Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD looks like a fan’s dream come true, but it isn’t the first time SHIELD has made its presence known on network television. In May of 1998, Nick Fury: Agent of SHIELD, a two-hour TV movie, premiered on FOX. It didn’t exactly set the world on fire, having finished fourth in the ratings to reruns of JAG and a showing of the second half of Titanic along with sitcom reruns on two other networks. FOX’s SHIELD arrived stillborn and lives on as an amusing footnote that can be considered the last of the Marvel superhero b-movies to come along before Blade and X-Men changed everything.

David Goyer, writer of Blade, Batman Begins, and Man of Steel, wrote Nick Fury for FOX . It’s not as if the Nick Fury film is all that bad, it’s just kind of…there: a time filler that doesn’t stray too far from Marvel’s established SHIELD characters but didn’t do anything terribly compelling with them either. Saddled with actors with limited range and a limited budget to execute a world where hellicarriers and flying cars are commonplace, SHIELD became a one night wonder that wasn’t very wondrous.

According to comic and Hollywood historian Andy Mangels, USA Today best-selling author of such books as Iron Man: Beneath the Armor and Lou Scheimer: Creating the Filmation Generation, “One of the earliest plans for Nick Fury in live action was announced in Weekly Variety. The September 17, 1986 issue had a multi-page salute to Marvel for their 25th anniversary, and it included articles and ads. One of those ads, from the talent agency The Kopaloff Company, touted Nick Fury, Agent of SHIELD for Hill-Obst Productions (Debra Hill and Linda Obst) and Paramount Pictures. Of the others announced in the same ad — Captain America, The Chameleon, Daredevil, Dr. Strange, Fantastic Four, The Protector, She-Hulk, Spider-Man, Decathalon, Sub-Mariner, Thor, and Power Man — only two of them were made: the low budget Captain America and Fantastic Four features. Amusingly, Hill-Obst did utilize Thor significantly the following year in their Adventures in Babysitting.”

Captain America and Fantastic Four went on to become bootleg staples at comic-cons and punch lines in their own right, but there was yet to be any traction on the Nick Fury front, until, according to Mangels, “In mid-May 1995, Fox Broadcasting announced that it had acquired a number of New World Entertainment (the owners of Marvel until 1988) projects for television, including Nick Fury as a pilot for 1996, as well as telefilm pilots for Generation X and Black Widow. At the same time, New World sold NBC a pilot telefilm for The Punisher, and CBS a pilot for She-Hulk. These were all put into place by relatively new chairman Brandon Tartikoff. At that point in time, the writer was set to be David Goyer, who was already scripting films for Blade, Ghost Rider, and Dr. Strange, as well as Flash Gordon (for producer Peter Guber).