Well the cartoon is based on the little toyline so really, its not a huge arse shock that they would want the show to look like the toys, so kids will go to the store and beg their parents for the barely articulated little statue toys.
You must be thinking of
The Super Hero Squad Show, which is a different topic. My comments about character design pertained to
The Spectacular Spider-Man. In that case, as I said, the character designs were created for the show by artist Sean "Cheeks" Galloway. The SSM toys are based on the show designs, unlike SHS, where the toys did come first.
And I agree with a previous poster about Spec.Spider-Man and X-Men Evolution those are two pretty decent shows.
Do you mean
Wolverine and the X-Men? It's from many of the same creators as
X-Men Evolution and has a roughly similar design style, but is a very different show.
That IS one thing I always liked about the old FOX Spider-Man and X-Men shows, they were actually in the same continuity. I recall an episode of Spider-Man where he goes and visits the X-Men and they are in the same designs as the X-Men show, same voices everything, even something Wolverine told Spider-Man kind of related back to their show I recall. So that was neat, First time I think outside of Superman and Batman where two cartoons acknowledged another one's existence.
Oh, there were cartoon crossovers before then, but generally not between extant superhero shows. Such as the
Superfriends Batman and Robin or the Hanna-Barbera Addams Family showing up on
Scooby-Doo. Heck, there were some Hanna-Barbera shows (like
Laff-a-Lympics) which brought dozens of their established characters together in the same show. For that matter, it goes all the way back to Betty Boop guest-starring in the first Popeye cartoon.
As far as superhero shows go, the
Spider-Man cartoons of the '70s and '80s often had guest superheroes from other Marvel titles, but nothing that was on the air at the time, I think.
It's also worth noting that when Iron Man and War Machine guest-starred in the FOX Spidey series, they were voiced by Robert Hays and James Avery, the same actors who played them in the contemporaneous syndicated
Iron Man series (though Avery had been replaced by Dorian Harewood in the main show by that point). Beyond that, it wasn't clear if they were meant to be in the same continuity, but it certainly implied as much. However, when the Fantastic Four and Dr. Doom appeared in the "Secret Wars" episodes, only Johnny had the same voice he'd had in the '90s FF cartoon. But Captain America had the same voice (David Hayter) in his guest appearances on both
Spider-Man and
X-Men. Hayter reprised the role of Cap in
X-Men Evolution, even though that was clearly a separate continuity. (And yes, that's the same David Hayter who wrote the first two X-Men movies.)
I also don't think the animation for the 90's X-Men or Spiderman were that bad.
As I said,
Spider-Man had superb animation to start with, but it got progressively cheaper and clunkier over time. Its premiere episode, "Night of the Lizard," is one of the most gorgeously animated cartoons ever created for television, on a par with the work TMS did for
The New Batman/Superman Adventures.
As for
X-Men... as the work of the Akom studio goes, it's one of their less ghastly efforts. Compared to the shoddy work they did in the second season of
Exosquad, it's excellent. But compared to the likes of TMS, it's awfully clunky. Part of the problem was that they hewed too close to the detailed design style of the comics, which made the animation stiff and cumbersome. As discussed above, streamlined character designs allow for much more fluid and expressive animation.
I'll definitely agree with you about Iron Man and FF. I disliked what I saw in both first seasons so much that I never actually came back for either show's second season.
That's too bad, because both shows were completely retooled after their first seasons, with totally new writing staffs and animation studios and some changes in format and casting. The second-season FF and IM were essentially completely different shows from the first-season versions. They weren't as good as FOX's
Spidey and
X-Men, but they were brilliant compared to their first seasons.
