As much as I loved both X-Men and Spider-Man when they first aired, I see a lot of their flaws in hindsight. The struggle to deal with massive casts of characters and often unwieldy “inspired by the comics” storylines didn’t always bother young Cartoon Sara, but they’re tough to ignore today. Time is seldom kind to computer graphics of the past and Spider-Man’s CG cityscapes haven’t aged well. Some of the worst animation caught my attention even back then and it’s even harder to watch today, ranging from passable to “This downshot of two characters walking is making my eyeballs scream” with some scattered moments of quality along the way. It didn’t help that Batman: The Animated Series came out around the same time, making X-Men and Spider-Man look all the more like textbook examples of the hard-to-animate character designs that Batman was rebelling against. The single episodes I saw of Iron Man and Fantastic Four from the syndicated Marvel Action Hour didn’t even pass the relatively low bar of my 90s TV watching standards.
Read More