Hey I enjoyed Crossroads....

My four-year old daughter is a fiend for superheroes. A few months ago, it dawned on me to look for the Marvel Superheroes on YouTube. N9w, I hadn't seen these cartoons sicne the early 70's when soem local station showed them in the afternoons.

I was stunned.

Although the use of the original art was done to be cheap (and sucks for Kirby), the result was that these cartoons actually feel like the comics brought to life (choppy, semi-animated life, but still). And, becuase they are using the comic art, the stories are not as dumbed-down-for-television as kost cartoon versions of the comics.

I do hope for a nice, DVD edition one day.

It wasn’t cheesy or childish, at that time I’ve never seen a cartoon that mature aired on an kids channel!

Does that pre-date The Phantom 2040? That holds that title for me.

It's the Fox Kids Spider-Man show that has the best history of "you idiots!" to the guys running the channel. Initial order of 65 episodes, it does huge at the start, begins to taper off as they go along, so nobody orders an extention. Those running the series figure "hey, X-Men got an extention, so let's not wrap everything up at once" (sort of like comics decompression half a decade early!) The guys running the network pretty much write off Spidey, burning off a few eps in the Summer, even taking it off Saturdays for its last season. But then, don't ya know it, its reruns turn massive numbers during 1998. And even 99. So they scramble to revive it, but everybody involved has gone elsewhere, so they scrounge up "Spider-Man Unlimited" to try to compete with "Batman Beyond" (instead of just continuing, ya know, what was WORKING to begin with). It gets canceled within 2 episodes thanks to the Pokemon boom, while the 90s Spidey toon continues to successfully air reruns!

Also, can you confirm an early draft of the X-Men II movie was based on "God Loves, Man Kills"?

None of the Marvel cartoons pre-MTV's Spider-Man are affected by this. In fact, they can be released by whoever has the rights for that region. Since Marvel is only concerned with the domestic market (i.e., North America), it allows the UK to have whatever it wants whenever it wants.

Thus the UK doesn't have to wait until there's a cross-promotion to tag a DVD release to. DC's really well known for this; Superman Returns was joined on DVD here in North America with re-releases of all four previous films (and Supergirl), along with Superboy season one. Batman: Gotham Knight came out around the time Dark Knight hit theatres, The Complete Animated Series box set is being timed around The Dark Knight's DVD release.

The most famous Marvel-related one was the Dungeons & Dragons animated series -- out for years before the US got it. However, once Hasbro really asked for it, a deal was struck and the DVDs came out... with bonus unaired final episode done as a radio play.

IF Spider-Man & His Amazing Friends comes on DVD to North America, expect it to be with the theatrical release of Spider-Man 4. Or an OAV release. But not before that.

I also became a fan of the X-men through Spider-Man And His Amazing Friends...

A kid from my High School actually got his family to get him a 7-string guitar like what Steve Vai plays and played it at the talent show. Very impressive, considering how difficult it is to play his stuff.

I remember seeing "Pryde of the X-Men" listed in the t.v. section of the newspaper and not believing it. An actual X-Men cartoon? Awesome! I remember being disappointed there was no X-Men cartoon the following week. I spent an awful lot of quarters on the arcade game based on that cartoon, however.

Irony, irony...

The X-Men cartoon from the 90s sucked badly, even if you disregard how childish it was. "The Pryde of the X-Men" despite some shortcomings was really good though.

Akom gets a pretty bad rap. Their B:TAS episodes are the ugliest, after all, and season 1 of X-Men is pretty ugly. But they really did get their act together by season 2, and especially by the time Graz Animation, who were doing the layouts and main pre-production work on the show, folded into Dreamworks in 96. Episodes like "Bloodlines" and "Storm Front" really looked great. Unfortunately, once Graz was gone, they changed to Saban in-house for layouts and Philippine Animation Studio (the company who made their debut with the show by forgetting to cover Lady Deathstrike's boobs properly, who were the pinch hitters for Akom from season 3 onward) became the main company doing the animation, and as such the final 6 episodes look just as bad as the first 6!

As for why no Marvel Super Heroes DVD in the US: During the 90s, Saban Entertainment ended up buying out all the rights to New World Animation, which got the rights to the Marvel toons by way of Marvel having been owned by New World Studios in the 80s! Anyway, Saban was buying loads of stuff, since they already owned X-Men and had a hand in Spider-Man (and were doing Hulk & Silver Surfer). So in 97, all the Marvel toons became part of Saban's newly created Fox Family Worldwide. Which was then bought by Disney in 2001. So now it's almost just like with the 60s Batman show, one company owns the shows themselves, one company owns the likeness and character rights. Disney owns the toons in the US, and Marvel gets to exercise their ownership of likenesses and such (meaning their lawsuit against Buena Vista, aka Disney? Is mainly grounded in the fact the DVDs they had done of the Fox Kids Marvel toons used 'original' artwork which they didn't approve. Or something). Thus, other countries get these shows, and here, we're awaiting lawsuits to thaw out.

But considering Disney owns JETIX, and they've just started running the vast majority of their Marvel toons again this Summer (which they stopped after the lawsuits started flinging), it seems like things may be getting straightened out. For the record, those Canadian releases currently being touted on TVShowsonDVD.com are some 8th level company using an old loophole to put their VHS tapes out in digital format. For instance, in 2002, the 60s Spidey toon came out in a DVD boxset, totally remastered from the original negatives by Disney. The Canadian DVDs out now use the original, second-gen unremastered stuff from a few 80s releases. They're glorified, barely-semi official bootlegs, really.