Post by Scott EilerPost by Terrence Briggshttp://realwrestlecrap.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=offtopic&action=...
With the X-Men animated series of the '90s, I always hear comments how
it's aged horribly (at least here in FAN). Which I think is very
untrue.
The storyline had some good drama and the animation (it does look old
when you look it at now) but the style fit the feel, looked just like
the comics, and still looks good to the eye.
Plot-wise: Season 1: good.
Season 2: kind of slapped together.
Season 1 was pretty tight, especially once "Slave Island" got the
Apocalypse story arc rolling. Of course, the continuity may have been
too much for the animators at AKOM.
The ending to "Slave Island"'s first airing ended with the X-Men
safely landing at the mansion. The next aired episode, "The Cure",
featured the X-Men rebuilding the mansion (Rogue's throwaway line:
"That boy Juggernaut sure made a mess.") WAT?! The mansion was
SUPPOSED to have been destroyed by Juggernaut at the end of "Slave
Island", leading into the next intended episode, "The Unstoppable
Juggernaut". Subsequent airings of "SI" featured the proper ending.
But the entire first season broadcast was a mess. Episodes would
dribble out once a month (the series premiered over Halloween weekend,
and the second episode wasn't aired until the day after Thanksgiving,
for example.) And, of course, plenty of unfinished scenes appeared in
the first-run broadcasts, which wound up on tape. Subsequent airings
(and the DVD box set), got the final cuts. (Check out the video tapes
if you don't believe me. Scenes were added and altered, music was
changed, etc.)
Season 2 was apparently the result of that messiness. They limited
the continuity to the Xavier-and-Magneto bookends, and kept the
episodes self-contained. It turned out to be a good way of focusing
on the individual character stories.
Post by Scott EilerSeason 3 would have been awesome, except the publishers were already
giving up on it and only put together a half-season's worth.
Season 3's hard to explain. "Beyond Good & Evil" seemed like the
perfect finale to the series, but there were so many episodes stuck in
the pipeline that they didn't air until Fall of 1996. I wouldn't call
them "filler", but they were character origin stories, flashbacks,
"lost episodes" (Dazzler's ep, which should have followed the Dark
Phoenix Saga), and so on. One of the show's staff writers told me in
that those eps were sent to various studios, in addition to AKOM, and
the works in progress looked so horrible that they practically had to
be redone.
Post by Scott EilerAnimation-wise: The main complaint I heard was, Wolverine should be
made of fluid motion, but he came nowhere close. I can recall him
attacking Colossus the exact same way twice in one episode, with the
exact same result, and there was exactly no claw contact either time.
Was this "The Unstoppable Juggernaut"?
The animation, with the exception of a few episodes from Season 2 and
the Phoenix Saga, ranged from tolerably mediocre to near unwatchable.
Curiously enough, X-Men had a producer, Sidney Iwanter, who helped
Tokyo Movie Shinsa get their foot into the door of animating North
American TV shows back in the 1980s. He, and several other
individuals involved with X-Men, mentioned in online interviews that
they wished they had Batman's animation budget.
You could argue that X-Men: Evolution was an attempt to rectify that,
but XM:E had its own problems. Some folks go back to the Toei-
animated pilot from 1987 (with Kitty Pryde). I have the videotape
right here, and can vouch for its technical amplomb, but it's as
disposable as a bad episode of the 1990s X-Men. I'll take "The Cure",
lame AKOM animation and all, 99 times out of 100, over those
adaptations.
Post by Scott EilerPost by Terrence BriggsSo why the hate?
*The audience's introduction to the X-Men is a whiny mallrat,
Jubilee. She is probably the LEAST interesting character on the team,
and (admittedly) a lousy introduction to the series. As a 12-year-old
watching the show for the first time, I would have agreed with that
assessment.
Huh? Perhaps we're not talking about the same series here.
I addressed this in my other response. In short: Jubilee is our
introduction to the X-men. She's kind of annoying :-)
Not horrible, but I'd say she was the least interesting character on
the team. We never really got an original story episode for her; just
"Jubilee's Fairytale Theater", a late-run episode bizarrely animated
by Phillipine Animation Studios.
Post by Scott EilerPost by Terrence Briggs*The last two (or even three) seasons are godawful filler that is
better off not being seen. Even the episodes that close earlier
narrative arcs are handled so poorly that they might as well have been
dumped. (See: Gargoyles: The Goliath Chronicles, Phantom 2040, and
TMNT: Back to the Sewers for other examples.)
Yeah. Some of the ways that people give up on series mystify me. (I
still miss Babylon 5.)
If by "people give up", you mean, "producers filling an episode order
with crap"...
But I think it's fair to say that X-Men ended with a whimper. Still,
we got 20-or-so really good episodes out of it. That's saying
something.
Post by Scott Eiler--
(signed) Scott Eiler 8{D> --------http://www.eilertech.com/---------
Terrence Briggs, has probably seen every episode of Season 1 twenty
times.