"What if the Marvel Entertainment Monolith never happened?" That alternate historical premise might sound insane to you if you were born after the turn of the millennium. But here’s two things you Post-9/11 Babies may not know: “Y2K" was a big weird panic that’s funny in hindsight, and Iron Man used to be a niche unknown thing. Within the past 11 years, random comics characters like Captain America and a raccoon with a gun went from minor doodles to global megastars. And on this episode of The Cracked Podcast, Alex Schmidt is joined by two full-on comics experts (Cracked’s own Cyriaque Lamar and comedy’s own Joey Clift) for a look back at how the dominant entertainment property of the 2010s sprang from one low-level Marvel employee and a whole bunch of lucky breaks. Discover the handful of left-field casting decisions, little kid focus groups, and Samuel L. Jackson dogged obsessions that sent billions of dollars flying in whole new directions and changed your past decade of moviegoing.

Footnotes: https://www.cracked.com/podcast/12-shockingly-important-near-misses-marvel-movie-history