Tuesday, April 28, 2009

X-Men Cartoon

They say it's out on DVD now. (shrug)

I was going through the rounds, and found some very critical commentary on it.

Well, I never said the old X-Men cartoon was as good as Batman: TAS. And if I ever implied it, it was unintentional.

The old X-Men cartoon was enjoyable for what it was-a rather cheap cartoon about the X-Men. Any affection I have for the X-Men pretty much comes from there, as I've read like three X-Men comics (and one of those was based on an episode of the cartoon).

The reason I've indicated I enjoy the series is because I did. Even the worst cartoons often have something very enjoyable about them, and many such series are better than their critics give them credit for.

What I liked about the X-Men cartoon and its contemporaries, good or not, was that they tended to be reasonably long-running series with reasonably strong internal continuity and some degree of focus on action. That era made such series in pretty large numbers, and all of them are at least a little watchable. (Many of them, while hopelessly stupid, were still pretty enough to enjoy them. There were plenty of good series, like Exo-Squad, Reboot, and Beast Wars, though.) What further distinguished them was that their internal quality was consistent-it wasn't like watching the He-Man cartoon (or any '80s series), where one episode would be awesome and the one right next to it would be absolutely awful.

There are still series like that, but most of them live on cable now, and I don't get to watch many of them. (Any other series like that tends to have been imported, which is why I like anime. Nothing to do with the genre itself.)

Sigh. Stupid cable networks.

-Signing off.

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