The Original Moon Knight TV Series That Never Saw the Light of Day
By Mark Leiren-Young
As we’ve learned from Dr. Strange, all dreams are realities somewhere in the multiverse — including a Moon Knight TV series that was developed with Marvel by a Canadian production company almost twenty years ago, where the Fist of Khonshu was fighting to take down the evil owner of an oil company.
This isn’t a story from Earth-616. This is from our world (aka Earth-1218). Although, like Spider-Man’s secret identity in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the story has been erased from this reality as if by magic.
As I write this, there’s not even a whisper of it on Wikipedia. And the only reason my memory wasn’t altered by this spell is that I wrote one of the five scripts for Marvel’s never-shot, never aired, never-discussed superhero series.
I also suggested casting Nathan Fillion as the lead. Firefly era Fillion.
Casting agents pitched Shawn Doyle, Matt Schulze and Scott Speedman. Since this Moon Knight would be shot in Canada and primarily funded by Canada’s Space Network and the various Canadian government agencies that paid for productions in 2006, there would be a lot more money available if the guy playing multiple roles was Canadian, eh.
Let’s break out the Eye of Agamotto and twist the timestone, to visit an ancient era just before Robert Downey Jr. became iconic as Iron Man, when the only way Oscar Isaac was dressing up as a superhero was if he was trick or treating, Netflix was renting movies on DVDs and no writer could drop allusions to Dr. Strange outside of a comic store and expect anyone to catch the reference.
I’ve been thinking about my Moon Knight adventures a lot lately — not just because the character finally made it to the screen — but because last year I launched a new writing course at the University of Victoria built around exploring the Marvel Universe.
So we’ll start this journey into mystery just before it began for me — a call to my friend Jon Cooksey from producer Larry Sugar, who ran one of Canada’s most successful independent production companies — No Equal Entertainment. Sugar’s No Equal was based in Vancouver and turning out syndicated hits like the cool cowboy anthology Dead Man’s Gun and the sci fi series First Wave and he had the rights to do a project with/for Marvel.
It was 2006 and a Blade TV series was set to launch on Spike TV. The vampire-hunting hour was spinning out of the Blade trilogy — the first hit movies based on a Marvel character. After three successful slayer films starring Wesley Snipes, this adaptation could be the first legit live action Marvel TV series since the 1970s when Bill Bixby kept pleading with people not to make him angry. Yes, there were a few short-lived, long-forgotten attempts at Marvel shows after The Incredible Hulk. But Blade had heat.
So did Jon Cooksey. Cooksey had established himself as Sugar’s go-to showrunner after creating and delivering the syndicated supernatural horror series, The Collector and Sugar’s supernatural kid’s series, So Weird.
And now No Equal was set to do the next Marvel series. When Cooksey and I caught up recently on Zoom, he told me No Equal was offered several possible comics to adapt for the small screen, but the one that popped was Moon Knight.
The character was coming off multiple short-lived, not particularly popular (and sometimes painful) comic runs. When Cooksey started reading the back issues his initial take was pretty much the same as every fan’s initial take on MK back in the day: “It was clearly Marvel’s Batman rip-off.”
If you only know MK from the Disney+ series, you’re likely thinking the only connection to Moon Knight is that both dudes have anger management issues and are keen on capes.
But Cooksey’s assessment was pretty much the standard take on Moon Knight. And he really did seem to start out as Marvel’s attempt to build their own Batman.
Created by writer Doug Moench and artist Don Perlin, MK first appeared in Werewolf by Night and was a mercenary werewolf hunter — which didn’t seem like a sustainable business model even in the MCU.
Once he got his own series, Moon Knight became Batman in tighty-whities — complete with his own crescent moon shaped batarangs, batty style toys — no Moon-mobile, but a Moon-copter — and a French version of Alfred named, what else, “Frenchie.”
The twist was that MK had three secret identities. Steven Grant was a millionaire playboy who looked and behaved like Bruce Wayne. Marc Spector was a mercenary version of Indiana Jones. Jake Lockley was a cabbie with echoes of Batman’s occasional alter ego, Matches Malone. Yes, I am nerd.
Spector (the real identity) also had a significant other who was a significant player in his adventures - Marlene Alraune.
Marvel kept trying to make Moon Knight happen in their various comics. It seemed like he guest-starred in almost every book they were publishing . But the character never quite took off any higher than the Moon-Copter. Moon Knight’s various solo series attempts died and came back to life more often than a typical Marvel supervillain.
So Cooksey wasn’t intrigued until he hit the then current revamp where writer, Charlie Huston, played with the idea that instead of secret identities, Moon Knight had dissociative identity disorder (DID) — a controversial update to the concept of multiple, or split, personalities.
Cooksey had done a deep dive into the phenomenon for an episode of The Collector starring Battlestar Galactica’s sexy Cylon, Tricia Helfer. Fortunately for me, this was an episode I wrote for him.
Cooksey loved the potential of playing with a hero who couldn’t always remember who he was. “I was fascinated by the idea of a meek cab driver waking up tied to a chair with people with lead pipes standing around him and trying to figure out what the hell he was doing here, what the person he had been before had just said that pissed them off so badly and what he was going to do now.”
If you caught Marvel’s 2022 six-part Moon Knight series, it’s clear their showrunner, Jeremy Slater, also liked this idea.
Sugar agreed to run with Moon Knight and Cooksey started writing. “I wrote a pilot and then we all started to work together.” We were Cooksey, Christina Ray (Murdoch Mysteries), David Schmidt (Shattered) and me.
I was in the writers room for a TV horror series being shot in Vancouver - the Lifetime vampire show, Blood Ties — when an email arrived from Cooksey asking if I’d ever heard of Moon Knight. I don’t recall any explanation for this question. It didn’t matter.
I replied that I had every single issue of every iteration of Moon Knight in boxes and polystyrene bags — including all his appearances as the back-up feature in Rampaging Hulk magazine. I don’t think I mentioned that I had his run with The Defenders and his debut in Werewolf by Night but, yes, I had those too.
He replied that I was hired before telling me what the job was.
Once he explained the job, Cooksey told me I would be his show’s “designated nerd” — the guy who tracked mythology and continuity, made sure scripts were littered with Easter Eggs and would go to Comicon to field questions. As a lifelong fanboy and collector (I owned more than 15,000 comics at the time) I’d had happier days in my life, but not many.
So why was I hooked on Marvel’s obscure, Egyptian-tinged Batman wannabe?
I’m sure I said this when I walked into the writers’ room carrying the cardboard longbox holding my collection, but when Moon Knight debuted, the character had an edge that Batman didn’t.
Even though I was a teenager in an age before insider gossip, nevermind comic coverage in mainstream media, it felt like Moench was telling stories that DC wouldn’t allow their writers to tell. Also, the costume was really cool.
So I liked the comic from the moment it debuted.
Then there was an issue where Moon Knight took out an asshole who was beating his wife — something that struck me as far too real for Batman.
And, the clincher — in issue 37 it’s revealed that Marc Spector is the son of an orthodox Rabbi in an issue that deals with the desecration of a Jewish cemetery. As a Jewish comic fan, I’d never seen anything like this.
Despite — or perhaps because — the comic industry was almost entirely invented by Jewish writers and artists, “out” Jewish heroes had previously been pretty much limited to Kitty Pryde, The Thing and, ouch, Ragman.
So even if MK was basically Batman, he was Batman with a Bar Mitzvah. I was prepared to follow Moon Knight anywhere.
Cooksey was excited about playing with DID and his favourite part of the show was developing the idea that Marlene loved Steven, hated Marc, didn’t trust MK and was best buds with Jake. “For me, it was a series about a person that didn’t think he was lovable because of the bad things that he had done. And because a woman was in love with him, he was in a dilemma. He didn’t want to give her up, but he couldn’t stand to be loved. So the only solution was to split off the part of himself that he found unacceptable and only be the acceptable part. This is what happens in a divided toxic male. And the path to Nirvana is reunification of all your selves. So that became the obvious end point for our journey.” There are also aspects of this that clearly appealed to the team behind the Disney+ Moon Knight.
Cooksey also liked an idea that ran through some of the comics that Marc/Steven/Jake might not have superpowers and their relationship with Khonshu was a delusion — despite an origin story where the Egyptian God rescues Spector from death and imbues him with powers (an origin almost identical in concept and look to DC Z-lister, Metamorpho).
“I left it ambiguous as to whether Khonshu was real,” says Cooksey,”because that’s silly. Egyptian gods aren’t real. But maybe because you think it is, it gives you enough superhuman strength to be able to do unusual things.” So, instead of super strength, our Moon Knight was going to do a lot of parkour.
As we worked on Moon Knight we were rooting for Blade to strike gold on Spike because, if Blade was a hit, we’d likely have an American home.
Starring Kirk “Sticky Fingaz” Jones as the titular vampire hunter, the series had an epic pedigree for fantasy TV. The pilot was scripted by David S. Goyer (who wrote the Blade movies and Batman Begins) and DC comics MVP Geoff Johns (who pretty much invented and still owns the Arrowverse).
I didn’t know how, or if, Sugar was dealing with Spike, but I was watching the night a character on Blade mentioned contacting Marc Spector to look into a situation involving werewolves. So it sure seemed like they were setting up Moon Knight as their sister series. I tuned out the fact that Blade alternated between confusing and boring and looked like it was shot on a shoestring budget for very cheap shoes.
Instead, I focused on Cooksey’s vision for Moon Knight.
For funding reasons that were way above my pay grade, the series would be shot in Calgary — Canada’s answer to Dallas.
Cooksey had long been concerned about climate change and, after watching Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth, was determined to address it in his creative work. He was about to spend the next several years of his life (and most of his money) making his own tragi-comic documentary, How to Boil A Frog.
Meanwhile, I was writing and directing, The Green Chain, a feature about endangered forests.
Yes, we were both west coast tree-huggers and if we were going to shoot in a place with oil wells, we were going to talk about big oil.
Cooksey decided Marc Spector’s former friend turned arch-nemesis, Raoul Bushman, would run an oil company and his evil deeds would be inspired by the type of evil deeds multinationals regularly perpetrate in the real world.
I think I first earned my keep when I told Cooksey that the Marvel universe included an oil company that showed up in all sorts of comics — Roxxon. I figured that would be the perfect home for Bushman and it’d likely work for the lawyers.
My other uber-nerdy contribution was pitching a story featuring Stained Glass Scarlet — a crossbow-carrying ex-nun turned vigilante from Moon Knight, who I suggested because she not only had a cool origin and a crossbow, but she was MK’s only female nemesis.
As we were working on the show, the TV series Smallville was being shot in Vancouver and seemed to have cracked the code for super-shows — avoid capes and masks and you could get away with anything. Their motto was, famously, “no tights, no flights.” Meanwhile, Heroes was a mainstream smash in a world where super-people stuck to wearing civvies.
So our Moon Knight costume wouldn’t be Batman in white.
This is from Cooksey’s very unpublished series bible: “Moon Knight will not be the caped superhero of the comic, but we’ll invoke the sense of that costume with a distinctive real-world wardrobe. The colors will be jet and silver, as described in the comic, but the cape will become a long coat (constructed so as to serve the same purpose as the character’s gliding cape in the comic) and a taut t-shirt with the distinctive crescent on it. The t-shirt is made from the bullet-deflecting material invented by Frenchie, and Marc always wears it underneath his clothing for general safety.”
In this world Frenchie (aka Moon Alfred) would be French African.
For villains, Cooksey couldn’t use any non-Moon Knight characters without clearing them first, but Marvel gave him permission to play with some MCU bit players. The one who still sticks with him is Hammerhead — a cheezy Spider-villain who looks and talks like a Capone-era mobster, but has a really flat, hard head. Cooksey reimagined Hammerhead as a Vietnam vet who had a plate put in his skull by a back-alley surgeon after the Veterans Administration failed to help him.
Also, unlike the Moon Knight comic, which was always dire, Cooksey anticipated that the key to making Marvel heroes pop on any screen would be bringing the funny. His note on humour from the series bible. “We want lots of it. Moon Knight is a dark character, and we won’t short-change the violence, but we want laughs on just about every page. Life can be dark and unpleasant and fucked-up, but if you look at it the right way, it’s still funny.“
Cooksey recalls being flown to LA to meet with someone from Marvel to develop the series and being shocked to hear their grand plans beyond Moon Knight and Blade. “I remember going down to Marvel and sitting out at the lunch table in the yard with him (the Marvel exec) and him saying, “ya know we’re going to make a bunch of movies out of the Marvel comics. And he said, “we’re gonna do Thor.”
“And I was thinking… that’s going to be stupid.”
“And he’s like, “it’s going to be great. We’re going to start with Iron Man. And then we’re going to build The Avengers. And it’s going to be fantastic.”
“And I was like, okay, I grew up reading those comics, but I remember them as being cheesy in a lot of respects. And so, there you go — Kevin Feige was labouring in the bowels somewhere at that point, thinking it all up.”
Marvel didn’t have a lot of major creative notes for Cooksey beyond worries that a US audience wouldn’t be keen on a series set in Calgary — so they wanted the city to go unnamed — and trying to keep their hero heroic.
As we were writing the show, No Equal was pitching it and locked down the Canadian broadcaster and an international deal — but came up $400,000 per episode shy of the budget needed to produce the show.
Cooksey found a memo to a Marvel producer in 2009 that says Spike had passed. Blade had, sadly, died like a vampire exposed to sunlight after a single season that ran — and this is perfect for a horror series — thirteen episodes. With Blade gone, Spike wasn’t interested in Moon Knight and neither was any other US broadcaster. Despite having Canadian TV wired and some international buyers lined up, the series wasn’t viable without an American home.
So, instead of launching the MCU on TV, Moon Knight went back to Marvel’s island of misfit superheroes to hang out with Vision, Rocket Raccoon and Scarlet Witch until someone came up with a take to introduce them to the MCU.
When Cooksey and I caught up, I’d just watched the final episode of the Disney+ series. He hadn’t checked it out and asked what I thought about their approach versus his.
Of course, I mentioned the body count in Moon Knight 2022.
“I don’t think we had him kill anyone,” says Cooksey. “I think he tried to avoid killing anybody. Different aesthetic, different time, different set of rules. And, I assume, lots more notes from Marvel now than we got.”
If you want a sense of what the original Moon Knight series was supposed to look like… it didn’t look like the multi-million dollar extravaganza that debuted on Disney+. I suspect it would have looked a lot more like another made-in-Vancouver superhero show that debuted in 2012.
When I saw the Arrow pilot and Oliver Queen was wearing a hood instead of a traditional mask and playing with a lot of parkour I thought, “that’s our show.” Okay, maybe that’s what our show might have looked like with the kind of effects and fight scenes that were possible a half dozen years after we were set to debut.
“I thought we did a great job,” says Cooksey. “I think it would have been an accessible action series and all those characters had socially thematic, relevant stories. In retrospect, I don’t think Marvel ever had any intention of backing it up. One would think that Marvel could have said, “wow, you’ve got all but $400,000 Canadian and found that money.” But apparently not.”
Or maybe, after the release of Iron Man the previous summer, the powers-that-be at Marvel weren’t keen on risking Moon Knight misfiring like Blade and decided it was safer to treat it like Roger Corman’s ill-fated Fantastic Four movie and bury it in the Egyptian desert?
Meanwhile, somewhere on another earth, an eco-warrior version of Moon Knight (played by Nathan Fillion) is about to start a new season battling big oil — with Ms. Marvel, Thor, Hawkeye and Spider-Man occasionally guest-starring in epic crossovers in the MK-verse.
And the series description from the very unpublished series bible by Jon Cooksey
“Moon Knight” is the story of MARC SPECTOR (early 30’s), a former mercenary who was left for dead in an archaeological dig in Egypt after a fight with his employer RAOUL BUSHMAN (40’s). What exactly happened that night, and why, will be a central question throughout the series (with many layers of answers), but the first one we’ll explore is: Was Marc merely wounded — his life saved by quick medical attention from his friend and fellow mercenary FRENCHIE (30’s) — or did he actually die that night, and return from the dead?
One thing is agreed upon from the beginning of the series: whatever happened that night FRACTURED Marc’s psyche into several pieces, one of which became his superhero alter ego, MOON KNIGHT, a relentless, pitiless, mysterious figure whose taste for action and dark sense of humor makes him the perfect foil for the villains in the series, a colorful mix of characters from the Marvel Universe, and completely new creations.
Note: And the perfect karmic capper to this story. This was originally set to be published in The Georgia Straight — a Vancouver paper I’ve written for forever. But The Straight was just sold and all the staff were “let go” so… that’d be why this is on my rarely used Medium page.
