Good grief this show was horrable

There's good anime and bad anime just like theres good American Cartoons and bad ones. Every culture ahs their good and bad. Cartoons tend to get a little more mass produced for "straight-to-exportation-to-the-US" action in Japan, thus why we tend to get all their unoriginal crap over here instead of the good stuff. Now, how Dragonball Z did good, I'll never know. They took a series that was mediocre in the first place and edited the heck out of it. Ah well. It's all perspective. I also personally kind of liked the F4 movie (realizing, of course, that it was just an intro for a much better movie).

Anyway,
I think it's cowardice to go with another cultures style to try to raise your viewership. I always really loved the F4 in the mid-90's, and the animation on that one wasn't even that good. It was stiff, it was sometimes inconsistent, it was sub-G.I.Joe quality, in fact. I'd still wake up early in the morning for the Marvel Action Hour though. And I saw every episode until I could easily give you a scene by scene breakdown of every show.

I think the problem plaguing the new F4 was the characters and story, and the fact that neither were really strong. The only characters I really cared for in the episode were Ben and Reed. And Reed only because I felt sorry for him being married to this wimpy incarnation of Sue. When it got to the part where we see Ronan, I was like "Yes. This is going to be awesome after all." But they managed to make Ronan a pushover too. The comic Ronan would, for one, have had better grounds for arresting an alien being (Johnny in this case), and would have also FAR outdone himself in battle. He has a hammer powered by "THE POWER COSMIC!" for goodness sakes. Between that and Kree technology, the only one of the four that would have stood a chance is Reed, and that's only because he's the only one smart enough to figure out an enemies weak point. Johnny was WAY too juvenile, even for Johnny (and what was with the cheesy haircut), Reed had absolutely no grip on anything, which is totally not Reed, Sue had emotional issues, and the whole city seemed to like them, which also isn't entirely accurate.

Then you have the CG. It's like they made no attempt to make the CG blend with the cel animation. It was very distracting. The mouth's were also an issue. They weren't always sync'd up to the words. An attempt at faking a dubbed look I'd assume. But why try to be an over-streamlined anime unless you already knew you were going to have rating issues. Personally, I don't see why they didn't go for the same kind of look they went for with "Ultimate Avengers" or even the Avengers or Silver Surfer series' from the late 90's. The style of any one of those would have been far superior to what they're doing.

Of course, one has to also understand that the majority of large, high quality cel animation studios no longer exist. So I imagine it's alot harder finding good animators nowadays. An unfortunate truth.

Even so, if they would have gone with a poorly emulated Bruce Timm style (a'la the last season of Batman:The Animated Series after it moved from FOX to the WB) and had a really good story and kept the charaters true to themselves, they would have kept my repeat viewership. Whatever though.

I give this a season (two at best) before it goes the way of "Spider-Man Unlimited," and it's later "I'm-trying-too-hard-to-be-cool" rendition from MTV.

-Matt

*rolls her eyes*

I must be the only person who disliked this episode.

Ben Grimm forever!