You can’t help but wonder how a Marvel cartoon, starting two years after X-Men: The Animated Series established itself as a programming mainstay, could fail to live up to the same quality standards. It debuted in an age where children had brilliant cartoons like the animated series of X-Men and Batman to occupy their Saturdays. Instead of an equal to the well-told stories of X-Men, Iron Man has all the flair and appeal of the old Transformers cartoon. The plots are hair-brained schemes by villains who cackle and curse their subordinates for plans gone awry. The great comic books aside, looking at the cartoon it’s easy to understand how a studio exec might not think Iron Man could ever fly as a franchise. Iron Man just can’t stand up to its peers, and from the looks of it, it never even tried.
After Robert Downey Jr. made Tony Stark a household name, this following summary just seems unnecessary, but here goes:
Tony Stark, a brilliant industrialist, has a secret. When he isn’t running his highly successful and lucrative technology company he’s moonlighting as the formidable defender of the world known as Iron Man. His greatest foe? The ring-clad sorcerer known as the Mandarin, his brain-tank known as M.O.D.O.K., and his gallery of complementary rogues like Blizzard, Dreadknight, Grey Gargoyle, Whirlwind, and Blacklash (aka Whiplash, for all intents and purposes). Even outside of his suit, Stark has a rival: Justin Hammer (to be portrayed by Sam Rockwell in Iron Man 2). Hammer and Mandarin work in cahoots almost 100% of the time, making it almost inconceivable that the rival industrialist isn’t just arrested on the spot, especially since Mandarin leaves him holding the bag whenever a plan goes south.
To the show’s credit, it maintains the animation style that made the majority of the X-Men episodes so enjoyable. It looks like a comic book bought to life (no, not like the Watchmen motion comic), and that alone makes the cartoon somewhat enjoyable. This facet, however, is almost entirely drowned out by two factors: the god awful writing (yes, even by cartoon standards) and the embarrassing computer animation sequence that kicks in whenever Stark puts on the suit in a climactic moment. It may sound like we’re ragging on dated animation – but this goes beyond that. Not only is the color so faded and poor, but it’s the same sequence every time. Not only did they willfully overlook the shoddy animation of those computer graphics, but they then placed it in almost every episode.
But it’s the writing that really makes you groan. Let’s hearken back to the old Transformers cartoons when Megatron would devise some silly plan to fill energy cubes (from a volcano, nuclear powerplant, etc.), one of the Autobots would stumble across the plan and go screaming back to Optimus Prime, tell of what he saw, and then they’d go and brawl. Well, replace Megatron with Mandarin (M.O.D.O.K. stands in for Starscream); replace Optimus Prime with Tony Stark, and put his entourage of Jimmy Rhodes, Hawkeye, Spider Woman, and the Scarlet Witch in for the Autobots. It’s genuinely the same formula – and there’s no excuse for that. If X-Men and Batman can challenge young viewers with more complex plots then why couldn’t Iron Man? In place of any well conceived plot they use made up scientific names that are utterly meaningless and do little more than eat up time in the expositional dialogue used to complicate what is otherwise a really simple setup: Mandarin stole some piece of technology (from Stark, an alien, or the Pentagon) and now we need to get it back.
DVD Bonus Features
There aren’t any extras, not even a Stan Lee retrospective on the cartoon. The man loves being in front of the camera, he would have loved to help with something like that. It’s a subpar cartoon given no help by its poor DVD presentation. How unfortunate.
"Iron Man: The Complete Animated Television Series" is on sale May 4, 2010 and is not rated. Action, Adventure, Animation, Comic Book. Directed by Bob Arkwright, Dan Thompson. Written by Stan Lee, Ron Friedman. Starring Efrem Zimbalist Jr, Jennifer Hale, Jim Cummings, Ed Gilbert, Robert Hays, James Avery.
