Saturday, October 3, 2020

Recasting the Children of Thanos


When Gamora and Nebula appeared in 2014's Guardians of the Galaxy, I was blown away by the idea that Thanos adopted a bunch of aliens, trained them to be killers, and pitted them against each other until rivalries formed among them. I was excited to hear that four more of his "children" would appear in Infinity War - imagine my disappointment when they ended up just being generic CGI characters who don't even really have names. I've never done a fancast before, certainly not one for a movie that came out 2 years ago, but that's not going to stop me from fixing this mess.

Okay, let's get a few things out of the way. I am not going to be selecting new actors to portray the "characters" who appear in Infinity War.  There isn't a single thing I like about them. I'm also not going to try adapting pre-existing cosmic Marvel characters like Quasar.

Basically I'm going to be casting characters from the ground up based on what I love most about Gamora and Nebula: they're funky colors, they're badass ladies, and they stared in big tentpole scifi franchises that the average MCU fan grew up with. I'm not even going to name them. Let's go.


Best known for her role as Kaylee, the engineer and mechanic aboard the starship Serenity on Joss Whedon's Firefly, Jewel Staite is also had a brief role on the Nickelodeon cult series Space Cases and SyFy's Stargate Atlantis. Nerds love her. She also played a ship engineer on Space Cases and I've enver seen Stargate but I think she played a doctor? My point is she's overdo for a big action role. I'd love to see her go head to head with the Avengers.


The genderbent Starbuck was one of the breakout roles from the reimagined Battlestar Galactica and  Katie Sakkoff really killed it. I'd like to see her as the tank of the group. Like that big one with the hammer who fought Iron Man and then Wong portal'd his hand off. But make the hammer an goofy oversized one, like what Ramona fights with in the Scott Pilgrim movie.


Lana Lang has always just been an early love interest for Superman. Kristin Kreuk was basically there to keep Clark warm until Lois Lane showed up. I only watched the first two seasons of Smallville, but I always felt bad that all Lana ever did was generic teen show girl stuff. So I say make her an alien and have her try to kill the Hulk. Everybody wins in that situation.


I wasn't totally sold on this one. Lana Parrilla seemed a bit too old to stand next to the rest of Thanos's daughters. But that was mainly due to her role as the evil queen on Once Upon a Time where she played the mother of young Henry and the already adult Snow White. But then I looked it up and she's only a year older than Zoe Saldana. Anyway. While the others on this list were chosen for brute force and martial arts skills, Lana would be better suited for the magical role that Squidward alien played, getting into wizard duels with Doctor Strange or Scarlet Witch.

I really wanted to add others like Kristen Bell, Rose McIver, or Hayden Panettiere, but I wanted to avoid too many skinny white blond girls. Plus I was thinking a bit realistically and figured The Good Place and iZombie would've kept their stars too busy for a trip to the Marvel Universe. Oh well. Maybe next time.