REVIEW: X-MEN Volumes 1 and 2 on DVD

25 Comments | Posted: April 28th, 2009 | Filed under: Reviews | Tags: , , ,

Here are four clips from the released-today DVDs featuring the X-Men cartoon that many of us grew up with:














I’d somehow missed this during my freshman and sophomore years of college1 and for years, a certain subsect of comic fans have been telling me that the X-Men cartoon stood up to the Warner Brothers-produced Batman animated series that also aired on the FOX network, and I’d always quietly suspected that the haze of nerd nostalgia had prevented them from being objective about the matter. I’m sad to inform them after sampling a dozen episodes from the confusingly named “Marvel DVD Comic Book Collection” of the 90s X-Men cartoon, it’s all as bad as these clips would indicate and the series surely can’t hold a candle to its contemporary from another studio.


Where Batman was sleek and sharply written, effectively using decades of continuity and minimal, easily animated designs to get the most from a tight budget, the X-Men cartoon is a bloated mess that seems to revel in its fiscal and storytelling shortcomings. There’s overblown dialogue forced into the mouths of voice actors who seem more desperate than talented, animation that seems to be missing every other frame, and an intensely dispiriting take on the X-Men mythos that lacks any sort of joy, stripping away the themes of tolerance and education in exchange for hamfisted plotting and poorly done fight sequences. In a lot of ways, it’s emblematic of much of the comics being printed at the time, all cheap gloss with no substance and an ugly veneer that seems designed to attract teenage boys with more money than charisma.


There’s a reason that this cartoon has been buried in the past until Disney secured the rights to release it on DVD: if the Batman cartoon was frequently a night of passion with a fantastic partner, something you’d want to revisit again and again, X-Men is closer to ten minutes with a tube sock that you’d then bury in the laundry, hamfisted groping that is embarrassing after a certain age..

1You can speculate why in the comments. I’ll tell you that it rhymed with “girls, music, and some more girls, almost like a Jeffrey Brown book.”

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25 Comments on “REVIEW: X-MEN Volumes 1 and 2 on DVD”

  1. 1 Frowny McBeard said at 12:14 pm on April 28th, 2009:

    Yes, it was terrible, but it also existed in an age where you could write X-Men on a flaming bag of crap and people would buy twelve of them.

    Besides, though several have attempted, there has yet to be a Joker half as spellbinding as Mark Hamill. And yes, I am counting Heath Ledger.

  2. 2 nicholas said at 12:18 pm on April 28th, 2009:

    oh man, i *hated* the x-men cartoon – basically, because they so obviously ignored all of the things that made batman: the animated series so great. i couldn’t stand watching them, and i was a big fan of the x-men at the time…

  3. 3 Steven said at 12:26 pm on April 28th, 2009:

    Wow, that is… much worse than I remember.

    I admit I really liked the series at the time, but actually thinking about it, there’s only one moment (strangely a line delivered by Gambit!) that stands out as exceptional.

    Looking at it now, it’s clearly no better than any other action cartoon of the late 80s/early 90s, and much worse than the best of them, such as Batman and (sigh) Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

  4. 4 Lis said at 12:30 pm on April 28th, 2009:

    I loved it back in the day, but I’ve caught a few reruns and it doesn’t hold up well. Also the cartoon is almost wholly responsible for Gambit fangirls.

  5. 5 TeamSmithy said at 12:45 pm on April 28th, 2009:

    I still like the opening credits…

  6. 6 Bryan Levy said at 1:01 pm on April 28th, 2009:

    This is why I spent my thirty dollars yesterday on “The Real Ghostbusters, Vol. 1″. It’s still not too late for you!

  7. 7 Thom said at 1:15 pm on April 28th, 2009:

    Yeah…I did not *hate* the X-Men cartoon, but I had no real love for it either. I had no actual favorable memories of it, that’s for sure. Stiff animation, stilted characters with exaggerated accents… no thanks.

  8. 8 Pj Perez said at 1:27 pm on April 28th, 2009:

    Uh … yeah. For some reason I remember watching this Saturday mornings before going to work and actually enjoying it. It’s painful to watch now. I will say, from the few episodes I’ve seen, X-Men: Evolution — despite not caring much for the “Ultimate” style premise — is leaps and bounds better than the ’90s trash. But again, it’s indicative of the era.

  9. 9 chrishaley said at 2:02 pm on April 28th, 2009:

    I’ll agree with Smithy that the theme song does invoke certain nostalgic feelings in me, but geeeeez. After watching those clips, I cannot believe I ever liked that show (little kid or not). I think part of it was an excitement just to see the X-Men on television.

  10. 10 MW said at 3:29 pm on April 28th, 2009:

    I had a similar experience with the ’90s Spider-Man cartoon. It holds up better than this does, but it is still not very good.

    I think this cartoon is directly responsible for my distaste for Wolverine and my outright hatred of Gambit.

  11. 11 Sallyp said at 3:50 pm on April 28th, 2009:

    At the time, I was entranced…now that I’ve grown up I’m highly embarrassed.

  12. 12 Bill D. said at 4:02 pm on April 28th, 2009:

    I watched this pretty faithfully for the first year or two, but more because it was an X-Men cartoon than because of actually liking it. Watchable at the time, but never particularly good. I would’ve preferred seeing the earlier “Pryde of the X-Men” version go to series… better animation, marginally better characterization (even with Wolvie’s Aussie accent, though how prophetic did that end up being?), and no Gambit in sight.

    Now the 90s Silver Surfer cartoon on the other hand, THAT I liked. I’d love to see how well that has held up.

  13. 13 Eno said at 4:15 pm on April 28th, 2009:

    Gotta agree with you there. The cartoon really hasn’t aged well and, like so many holy grails of nostalgia, wasn’t all that great in the first place once you take off the tinted specs. Ninja Turtles and He-Man would also probably fit in that category.

    At least we now have Spectacular Spider-Man… I dunno, what’s your view on that? Other than a few bits of hokey/cliche dialogue and melodrama that falls flat (but hey, B:tAS had a lot of that too. Just watch “I Am The Night”…) I’d say it’s very well written. The animation is mostly above average too for a TV show, except for some pretty bad use of CGI for vehicles (what is with kids shows nowadays doing that?)… And worse. The falling christmas tree in the second Sinister Six episode springs to mind immediately. I don’t know what they were thinking with that.

  14. 14 Max said at 5:57 pm on April 28th, 2009:

    I couldn’t even watch these as a kid. Honest truth.

  15. 15 Stuff Daddy said at 7:55 pm on April 28th, 2009:

    I am sick of people telling me how good this heap of Korean slavery was. I will say that the new “Wolverine & The X-men” cartoon, comes much closer to a Warner Animated product, but not Batman Animated.

  16. 16 KDBryan said at 5:03 am on April 29th, 2009:

    Wow, this takes me back. I remember watching and good-naturedly mocking this cartoon with my friends in my HS years. I remember Beast being fairly well-done but that’s about the nicest thing I think I can say for the show. Of course, for any Marvel fan back then, this was about par for the course, media adaptation-wise (which I expect counts for so much of the nostalgic goodwill towards it). Seriously, what else did Marvel fans have in the 1990′s? Captain America: The Movie? The Force Works/Iron Man cartoon? Generation X, the movie?
    *shudder*

    And those voices! Ouch. I had honestly forgotten how impressively terrible Belladonna’s- I can’t even call that an “accent”. Of course, between Xavier sounding continually nasal and/or constipated, Rogue’s hilariously bad accent (and her occasional melodramatic scream that somehow involved every vowel including “y”) and Storm’s incredibly stilted delivery, the show was always extremely MST3K-able.

    Any thoughts on the new Wolverine and The X-Men cartoon? I’ve been mildly enjoying it, if only for the bizarre experience of seeing several different versions of X-Men continuity being blended together like a Long Island Iced Tea.

  17. 17 Just Some Guy said at 6:27 am on April 29th, 2009:

    Despite all of that garbage (and really those clips were pretty representative of the series) it did have a handful of moments that were done well: the ones taken directly from comic. Of course to get to those moments you need to filter through a lot of awful stuff…

  18. 18 Steven H said at 7:50 am on April 29th, 2009:

    Yeah, pretty abysmal and all, but I’ll never stop loving the theme music. When playing a Heroclix X-Men team, my special team ability is for me to hum it until the other person hates me.

  19. 19 Phil Looney said at 9:23 am on April 29th, 2009:

    I remember it not being very good as a kid, but I was just excited about having the X-Men on TV. I remember the show just got worse as time went on.

    The one thing I give it credit for – I don’t think the first X-Men movie would have been a hit without the seeds planted by this cartoon.

  20. 20 Greg said at 11:22 am on April 29th, 2009:

    What subset of comic fans would ever compare this to Batman? I loved this cartoon as a kid and it helped get me into comics, BUT even at that young age I knew it wasn’t a patch on the Batman cartoon. That said, I do still love that theme song, despite its awfulness.

  21. 21 Blue Spider said at 2:41 am on May 1st, 2009:

    Look. Disney has had the rights to put most of the Marvel films on DVD for pretty near damned half a damn decade.

    So look you damned fool, the reason why Disney didn’t put these damn things on Damn Video Disc two or three damn years ago… at least in season form, is because they made more money releasing them two or three at a time.

  22. 22 Kneon said at 10:06 am on May 1st, 2009:

    Blue Spider is mean. :(

  23. 23 Kevin Church said at 10:14 am on May 1st, 2009:

    I don’t know Blue Spider, but they’ve been tagged as someone who doesn’t play well with others and will be sent to the time-out box in the future.

  24. 24 Mikester said at 10:46 am on May 1st, 2009:

    I think I’m going to refer to them as “Damn Video Discs” from now on.

  25. 25 kyle said at 11:53 pm on May 5th, 2009:

    to be honest, i liked this show. but i have to qualify that with a few remarks. first off, xmen is pretty much soap opera and batman isnt. naturally, the show is going to feel cheesy, the same way soaps feel cheesy.

    regarding the art- ALL american animation was like this. this was pretty much average to good for back then. its ridiculous to compare anything to batman because that was a total exception rather than a standard. besides (and ill probably get hate on this), looking at the art from this show feels the same as me reading a book drawn by george perez. it just piles up into a mess of lines that dont belong and questionable inking/coloring choices. so in that aspect, if its good enough for me to read TODAY, its good enough for me to watch then.