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Much like Iron Man, which was the first half of the Marvel Action Hour, this animated version of the Fantastic Four was plagued with many of the same problems. The cheap animation lacked fluidity, with characters often looking too bulky or moving awkwardly. Continuity in the animation is a large hurdle to deal with. The less said about the awful writing and vocal work the better.
The first season is actually just redone, slightly modernized (for the 90s anyway), remakes of episodes from their 1960s series. Is the sight of the Human Torch rapping in an episode supposed to be a way to endear the character to a younger demographic, or is it some kind of campy affectation for the Gen X set? It’s very difficult to say. Is this first season supposed to truly be this terrible, or is their a layer of knowing artifice and camp going on? Since everything is played so straight and with gee-whiz kid-gloves, I think that the producers thought that a wholesome approach to the Fantastic Four would be a great approach. And there’s nothing wrong with the idea of that approach, the problem is the execution of it here.
Mercifully, much like Iron Man, the second season didn’t just improve upon the first, it transcended it. It comes close to achieving a sense of overall good-but-not-great-ness, but certain problems from the first season are reoccurring. Dr. Doom’s bombastic and incompetent characterization is irksome. The most fearsome and delicious evil villain in the entire Marvel universe is downgraded to this lisping buffoon? For shame.
At least they dropped Brian Austin Green’s whiny performance as the Human Torch, cleaned up the animation and jettisoned that rejected 80s-style theme song into outer space.
The cameos galore in the second season harkens back to the glory days of Marvel comics in which character crossovers were episodic and not some giant company-wide game-changer. Black Panther, Thor, Hulk, Daredevil and Ghost Rider all pop up briefly, and feature some great guest-vocal work and a sense of fun.
But this show was always clearly aimed at a much younger audience than the other Marvel shows on at the time. This isn’t necessarily a problem, but the piss-poor animation and cheesy, barely recognizable adaptations of the central characters hinders any kind of momentum it would have built.
