Make Way for Hulu’s ‘Hit-Monkey’

M.O.D.O.K was just the beginning! This November, Hulu is continuing to crank out the epic Marvel animated shows, with its latest ambitious adaptation of Marvel’s Hit-Monkey!

For those of you unfamiliar, Hit-Monkey in the comics was created by writer Daniel Way and artist Dalibor Talajić. He was a Japanese snow monkey that was part of a troop of other Japanese macaques, who discover a dying assassin in the snow one day. Though the other monkeys take in the assassin and nurse him to health, Hit-Monkey remains suspicious of him, and starts spying on him. Through his observations, he learns how to fight and kill like the assassin does. Angered over the group nursing the assassin back to health, Hit-Monkey fights his troop, and gets exiled because of his violent ways. However, the assassin’s past catches up to him, and soon he and Hit-Monkey’s entire troop are murdered by a group of armed men who come after him. Hit-Monkey grabs one of the men’s guns and kills all of them in retaliation for his fallen troop. And becomes an unassuming assassin himself from that day on.

Unlike MODOK, the series looks to be a more serious (and probably more faithful) adaptation of the character’s origins, including the original one-shot comic book by Way and Talajić. It’s also using more of an anime style rather than stop-motion. Here’s the teaser:

The summary provided for the series by Hulu is the following:

After a Japanese snow monkey’s tribe is slaughtered, he joins forces with the ghost of an American assassin and together, they begin killing their way through the Yakuza underworld.

To be perfectly honest, it does look like an entertaining enough series. And to their credit there’s some good Asian representation in the cast, which includes Olivia Munn, George Takei, and Ally Maki. While non-Asian, Ted Lasso himself, Jason Sudeikis, voices Caucasian character Bryce, the assassin that is saved by Hit-Monkey’s troop.

However, unfortunately, we do have another story following the “[insert assassin character] goes to Japan to kill a bunch of Asian people” trope sort of going for this, where the bad guys are seemingly all Asian people. Granted it’s a monkey this time doing the killing instead of Mary-Elizabeth Winstead, but still. Not my favorite trope in entertainment, honestly. Can we maybe not portray all the Asian characters as evil mobsters that deserve to die? This could have easily been a “Hit-Monkey teams up with Deadpool in New York” series, but I guess we’re doing Yakuza killing instead because we have to.

I haven’t seen the show so I can’t tell you whether or not this is going to be offensive, or if it’ll just be enjoyable. Could be both. But it’s potentially something we may need to keep our eyes on given the subject matter of the story they’re trying to tell here. We’ll see. But until then color me skeptical.

Hit-Monkey arrives on Hulu on November 17.