It's all I can do to stop myself from complaining about how Cyclops was treated this past season. Stop me before I complain about Cyclops again!
You know how it is, you dislike something, you find yourself posting the same thing over & over, then you realize "whoa, maybe I dislike this a little too much", you try to break the cycle, etc. I tried burning some of it off by writing my own review at IMDB (there's only about 20 reviews there for the show now). I still think the writers should have made more of an effort to show that even when depressed Cyclops still cared about the other X-Men.
I understand, especially regarding criticisms about Cyclops. I sometimes think I have nitpicked so much on this forum about it, people could sell t-shirts. I have tried to tuck it back, which has been hard since you usually seem to agree with me and share some rants! As you can see by how long this post is, this time I have failed to bottle my urges.
Panthro said:
I don't remember the 2nd one (haven't had time for an all out 90s X-Men marathon), but that first one sounds hilarious. I'll have to find that on You-Tube.
It was 1993, Season 2, " 'TILL DEATH DO US PART, PART 2". Wolverine is fighting Hairbag, one of Mr. Sinister's Nasty Boyz, and he lays out Wolverine with a POISON BURP! It isn't enough to be brought to your knees by a burp, but Wolvie goes on about choking or whatever.
The first one is from 1984, SPIDER-MAN AND HIS AMAZING FRIENDS, "A Firestar Is Born". Most of the episode was the origin of Firestar, told in between her and Iceman visiting their old chums the X-Men, while Juggernaut decides to go on a revenge rampage. The first time Wolverine is animated, as well as with an Aussie voice accent. It's an unflattering debut. As bonus absurdity, Angel can somehow show lasers from his hands, Firestar mispronounces "Magneto" in her narration, and some of the sound effects for the Danger Room are stock computer effects from STAR TREK. I actually have some fondness for that silly show, as I was in the crib when it was still airing in syndication on NBC, but it's hardly a good moment for Logan. The episode also has the most articulate Juggernaut ever, who uses big words like, "juvenile" (and, like his original 60's comic appearance, lacks pants).
Personally, the toxic burp is worse. Yeah, being thrown into a wall and screaming, "I-I'm stuck!" is a low point, but losing to the Juggernaut isn't so bad. Losing to some random henchman's GAS is less justifiable.
You can watch the bit from "A FIRESTAR IS BORN" here (Wolverine's fight begins at 4:42, and ends at about 5:01):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=629Tc2ubIDM
And that "burp" moment from the 90's show is here (from about 0:20 to 0:40):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybb8...2FD9D5BD&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=37
Most unflattering.
Panthro said:
He had some unflattering fights in his own series as well, like the one where he got knocked around by that loony cop in the iron man armor suit (come on, that's basically what it was) in "Prototype".
Hey now, the angle of Superman being blinded by an attack was a nice twist. But I will agree that Superman was a bit underpowered in that show. It was mostly for drama's sakes, though. They knew when to take the gloves off, like the Darkseid moments.
Panthro said:
As long as we can agree the fight should/could have been better. I hate one-sided fights. One of the weird things about it is the dialogue indicates this wasn't the fight time Thor fought the Hulk, which makes his poor showing even more ridiculous. I don't really trust Chris Yost with Thor either. Yost wrote Next Avengers: Heroes of Tomorrow after all.
I agree that Thor could have put up a better showing against Hulk in HULK VS. It makes little sense power wise that Wolverine can fight the Jade Giant to a draw, but Thor can't. Popularity wise it makes sense, but if I wanted that, I'd watch wrestling (where a wrestler over 45 can beat one in his prime if he is popular enough). Still, the fight aside, HULK VS. THOR was a decent story and a fine introduction to Asgard, most of which had not been animated before (unless you count the original "motion comics" of 1966). Unlike HULK VS. WOLVERINE, there was more to that 45 minute short than a fight.
Yost has also written some good stuff on X-MEN EVOLUTION, or FANTASTIC FOUR: WORLD'S GREATEST HEROES (it gets a bad rep, but if you look at it as a comedy, it actually is rather entertaining), or even the 2k3 TMNT cartoon (Yost wrote about a dozen episodes of that). Most writers will have some mediocre or duds in their resume; the best maintain more consistency, but I wouldn't cringe at Yost yet. Or Kyle, or Johnson. When they're on, they're on. First seasons can be rough on anyone, especially considering it had been years since any of them worked on the X-Men. It is easy to trash Season 1 of W&TXM compared to, say, TSSM, but look at the first 26 episodes of THE BATMAN (or even, to a degree, LEGION OF SUPER HEROES), and it looks like gold. Season One's major failing I think was the writers didn't think establishing proper set-up to major events at the start, such as the X-Men status quo, was important, when it was, because like any cartoon, their continuity was their own, NOT exactly like the comics or films, and has to be taken on it's own terms. If "Hindsight" had been 4 parts and the first episode was more of a sort of "day in the life" episode of the X-Men, establishing who they are and how they normally roll, I think a lot of the criticisms wouldn't have been as bad later on the road, since we'll have better seen where, say, Cyclops fell from, or how much Wolverine stepped up. Instead we only saw bits and pieces of that in flash-backs because the writing crew I think had a sense of, "they already know the origin", but I think it would have resulted in a stronger season. That, and the Sentinel/Phoenix plot lines really had nothing to do with each other rather than coming to a head around the same time, and the Sentinel story was much more interesting between Kelly and Magneto. The Hellfire Club stuff felt way more obligatory. But, now I am digressing.
Panthro said:
Is "Sword of the Stranger" any good?
If you don't mind paying $20 for a 100 minute anime film, yes. Some people don't like buying movie anime anymore, as series are more popular in the DVD age, where for $20 you can buy 4-5 episodes of something, or even a thin-pack of a series. But, some places online offer it cheaper. It was a fine film; if it had come out in 1997 instead of 2007, it might have reached "NINJA SCROLL" type fame, if you're into anime. The story is a little basic by anime standards, but that isn't the strength of it; the strength was the execution, IMO. It's basically a "lone samurai takes on evil dudes to protect a kid" story, but the animation is great and the action sequences are incredible. In terms of anime, I've paid $20 for far, far worse fare.
As a bonus, Scott McNeil, the voice of Wolverine from X-MEN EVOLUTION, plays the main antagonist.
Panthro said:
[ et al about NEXT AVENGERS]
Rick D. Zimmerman, who is playing Hulk in "PLANET HULK", apparently will be Thor in the AVENGERS cartoon in a couple of years. I liked David Boat and Matt Wolf as Thor.
ULTIMATE AVENGERS VS. ULTIMATE X-MEN was scrapped for HULK VS., as told by Steven E. Gordon himself. To be frank, I think HULK VS. was a far better product that UAvUX would have been, since the mini it was based on wasn't that amazing.
I think the theme of Torunn's bit with NEXT AVENGERS and Thor was that she had to "prove" herself to her father and go beyond mortal heroics and honor in order to be acknowledged. When she went into space to get rid of Ultron, she was stepping up beyond the mortal plane, where sacrificing her life for what was right, or to save someone, moved her into the stuff of legend. Disney's HERCULES in the 90's had a similar theme; Hercules wasn't welcomed back into Olympus as a god, despite that in the movie's terms his mortality was through no fault of his own, until he "proved" himself. Hercules had to be willing to sacrifice his life to Hades himself to save Megera before he could become a true god (or demi-god). The moral is that it is easy or takes no courage to be brave and heroic when one is untested, when nothing can harm you and you can overpower any obstacle; but when one can't is when true courage is seen or not.
That all said, it did make Thor seem to be little better than Odin, who often tortured the bejeesus out of his son to try to "learn him something" and Thor usually never liked it. And it did make Thor seem like a deadbeat father; which, a lot of gods are in myth, but one usually doesn't like seeing that quality in Marvel's Thor. While the angle of having to "prove yourself" to earn any sort of acknowledgment or personal love from a father who is a god is common stuff in mythology, in modern times it is seen as cruel and neglectful. After all, even the Biblical God was more than willing to watch his son Jesus be crucified, which is hardly the most comfortable way to die. Nowadays, someone would call ACS on God, at least.
(There was an earlier moment where Torunn prays to Thor to answer her darkest hour, basically, and he magically returns her sword to her from Ultra City.)
I do agree it made Thor look hypocritical. The "Uncle Tony" stuff was fine, as well as Vision and Ultron himself. I didn't like the idea of making Stark his creator, not Hank Pym, because it robbed Pym Jr. of any drama and stuck him in the "goofy funny genius" cliche, when it could have easily been avoided. I think NEXT AVENGERS could have flowed better had the entire bit with Hulk been removed and instead it was Thor who showed up in the finale act to fight Ultron. Unlike Hulk, who was not even mentioned until act 3 by sheer obligation, Thor had been mentioned many times in the story up until that point.
Josh Fine would like a sequel to NEXT AVENGERS. I wouldn't. The characters are really too stock. Of course Cap's son is the leader. Of course Pym's son is a tech nerd. Of course Thor's kid is a warrior. Anyone with 5 minutes and a notepad could have some up with those concepts, and I expected a little more imagination, maybe closer to Brian K. Vaughn when he created the RUNSAWAYS, with the NEXT AVENGERS kids. Maybe I expected too much. I mean, imagine how much fun if we switched the cliches? Imagine if Pym Jr. is a jock, who can grow in size, and Cap's son is the reluctant nerd, groaning every time someone wants him to throw a shield? But, whatever.
Still, I thought NEXT AVENGERS was better than INVINCIBLE IRON MAN.
Panthro said:
I certainly hope a Death of Captain America adaptation would turn out better than Superman Doomsday, which felt more like an experiment with the format rather than a sincere attempt at telling a Superman story.
Hopefully. There's not as much Cap material, so it wouldn't run the risk of accidentally ripping off prior material as SUPERMAN: DOOMSDAY did.
Panthro said:
That seems the more likely route that they'd take. Or they could do something completely out of left field like reveal that Xavier & Jean both knew the truth behind why Cyclops couldn't turn off his optic beams & deliberately kept the information from him fearing that if he ever learned to turn the power off he might, GASP, be tempted to leave the institute & pursue a normal life, and when Cyclops himself learns of this, the shock & resentment results in him leaving. But I'd doubt the writers would ever consider doing that.
In the comics, Xavier and Jean lied to Cyclops (and the other X-Men) about Xavier seemingly being killed by Basilisk. Xavier's the sort of guy who, rather than say, "Look, I have to prepare for these aliens who are coming, please don't bother me for the next few months", would rather organize his own impostor and then allow his students to believe him dead for weeks. Xavier also sometimes resented Cyclops and Jean, as well as some of his other students, for "wasting time" trying to have normal social lives rather than sacrificing all of it for the cause, as he mostly did. My point is that in the comics, at least, Kitty was right; "Professor Xavier is a Jerk!" At least sometimes.
I don't see that angle in the cartoon, though. I especially don't see Jean deliberately lying to Cyclops there. I don't think the writers really intended the viewer to be surprised that Xavier is so dismissive of Cyclops as he has been in the show. Again, there is no context for how things were like before. Just because Xavier was nice to get Scott to join and stick with them doesn't mean he had quite the "adopted father" role to Scott here as he did in the comics. Again, we had almost no time to see the X-Men before the explosion. For all we know, Xavier was always that way. Still, while Logan criticizing Scott for things that he himself has been guilty of at best comes off as ironic, but Xavier comes off as more shocking, to me.
The idea of Cyclops's inability to control his optic blast being more mental than physical is a very, very recent development from Whedon's run on ASTONISHING X-MEN and to the best of my memory no writer has really touched it since. There is a school of thought that if Scott can control his blasts, he loses some of his character pathos, and that's not something I disagree with overall. I never liked the whole, "character becomes twice as efficient without their powers" story idea because, you would expect that when their powers return they'd now be twice as efficient with them, and they usually never are. I wasn't altogether thrilled with how Whedon executed that angle, either. He has Frost deconstruct Scott as a loser for being the lone obstacle of his own success, but what happens? Scott merely acts like Capt. Mal from FIREFLY for the rest of the run, not like himself. There's one pose from Cassaday that matches a Mal pose from the TV show exactly, if it wasn't so obvious. Plus, the idea of being able to overcome psychic illusions by shooting them with a handgun is still one of the most absurd things I have ever read; by that logic, no one could ever fool Punisher.
W&TXM Season 1 seemed to find it's niche by making Cyclops' actions only vaguely understandable. While few in the audience would be surprised that he'd cling to Jean's memory so much, when he takes it to destructive levels, it isn't justified. Scott isn't justified when he brought his grief to disturbing levels, when he abandoned his friends, and so on. I honestly don't expect that to change in Season 2. I don't expect them to make whatever bad things Scott does for dramatic effect entirely justified. The theme seems to be they like Cyclops as an anti-hero, despite the fact that unlike most anti-heroes, many of Cyclops' acts backfire and he needs to be bailed out. I can't remember one instance where Wolverine made a major mistake in the show and had to have the rest of the X-Men bail him out and shake their heads at him. Even his error of failing to destroy Master Mold in the cradle when he could have, Wolverine himself is allowed to avenge by stabbing a computer terminal.
Panthro said:
She was already plenty turned off by Cyclops physically assaulting Wolverine, so I wouldn't rule it out. Kind of makes you wonder how differently we might feel towards this incarnation if they'd gone the opposite direction with the pilot/Breakdown had shown Psylocke hanging around the X-Men, checking out Cycke & then show Psylocke being on the receiving of an irrationally angry/jealous Jean...
Granted, Psylocke looks like she's 16 in this show so that may not have been an option.
Psylocke seemed more attached to Quicksilver than the X-Men. I didn't think she looked as young as Lorna, who always looked no older than 14.
I still have a problem with that bit of the "Breakdown" flashback. I mean, c'mon, how can anyone think an audience would relate to Cyclops after he blasts Wolverine in the back? When he continues to when Logan says outright he has no intention of fighting back? Or all the times in the show when Cyclops looked for any excuse to blast Logan, who for all we knew was still keeping his end of the bargain with Jean to not fight Cyclops? He came off like a spoiled brat lashing out because for the first time in his life he had a little competition with Logan. Logan clearly comes out as the more honorable man in that instance; he isn't putting relationship stuff before the good of the team, and that was before he personally reassembled the X-Men and whatnot. And while I may or may not object to Logan coming off as more honorable than Cyclops, my beef is it shouldn't be that clear cut and easy to see. Make it a challenge. Make Logan's feat of assuming command a worthy accomplishment, rather than make Cyclops seem so weak that Logan was merely filling a vacant seat, putting on an empty suit. If Season 2 fixes that issue, of making Logan rely less on Future Xavier and not thinking he is stronger when Cyclops is easily overcome, they'll get a better rivalry and a stronger show.
To be fair, Wolverine isn't the only character where these sort of things happen. JL/U did that with Batman a lot; he had to be right in every situation, even to the extent of Superman looking inexperienced. No other Justice Leaguer could have common sense beyond just smashing at a target with their powers, because that was Batman's role, the strategist. It got better as the show developed, but it did happen. So it isn't just Wolverine.
Panthro said:
I'd like see both Cyclops & Colossus enjoy a "Crowing Moment of Awesome".
Cyclops has had a few in animation history. Even though he needed to be bailed out in the end, "X-Treme Measures" has some cool power moments with him. X-MEN EVOLUTION of course had "STUFF OF HEROES" where Cyclops stood his ground and blasted Juggernaut (before it backfired and he needed to be saved by Rogue, but he was very rootable in that show so it was still effective).
To be honest, a scene in Season 2 where Cyclops does something cool with his optic blasts is something I expect, because that happened a few times in Season 1. Colossus, though, needs it more.
t:
Granted, the odds of Thor showing up on this show are slim to none, unless they feel like doing an X-Men Vs. Avengers episode, which I don't see happening. 
