Ben 10 is a show near and dear to my heart.
With humble beginnings on Cartoon Network in 2006, I watched the series premiere one night and have been hooked ever since.
The series was about an ordinary 10 year old boy who discovers an alien device called the omnitrix, that allows him to transform into ten different alien species.
Each with their own superpowers that he can use to fight crime.
It's had a complicated history since then, becoming a massive franchise and going through a lot of different iterations and reinventions.
But for now, let me go back to the very beginning and outline what made this show resonate with kids like me so much, and why I think it's one of the most enduring and successful superhero franchises to not bear the mark of Marvel and DC.
In short, I believe the answer is, Ben 10 is the best superhero that didn't come from comic books.
The show had everything it needed to be a perfect superhero story.
This series gave us as kids so much to get excited for back in the day.
Explosive stories, giant monsters, crazy worldbuilding and lore…
And of course, some of the most badass fight scenes for a kid's cartoon.
They really beat each other's asses in this show.
But it wasn't just violence and monsters, this show had a lot of heart and creativity that kids really respond to.
Starting with a really unique story that unfolds in an interesting way.
Season 1 had a really great origin arc, where our hero, Ben Tennyson, get his hands on some super powers during summer vacation, with his cousin and his Grandpa on a cross-country road trip.
Ben Tennyson is a brash, hot headed, overconfident kid with a bratty sense of humor.
But deep down, he's actually very noble and willing to heroically stand up for the little guy.
First chapter, when Ben faced the bullies of his school, really reminded me how kid Midoriya faced kid Bakugou.
His cousin Gwen is bookish, responsible and self-reliant.
And their conflicting personalities lead them to argue a lot, because… you know, that's what kids do.
Their banter always struck me as endearing, having grown up within a similar sibling relation, and it was nice seeing them eventually getting along.
Their Grandpa, Max Tennyson, is just a wholesome sweet guy that's intelligent, well traveled and likes nature.
He's got a real uncle Ben/Iroh feel for him, being the kind of parental figure that you'd never want to disappoint.
During a freak accident where a pod from space permanently attaches a piece of alien technology to his wrist.
'Holding the key to a power struggle so ancient, so vast, that is is beyond our feeble comprehension.'
Ben gets the ability to turn into various extraterrestrial monsters and causes chaos while being attacked by bad guys from earth and space.
It's on the theme song, you know how it goes.
Instantly it seems like Grandpa Max knows more than he's letting on, but the series let that simmer for a few episodes as it expands on its story.
With time we learned that the watch ended up on earth because it was being kept away from an alien warlord who looks oddly similar to the bad guy from Megas XRL (Cthulhu adjacent, but that was before Dagon), known as Vilgax.
He wants to use the device's power to take over the universe, but in chasing it he got a little messed up and couldn't retrieve it directly yet.
That gave Ben time to discover all 10 alien forms in the watch and stop some more low stakes super crime.
But when Vilgax finally steps in, he's a really imposing and badass villain.
And as overpowered Ben may have seemed at the time, he was still pretty outclassed against this tall angry squidward.
After a crazy season one finale, we discovered Grandpa Max's secret past as an alien hunting superhero of sorts that has protected earth with advanced weaponry for decades.
His organization, which reminded me a lot of the Man in Black, was codenamed 'The Plumbers'.
…
Because why not.
Back to Max, he was actually Vilgax's old nemesis and the two of them battled ages ago when Vilgax's fashion sense was a little more rocky horror picture show than his current attire.
I guess it was big at the time.
Grandpa Max's alien belt notches also apparently rival that of the great Captain Kirk or Commander Shepard.
Who would have thought?
A stand out feature of this show was the voice acting, for both the English and the Brazilian Portuguese versions.
I loved the voices for all the aliens, each classic alien had so much personality to its design and powers.
Every kid on the block wanted the Omnitrix for themselves and would argue about which alien transformation was the best one, or which one they wanted an action figure the most.
I remember my friend was more of a Heatblast kind of guy, but I was partial to XRL8.
Everyone would have their favorite and each one could be useful.
Even Ripjaws!
I never understood why the series insisted on trashing him as an inconvenient transformation to raise the stakes.
I guess Brainstorm got really lucky that the omnitrix provided a respiratory bracer for him.
Anyway, Ben's powers were so interesting because he basically had every super power, granted with some limitations for each transformation to balance things out.
Much like any good superhero, Ben even had a built-in weakness to keep things interesting.
His watch had a timer on it that runs out after he's been transformed for 10 minutes.
Well, 10 minutes in canon, but for the sake of compressing time for a 22 minute cartoon, it actually runs on the same timetable as how long it takes Spider-Man to run out of webs which is exactly as long as writers want until the precise moment when it's most inconvenient and dramatically exciting.
Ben also had a habit of tampering with the thing because he was irresponsible and kind of a Bart Simpson type, so it was a running gag that he was in possession of the most dangerous technology in the universe and sometimes he just smashes it against the wall or jams a screwdriver into it or uses it to break walnuts or whatever, causing the watch to work improperly by not turning into the alien he selected.
Or just glitch out and not let him change back to a human for an extended period of time.
That gives a nice bit of added tension because sometimes we think one guy is the obvious solution to a problem, only for the watch to give him another, forcing him to figure out how to make due with that instead.
Showing how resourceful he could be in a pinch.
And for all his trash talk, he's actually pretty smart.
He's a cool character once you look past all his surface level attitude problems.
Along the way, his constant button smashing allows him to unlock additional aliens to turn into, with some cool new powers and gimmicks, meaning there's a lot more than ten in there.
More like, thousands upon thousands.
He also met a few good guys aliens to help him grow as a character, like an alien mercenary named Tetrax.
He taught Ben how to use some more clever tactics and to think his way through a fight more often, instead of just turning into muscular guys over and over.
We even met the sarcastic little alien scientist who built the watch in the show's first TV movie.
The creator, Azimuth, explained that it wasn't a weapon for war, but a tool to create understanding and racial peace between alien cultures across the universe by allowing species to walk a mile in each other's shoes.
It's a pretty heavy concept for a kids show, feels like more of an idea out of a random Star Trek episode.
I loved that the show didn't pull punches on something nuanced like that.
So, with the reveal of their Grandpa's secret past and pretty much all there was to know about the Omnitrix and the various criminal entities in the universe who want to get their hands on it.
The show opens up so much more in season two.
I'd also like to take time to highlight how much I love this show's other greatest villain.
Kevin Ethan Levin.
I see what they did there.
The name is a little on the nose, but if Vilgax was Kingpin, then this kid is the Venom of this show.
He's a vandal punk kid that lives on the streets with super powers of his own, the ability to absorb and expel energy like a human battery.
Ben runs into him and they become fast friends using their powers to act like a couple of schmucks and perform some old-fashioned b and e to get an unreleased video game before outrunning the cops.
But Kevin turns out to be a little bit of a loose cannon and wants to start using their powers for more extreme crimes than stealing video games.
Him and Ben battle it out, and we discover that Kevin can use his powers to absorb the energy from the Omnitrix and take on some of Ben's powers.
He's a morally bankrupt dark reflection of our hero.
After multiple battles with Kevin mimicking Ben's aliens before he goes too far and becomes this hodgepodge of all of them.
I did enjoy the episode on the second season where they both got stuck in an alien gladiator arena with an electric shock button attached to them and they have to work together to escape.
Basically Planet Hulk.
The other strongest villain characters would have to be Dr Animo and Charmcaster.
One's a mad scientist that uses animal DNA to create giant monsters and the other is a young sorcererss that's trying to live up to her uncle's name as a magic villain.
I typically don't care for the human villain in this type of series, but these two stand out a lot more than one would have expected.
Unfortunately, I couldn't say the same about the Forever Knights.
Kinda like an evil version of the plumbers that wanted to hunt and experiment on all aliens.
Their concept was really cool to me, but I always felt they were terribly misused in the series, serving more of an excuse to have stormtrooper type bad guys that Ben could just punch a thousand of.
Season two ended with a banger of an episode where Vilgax and Kevin team up to kill Ben, but he had accidentally turned off all the restrictions on the watch and he could change into any of the aliens with a thought for however long he wants.
It was awesome to see him really let loose to keep up with his two greatest enemies, and ended up ditching them in an alternate dimension called the Null Void, that Grandpa Max used to drop dangerous alien criminals into.
Kinda like a variation of the phantom zone and negative zone from Dc and Marvel.
Season three and four afterwards felt a little directionless to me with the two main villains gone, and they just spent the next few episodes just roaming around the continental US writing wrongs and fighting random smaller antagonists, but the majority of them aren't as interesting as Darth Cthulhu and Chimera alien.
The exception probably being Ghostfreak.
He is pretty cool initially, but other than that, not a whole lot of important stuff happens for the last two seasons.
The series continued to introduce more and more transformations, and even though I initially liked them, they now felt like initial symptoms of the disease that would allow a gorilla made of lego to join the list of Ben's transformation.
Back then the series also didn't really know what to do with Gwen back then.
To keep her from feeling like too much of a sidekick they made up that she began learning magic from a spell book she pilfered from Charmcaster.
This choice initially felt a little out of place in a show that was so heavily steeped in Sci-fi and it gave some people the sense that the creators just threw it in to give her something to do during the fight scenes since everyone else was so proactive.
It wasn't the worst idea in the world, and it's paid off in the later shows very well.
On a side note, their summer road trip felt like it had lasted way longer than three months.
In fact, I believe this is the second longest cartoon summer vacation after Phineas and Ferb.
The last two seasons didn't invest me so much on the villains, but I did enjoy the smaller one offs episodes that feel more slice of life.
Couple examples…
Ben's older cousin, another member of the plumbers, marries an alien from a race that humans had been at war with for decades.
There was this interesting family rivalry where everyone wants to stop the wedding and Ben has to make sure it happens to form a bond of peace with these two species.
There's also a really neat episode where Ben and Gwen were taken into a possible future, where Ben had become the greatest superhero in the universe by the time he's 30.
But as a result of doing this for so long he's become jaded and serious, never leaving his alien forms.
But meeting his younger self gives him a reality check and helps him learn to have some fun and appreciate his human half once again.
It even inadvertently criticizes its future reboot with an episode were Ben's aliens had been turned into super lame and cartoonish characters of a TV show.
Season three and four reminded me of the last few issues of a really great comic run after the writer has finished his main overarching story and just spends a little extra time with the characters doing smaller things for another 5-10 issues before the new writer steps in to mix things up.
This show definitely has the fingerprints of comic industry writers all over it like that.
It even has a few alternative universes of 'what if' episodes, where Gwen gets the watch in an alternate timeline, or a story where Ben's parents find out about his powers after the summer ends.
As with any other long-running story, it's fun to go back to the earliest stuff and look at it with the perspective of future context.
Like understanding that Gwen powers came from the genes she inherited from her alien grandma, who's a being of pure energy that can warp reality with her thoughts.
Making her kind of a goddess.
Eventually the show winds down with an hour-long special, where he faces off against ten of his human antagonists from throughout the show as a nice little closer.
And there was also a live action TV movie I that unfortunately didn't aged well to me, with its confusing story and low budget effects.
Ben 10 was a great series that got my imagination really flowing as a kid because it was so good at thinking outside of the box and doing something unique, but still very classic for a superhero show.
It has all the hallmarks of a great comic book character without ever being based on a comic book.
It's a great mix of original ideas and taking inspiration from other sources to make something fresh but still pleasantly familiar.
Ben as a character is great because he's relatable for kids, but even at that age his flaws are still identifiable and it was inspiring to see him overcome them and grow past them through the course of the series.
He was a character that taught us that brains could beat brawn, that you should do the right thing even with nearly infinite power and that family was just as powerful as that.
Much like Ben itself, it wasn't a perfect show.
But it stuck with me and became something that I could see a bit of myself in and inspired me.
That's the definition of a superhero in my book.
But what if someone less good hearted took Ben's place?
Someone with foreknowledge in regards to the original story that would certainly take advantage of that.
Well, let me put my cards on the table.
Somehow, I, the most random person in the world, woke up in Benjamin Kirby Tennyson's body a few days after his birth.
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(28/01/2021)
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