Do you still enjoy the 90's X-Men cartoon?
- Thread starter Captain Worf
- Start date
I like the guy who did Beast in the Wolverine series. He sounded a lot like Edward Herman who I think would be perfect for Hank. (Younger of course.)
You're probably thinking of the last 7-10 episodes. Those episodes were still being handled by Saban, but all the other companies had shut down by that point, so all new character designs had to be drawn up. Unforutnately, those are also some of the weakest episodes of the series (any one even care to comment on Jubilee's Fairy Tale???),
Otherwise, I still consider this X-Men series to be the best of the shows, and when I want to watch an X-Men TV series, this is the one that I pull out the most.
Unfortunately, it's to bad that Disney decided to release the series in airing order, instead of production order, so you get No Mutant Is An Island popping up in Season 5, when it should've gone into Season 3 (it should've been the first episode on the Volume 3 Disc 1 DVD). Also with the DVD's it's too bad that Disney didn't put on, either as bonuses, or just as different episodes, the remade versions of No Mutant Is An Island, A Deal With The Devil, & Longshot, as the versions used are the original versions that were either missing graphics, or in the case of Island, completely rejected by FOX for animation issues (although the remade versions are on the Marvel website, plus, as far as anyone is aware, the remade versions were never aired outside the US---even Canada never saw them on broadcast TV, all we got were the original versions).
But it should also be noted that the 90's X-Men series crossed over with the 94 Spider-Man series a few times. One of those crossovers has been released on DVD in Canada as the "Mutant Agenda" DVD from Morningstar. Although, compared to the Disney DVD's, Morningstar's release is of lower quality, since it was a transfer of the old 1997 Telegenic VHS release, so it is VHS quality. The 2nd X-Men crossover was in the Secret Wars arc in the final season of Spider-Man, but it's only Storm, as Storm's original voice actress was living in California at the time, so they didn't have to fly the whole X-Men cast down to California from Toronto. (Secret Wars was released on VHS by Telegenic back in 1997, but so far there has been no NTSC DVD release.)
Another thing that I wasn't to pleased at was with how many episodes Disney crammed onto the discs. Upto 8-9 episodes per disc.
I have a region free DVD player, so I have no objection to an import, but I'm having trouble even finding it for sale as a region 2 (and I suspect it's more expensive overall).
8-9 episodes per disc. You are talking heavy compression. Average bit rate is between 2.8 and 4.9 Mbps on a DVD-9 disc (with an occasional peak up to 8.9Mbps).
I've compared the episodes that were released by both Universal and Disney back in the early-2000's on DVD where there were only 4-5 episodes on DVD-9's. The average bit rate ranged between 5.2 and 7.8Mbps. 2 episodes that have been released on DVD 3 times by both Universal and Disney have been Out Of The Past Parts 1 & 2. On the first two discs (Reunion/Out Of The Past/No Mutant Is An Island Universal 2001, The Legend of Wolverine Disney 2003), and this may've been due to the transfer person doing a better color correction job, but it's most likely due to the lower compression ratio, the colors were more vibrant and not as murky looking, plus the picture wasn't as pixelated during the action sequences.
Also, the 2003 Legend of Wolverine had a commentary track by Chris Claremont on all the episodes, and a few bonus videos talking about the X-Men series and the franchise overall, something that Disney did not transfer over to the Volume sets.
I put on the 2001 Universal DVD release "Sanctuary Parts 1&2/Weapon X, Lies and Videotape/Proteus Parts 1 & 2" tonight (and I'm watching the last episode on the disc tonight, "Proteus 2"). Proteus is not one of the best episodes of the series, but it is still a nice stand-alone, and with "Sanctuary" on the disc, you get the background on the woman who walks out on Xavier in his flashback in "Proteus 1" (and it's Amelia Voight) instead of wondering why the flashback, all of sudden goes to an unknown woman is nursing and then arguing with Xavier, after Xavier had just broken up with Moira MacTaggert (or whatever her maiden name was before being married to Joe MacTaggert, as the Proteus flashback also reveals that she was Joe MacTaggert's first wife before they divorced).
Anyway, this is still a great series, even after all these years, and in a way, I think it is also one of the last cartoon series where the writer's and animators had the ability to "throw stuff to the wind", as many animated series since the 1990's seem to have been made under the rule "if you can't do it in the real world, you can't do it in a cartoon".
Anyway, this is still a great series, even after all these years, and in a way, I think it is also one of the last cartoon series where the writer's and animators had the ability to "throw stuff to the wind", as many animated series since the 1990's seem to have been made under the rule "if you can't do it in the real world, you can't do it in a cartoon".