Can i watch "The Avengers" having not ever watched "Thor, Hulk, IronMan, Cap America"

[Tarik One]

Can I get away with watching the film despite not viewing the aforementioned individual movies?

[Myth]

Of course they'll take your money and let you sit in the theater. Why wouldn't they? Besides, they don't screen people to make sure they have seen the previous ones.

[flipogb]

yes, you can watch it after and go ohhhh thats what that was. but only for small specific things that aren't really important

[rezznor]

Can I get away with watching the film despite not viewing the aforementioned individual movies?

you miss out on some backstory but it's a fairly straight forward movie. i would still recommend watching the prequels though to get a complete picture

[niko]

You don't need to see any of them really. Especially if you have a working knowledge of the characters. Hulk i would not even recommend, it doesn't feel like part of the sequence anymore.

[flipogb]

what a waste those previous Hulk movies turned out to be

[El Kabong]

what a waste those previous Hulk movies turned out to be

The Norton one was decent enough. It'd be interesting to see the director's cut on that since I heard there's a fair chunk of footage they cut out to make it a 90 minute action film.

[Alamo]

You don't have to watch Hulk and Captain America. But you wouldn't understand about 70% of the shit if you have never seen/read Iron Man and Thor.

[ballup]

You don't need them as the references exclusive to previous movies are very small. If you don't know about these characters and their backgrounds, you might want to watch Thor to get a sense of Loki's relationship to the story.

[Noah Rose]

Iron Man films basically explain S.H.I.E.L.D. (post credit in IM1, and everything IM2).

Captain America explains the Cosmic Cube.

Thor explains the history behind Loki.

[rezznor]

You don't have to watch Hulk and Captain America. But you wouldn't understand about 70% of the shit if you have never seen/read Iron Man and Thor.

capt america introduces you to the tesseract

[kentatm]

you probably dont need to see them but you'll also likely end up a bit confused as to what is motivating the characters.

I recommend seeing them all, even the Hulk movie, if you don't want to have a bunch of jargon thrown at you with little explanation.

[Nick Young]

isn't the tesseract exactly the same thing as the allspark in transformers?

[rezznor]

isn't the tesseract exactly the same thing as the allspark in transformers?

In geometry, the tesseract, also called an 8-cell or regular octachoron or cubic prism, is the four-dimensional analog of the cube. The tesseract is to the cube as the cube is to the square. Just as the surface of the cube consists of 6 square faces, the hypersurface of the tesseract consists of 8 cubical cells. The tesseract is one of the six convex regular 4-polytopes.
A generalization of the cube to dimensions greater than three is called a "hypercube", "n-cube" or "measure polytope". The tesseract is the four-dimensional hypercube, or 4-cube.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word "tesseract" was coined and first used in 1888 by Charles Howard Hinton in his book A New Era of Thought, from the Greek τέσσερεις ακτίνες ("four rays"), referring to the four lines from each vertex to other vertices. Some people have called the same figure a tetracube, and also simply a hypercube (although the term hypercube is also used with dimensions greater than 4).

[kentatm]

isn't the tesseract exactly the same thing as the allspark in transformers?

sort of but not really.

in the comics its called the Cosmic Cube

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_Cube