Anyone who grew up a fan of Marvel Comics in the seventies or eighties knows all about disappointment when it comes to seeing our favorite characters and stories translated to the big (or little) screen.

For most of our lives, the thought of a Marvel property on television or film instantly brought about an involuntary wince, a gag reflex, an aversion or downcasting of the eyes in shame.

Face it, friends: Everything Marvel touched, in live-action or animation, turned to crap.

Then came the X-Men movie, and the Spider-Man movie, and their sequels.

Suddenly, Marvel wasn't such a joke outside the pages of their comic books. Suddenly, Marvel properties seemed cooler to a whole new audience. A much bigger audience.

Suddenly, Marvel had a license to print money.

With that money and popularity, Marvel has started to exercise its influence, to a much greater degree, on the actual writing and production of its features. This is what we would call a Good Thing.

The latest fruits begot of this new arrangement: Ultimate Avengers, Marvel's first straight-to-DVD animated release. While based primarily on the Ultimates comics series by Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch, it's as close to a genuine Avengers movie as we're likely to get for some time, and is in fact a tiny bit closer than one might expect to that source.

The Ultimates series, which sought to modernize the entire Avengers mythos and make things much grimmer, grittier, and over-the top, certainly has its bad points along with its good. Longtime fans complain that the characters were transformed into exaggerated caricatures of their former selves — drunken womanizer Tony Stark, wife-beater Hank Pym — and they're right. Still, the level of the writing is such that even the most die-hard old-timer have to admit the thing represents quality.

Thus it is probably not a terribly Bad Thing that Marvel chose the Ultimates storyline as the basis for this animated feature. The fact that they then softened it all up a bit, blending in more than a little of the traditional Avengers look and feel, only helps.

Add to that one additional fact: At its core, the film is about Captain America as a man lost to his own time and finding his way in the modern world, clinging to his old ideals in the face of modern complexities. This is entirely as it should be. The fact that the filmmakers mostly carry it off gives a heart and a soul to what could easily have been a joke of a movie, full of sound and Nick Fury but signifying little.

All the bells and whistles surrounding that story are nice. We get some fun battle sequences between the not-terribly-cooperative Avengers and their first set of foes, and then a fantastic action sequence near the end involving the Hulk. This is what Avengers fans signed up for, and they should not be disappointed by that final act.

The animation is not particularly smooth, but the characters look right — and closer to their classic looks than they appeared in Ultimates — and the voice work, for the most part, is acceptable. The music is one of the high points. It sounds at least as good as the scores of most of the big-budget Marvel movies, if not better, with a grand, sweeping theme that conveys the power and the glory of Earth's Mightiest Heroes.

The real gem on this DVD, however, is the "Avengers Assemble" documentary under "Special Features" — and I don't just say that because I run the Web site of the same name. This twenty-minute set of intertwined interviews gives us a look into the thoughts of Tom Brevoort, Joe Quesada, Mark Millar, Kurt Busiek and George Perez as they discuss conceptualizing and executing Avengers volume three, Ultimates, and New Avengers.

The exchanges between Busiek and Perez, in particular, are worth the price of the DVD by themselves. George Perez's sheer enthusiasm for the Avengers and for comics in general is enough to make even the most jaded fans want to drag out their long boxes and dig into the classics.

Is Ultimate Avengers a perfect movie? Certainly not. But it is certainly better than we had any right to expect from a direct-to-video, animated feature, based on a comics series that offended as many die-hard Avengers fans as it pleased.

Get it, enjoy it for what it is, and then stash it away and keep waiting for the day when we finally get that long-dreamed-of, giant-budgeted Avengers: The Motion Picture. And, in the meantime, go dig out all those old Perez Avengers issues and revel once again in the power and the glory of Earth's Mightiest Heroes.