Why do people pretend like Iron Man was this obscure character before the first MCU movie?
Because normalgays think it creates interesting headlines and conversation
With that said, would you consider him pre-MCU to be at least less popular than Thor and Captain America?
>would you consider him pre-MCU to be at least less popular than Thor and Captain America?
Not him but hell no. Back in the day Iron Man had a cartoon and toyline where he was leading his own team while Thor and Cap had no show at all. Outside of the US Thor was obscure and Captain America is outright disliked to this day.
>Not him but hell no. Back in the day Iron Man had a cartoon and toyline where he was leading his own team while Thor and Cap had no show at all.
Captain America was due to have one, but Marvel pulled the plug.
>Captain America is outright disliked to this day.
Citation needed, he's at least the second most popular Avenger.
Obscure, not in the slightest. Considered generally boring as frick and nowhere near as cool or memorable as dudes like Spider-Man or the X-men? Yes. Very yes. All told, he would not have been most people's first choice for the start of a new series of comic book based movies.
Depends what era, but if we're going right before he showed up in the MCU aka the 90s, I'd say below Cap, above Thor since Thor was going through a very rough period then.
They probably mean relative obscurity. He had cultural presence but it was nowhere on the level of Batman, Spider-Man, or even Wolverine
But that's the thing though. Sure he wasn't one of the peak top dogs of Superheroes but that's kind of like saying any movie that made less than one billion dollars is unheard of.
To the uninitiated who had never read any sort of comics and only know of those top dogs through cultural osmosis, not being on that level might as well be being unheard of.
I'd wager a normalgay from the 00s would be more familiar with the FF than Iron Man
>I'd wager a normalgay from the 00s would be more familiar with the FF than Iron Man
They both had cartoons in the 60s and again in the 90s, complete with their own lines of toys and merch. The 70s FF cartoon with Herbie is the only decade they got pushed outside of comics and Iron Man didn't, and nobody but comics nerds even remembered that cartoon by the 2000s, either for complaining about HERBIE or laughing at wooden gun memes.
Before they both got movies in the 2000s, there's no real reason any normie would be more aware of the FF than Iron Man. If they were 90s kids they literally couldn't be aware of one without being aware of the other, their cartoons were packaged together as the Marvel Action Hour.
The general public were only aware of who Iron-man was due to either that old Iron-man cartoon or Marvel vs. Capcom.
The new narrative pushed is that Iron Man was fricking despised because of civil war and that the MCU saved his reception through people introduced to him via the MCU
Which....yeah isn't bogus
He technically WAS obscure in the larger public consciousness. People knew Spider-Man, Batman, not Iron Man. Why do you revisionists pretend otherwise?
Its more about standards
Iron Man wasn't a D-Lister
Fricking El Muerto is, it's why EVERYONE made fun of Sony for scraping the bottom of the barrel
Simply not true.
People knwe Cap, Iron Man, Ant-Man, they just weren't popular. They were the "boring" characters that only nerds gave a frick about. Iron Man had a very popular cartoon in the 90s, it was just very popular with nerds.
he wasnt a D-lister or anything, but he wasnt famous either
he was a solid B-lister somewhere on par with ghost rider
just popular enough that people thought they could elevate him to A-tier but never on the same level as the hulk or the X-men
There's a distinction between popular and being well-known. For example, everyone knows who Superman is, but you'd be hard pressed to call him popular. It's the same with the Fantastic Four, where your average person on the street will probably be able to namedrop Mr Fantastic or Dr Doom, but not actually care much about them. But then you have characters like Spider-Man or Batman who are both well-known AND popular.
I'd say that pre-MCU Iron Man was popular, but not well-known, which meant that popularity was limited mostly to comic fans and comic-adjacent fans. He wasn't completely and utterly unknown, since he had good, solid representation in the cartoons and video games, but neither was he a superhero your average, non-comic-reading person would readily name. He's an A-lister in the Marvel universe, sure, and he was treated accordingly in comics and the various cartoons and games. But in those days that only translated to being a B-list character in terms of mainstream pop culture, maybe even C-list. So not obscure, but not widely well-known.
An Iron Man movie had been in development from around the same time as a lot of the earlier Marvel movies of the 2000s, people try to spin him not getting a movie until 2008 as him being "less important" when it was really more development problems, and the armor meaning Iron Man was a character you couldn't half-ass on a lower budget the way you could with some other characters. Tom Cruise and Nicholas Cage were both in line to play Tony at different points.
But the people arguing Iron Man was super-obscure or an irrelevant D-lister don't tend to be normies because actual normies who've never even seen a comic wouldn't be singling out Iron Man in that regard, until the movies started those people were unlikely to be aware of many Marvel characters other than Spider-Man and Hulk anyway.
The people who keep saying this tend to be older comics fans who think "Marvel is just X-Men and Spider-Man and none of the other characters matter". Usually the type of X-gay who actively resents those other characters even existing, and can't understand a reality in which Iron Man movies were more popular than X-Men movies.
You can usually tell these people started reading comics in a particular period of the early 90s by the way they insist Ghost Rider and the Punisher were always bigger than Iron Man or the other Avengers characters, something that was only really true for a few years of the 90s. Some of them also have a weird conviction that Fantastic Four was on a similar level to Spider-Man, Hulk, etc, when they were actually much closer to the level Iron Man was on back then.
TL:DR - it's just fans of other characters getting salty about Iron Man getting popular than they think he's "meant to be".
biggest thing holding him back has always been the candy apple. makes him like a candy ass, Gold is cool, gunmetal is cool, chrome is cool, black is cool. What's "iron" about a capitalist wearing pinko colors?