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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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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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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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