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With Disney+ coming out the other day, a bunch of 90's cartoons my kid brain loved are available to stream whenever and wherever you want! The thing is, these cartoons also suck butt. So much butt. But I'm gonna watch them anyway and post about it, because the internet has broken my brain. I encourage you to join in! It's not going to be all irony and "this show sucks", though, I've been a comic book fan since I was five, and a lot of these shows adapted all-time classic comics stories like the Dark Phoenix Saga and the Legacy Virus, so when I get to those episodes I'll be comparing the TV show to the original story and giving some context. The actual watching for me will start tomorrow, since I have to go to work in a bit, but I'll be kicking it off with the 90's XMen cartoon. Is anyone interested in grabbing another series of 90's dreck and joining in?
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Nov 13, 2019 22:28
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I've already re-watched various cartoons I grew up with. Some held up surprisingly well. Others... not so much. Re-watch highlights for me included Captain Future (the German version - though this is notably older than the 90s), Batman: The Animated Series, Gargoyles and Reboot. Parts may have been uneven but all of them had a lot of entertainment value. X-Men... probably doesn't hold up quite so well as the above. The voice work is often quite, uh, special, with the entire world being made of ham. But at both its best and at its worst it's rather entertaining, it's only when it's mediocre where it suffers the sin of just being boring. Most of the shows I'd recommend if you want to hurt yourself are more from the late 80s and I've re-watched everything I personally would dare to already, so I'll just wish you good luck with your X-Men adventure.
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Nov 14, 2019 04:29
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On Tuesday I rewatched the first episodes of Gargoyles and X-Men, and they held up exactly as I expected them to. Gargoyles was as decent as I remember and X-Men was as bad as I remember. I'm a much bigger X-Men fan than Batman, but the Batman animated series was brilliant, whereas I remember sleeping over at a friend's house the night before X-Men premiered and watching the show that morning, and being disappointed. Granted, we were all animation nerds who could look at an episode of Tiny Toons and tell you which of the several studios they used had animated that one. Also the woman who voiced Rogue just got elected to Canadian parliament as a liberal so she's cool.
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Nov 14, 2019 06:04
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The loving mighty ducks cartoon was my poo poo as a kid lol
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Nov 14, 2019 06:22
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wait a second, is Disney+ going to have all of their Disney Afternoon cartoons? We gonna get some poo poo like Quack Pack to see the light of day again?
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Nov 14, 2019 07:45
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it's not a cartoon but So Weird on Disney plus has kind of melted my mind. There's so much poo poo that I forgot about that I internalized from this show.
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Nov 14, 2019 08:10
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Some things to keep in mind for your X-Men marathon: - Cyclops is the most massive square and phenomenally useless - Jean Grey exists to faint from exhaustion from using her powers or pretty much anything really - Gambit is really sketchy at all times - Storm will not say anything without it being a pronouncement of immense importance. I believe her powers require her to yell, or they won't work. - Xavier is not very good at his job - Wolverine really, really wishes he could use grown-up swears - Beast is Smart, which is why he reads books and quotes things, like smart people do. - Rogue is actually great, except she's never around when you need her, or forgets her powers half the time she actually is. - Jubilee was supposed to be audience stand-in. They do pretty much nothing with her. - So many Liefeld-era characters, cameos and designs! Woo! Soul Reaver fucked around with this message at 12:01 on Nov 14, 2019 |
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Nov 14, 2019 11:58
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Soul Reaver posted:- Storm will not say anything without it being a pronouncement of immense importance. I believe her powers require her to yell, or they won't work.
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Nov 15, 2019 06:05
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Finally getting to watch the first episode of X-Men a day later than planned. I'm starting with the first episode (Day of the Sentinels) but I'll probably just end up doing the highlights as I go further into the show. No screencaps, unfortunately. I'm not gonna do plot recaps for every episode, there's wikis for that. When I talk plot stuff, it'll be when we get to the major storylines and parts where I can contrast it with the comics. WHAT IT DOES RIGHT So, the first thing is obviously the theme song. That was a banger in 1992 and it's still a banger now. It's a great way to start an episode and it was so good at exciting the crap out of kid brains to accept basically whatever came next. The plot's not based on any particular major classic X-Men story, but it serves well as an intro. This is a very Jubilee-centric episode, since as much as she's one of the worst additions to the X-Men, she's a great POV character for the first episode of a 90's kids cartoon. The characters are all in broad strokes in this episode, and that's not a bad thing- I was honestly surprised at how well it was able to present a bunch of exposition in a few minutes during the mall scene, from introducing Sentinels to giving you a feel for all the characters. The quips aren't terrible, in a very comic-book way... they're obviously at the level kids would get but they do fine for what they are. Insanely Dramatic Storm is way better than Halle Berry Storm, too, it works well with her godlike powers. There's a lot of the dread of being hunted for things about who you are that are outside of your control. It hasn't done too much about the social discrimination besides just showing some of it, but it lays the foundation for it and it's a concept I'll talk about later when I have some more episodes down and time to compare the show to the comics. WHAT IT DOES WRONG The animation is often choppy, and some of the actual art looks like poo poo sometimes. The first time Morph shows up, his normal face looks like it was drawn by someone who never had seen a face before, or had that kind of encephopathy that makes you unable to draw clocks. It was jacked up. Morph is also the exception to the "quippy stuff is decent". He's the aimed-for-the-four-year olds goofball. I remember he dies and I'm looking forwards to it. Like I mentioned before, this is a Jubilee-centered episode, and as much as she's suited to being the fish out of water character for the audience to identify with, she suuuucks and even the comic writers had no idea what to do with her as the 90's wrapped up. She was a vampire at one point, it was weird. The sentinels are also a sticking point- at the beginning, no one seems to notice the giant robot until it's in their line of sight. The scale is messed up, too, and it changes size repeatedly through the opening scenes (and if this is one of the ones that can change size, there's no indication they can do that. It's a bog-standard OG sentinel as far as I can tell). Oh, hey, Morph just got greased in part two. Wolverine's reaction is better than anything with Morph actually on the screen. WHAT MEMORIES IT KNOCKED LOOSE Holy poo poo, this show actually made me find out the difference between mono and stereo sound when I was a kid. Seeing "In Stereo" at the bottom of the screen made me look up what that meant, since obviously this wasn't in a Stereo system! Also... I remember I had a picture book of this episode when I was a kid.
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Nov 15, 2019 20:24
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If anyone is interested, one of the head guys on X-Men wrote a behind the scenes book called Prievously on X-Men that has a bunch of behind the scenes info, interviews with cast, crew, and executives, and all thag good stuff. One anecdote was that they were always told that the Batman team was jealous of their ratings, but they sure as poo poo were jealous of Batman's significantly higher budget.
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Nov 17, 2019 22:15
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Never having read the comics, I liked Jubilee a lot. Why do you dislike her?
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Nov 18, 2019 02:10
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However, X-Men does have that sweet bell in the opening theme, twice.
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Nov 18, 2019 02:18
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FactsAreUseless posted:Never having read the comics, I liked Jubilee a lot. Why do you dislike her? She had a real bad case of 90's comics character. Pouches! Being all about stuff that a bunch of 30 year olds think kids like! Fairly lame powers! More pouches! There were a lot of terminally dorky characters running around 90's comics, but she was always a least favorite. It felt like story arcs never really had any purpose for her (which at least justified other 90's edgelord characters like Bishop and Cable, they tied into the weird sci-fi time travel apocalypse stuff in the mid 90's) but she was the go-to for the target audience to relate to so she got pushed. SHe was better in some of the spinoff stuff but not by much, and after the 90's the writers kept throwing weird plots and new powers at her because, well, "mallrat who makes sparkles happen" wasn't much to work with.
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Nov 18, 2019 02:34
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FactsAreUseless posted:Never having read the comics, I liked Jubilee a lot. Why do you dislike her? Jubilee was basically the replacement for Kitty Pryde (almost literally, given that there's a decently direct line from Pryde Of The X-Men - a pretty bad pilot/special that is where the X-Men arcade game gets it's roster and designs- to the Fox show) because the latter fell victim to the thing that only ever happens to popular sidekicks in comics. They get to grow up even as their mentors stay the same age. See also Dick Grayson, Wally West, Donna Troy and Bucky Barnes. So by the time the show was airing, Kitty wasn't Wolverine's kid sidekick anymore, by Jubilee was the kid X-Man so they slotted her almost wholesale into the same role/stories. Unfortunately Jubilee's west coast mall baby shtick has aged pretty badly and it was kind of grating even then. Plus she fell into the Mati from Captain Planet trap of having a power that sounds lame even though it's actually pretty rad if you take more than 5 seconds to think about it.
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Nov 18, 2019 03:13
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