Movies / Animé and Toons

Marvel X-Men Volume 4

By Hervé St-Louis
April 8, 2010 - 15:51

This is the second last chapter of the Marvel X-Men television series that ran throughout the 1990s and that was created by animation studio Saban. The X-men face Apocalypse in a five-part epic where the evil mutant recruits other bad mutants to wreck chaos on the world of the X-Men while he can kidnap the world’s most powerful telepaths. But X-Men are not giving up on their greatest foe and will not allow the world to be reconfigured by Apocalypse. Can the X-Men’s allies, Cable and Bishop help?

This storyline was slow in development as many threads that had been going on since the beginning of the series are finally brought back and weaved in a grand epic. I have to say that after this story which was in scope as great as the two Pheonix sagas this series had prior, that the other episodes felt tired. It’s as if the creators of the series had ran out of ideas and could no longer muster anymore great stories. What follows is not bad. It’s just not as involved and world changing as the previous episodes. For example, some of the episodes included the classic Christmas special and a few plot-cleaning episodes like the one where Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch discover that they are Magneto’s children. Christmas stories, unless done in a quirky way like in the Simpsons’ always feel like fishes out of water and completely irrelevant outside of the Christmas season. The episode with Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch was actually an Avengers story done by John Byrne but with more panache.

The animation of course is as poor as previous episode. Having this series come from Disney is ironic. Disney spends a decent amount of money on the production of its television cartoon series. Saban never did. This series looks rush. You can see the animation levels and overlays not registering properly with held cell animated layers. That’s pretty poor. Still, this is the series that made the X-Men a household name in the United States, so it’s still a good collection to own.

Rating: 7 /10

Last Updated: August 31, 2023 - 08:12