The movie was awesome, made a ton of money and sold a ton of DVD/Blu-ray disks, so it makes sense that Marvel would want to expand the franchise beyond comic books, and movies, which can only come out once every two years at best. Enter the Iron Man animated television show.
Like the previous, and I might add, short lived Spider Man: The New Animated Series (there's already a new show which points how badly it was named) it is computer 3D animation rendered with "cell shading" techniques that are designed to make it look like it was hand drawn animation. There is a reason Spider Man: The New Animated Series didn't last past it's first season, it sucked. The writing was on par with the literary bile that a high school english failure would come up with and it looked terrible. Which brings me back to Iron Man.
It. Looks. Terrible. Most of the environments that the characters find themselves in are bland and empty with less detail then you'd find in even the simplest of 2D animation shows. There are a few instances where the producers made sure things looked good with lots of detail but those scenes only end up looking out of place because most of the show looks like wide empty space. This goes to the point that neither TV or film animation should be done with cell shaded 3D. There's just no point in trying to make 3D animation look 2D, and with a TV show that has significantly smaller budgets to work with it only causes more problems.
For instance, the animation appears stiff and lifeless. Another problem with their chosen production methods is that many of the visual effects that are simple to pull off quickly and cheaply are very difficult to achieve in 3D. Iron Man is an action franchise that requires a lot of explosions, smoke, dust and sparks. All of which need complex particle methods to do even remotely well in 3D while the 2D animator can grab a pencil and have a lot of fun with it. So what does all this mean for the Iron Man show? It means that these sort of effects were either badly made or missing altogether. So when Tony Stark in his heavy metal suit gets thrown hundreds of feet back, hits the dirt ground and slides to a stop, he doesn't kick up dust. At all. There were a few sparks but they looked kind of stupid.
So the new animated Iron Man show looks awful, in almost every conceivable way. But looks aren't everything. I loved the movie Hoodwinked which was also less than eye candy and had less than stellar animation. What made it a great film was that it was very well written and performed by the voice actors. I've already mentioned how bad the writing was in that similarly produced Spider Man show. Iron Man is not that bad. But...
It still isn't going to win any writing awards. In fact, it's still pretty bad but it's not horrible. Unfortunately it's just not enough to save the show. Tony Stark is a high school teenager in this show and this creates a lot of problems. For one, he's still a super genius kid that has managed to put is super genius father to shame on occasion. That may not sound like a problem provided you are open minded to re-envisioning a property for different mediums. I am open minded in this way. The market for cartoon shows is largely teenagers and younger in North America so it makes sense. The problem is, why the hell is he still in high school?!
His intellect is established as well beyond college level so why is he going to high school? It make no sense at all. None. Whatsoever. There is a scene at school where a dumb jock mentions the term "A.I." to which Tony asks if he even knows what that means. The dumb jock of can't answer the question of course which poses the question, why the hell is Tony Stark in high school?! If I were to continue to watch the series then I'd have to continue to ask this question until the writers realize that it is not necessary to have teenaged Tony Stark in high school in order for him to have age appropriate friends. But I'll stop asking it, and watching the show.
Before I conclude this review/rant on the animated, if you can call it that, Iron Man show I have to bring up the other aspect to motion picture production that is also of great importance and that is the sound. I would love to just mention that the voice acting is bad and leave it at that but you know I just can't do that. No, on second thought I can. It's bad. But voice acting isn't all there is to audio. It's an action show and as previously mentioned this means explosions and all sorts of sound effects. The sound pallet used is very limited but for the most part it's good enough for a television production. Of course they can use a sound library so much of their work is done for them so that's probably the easiest part of the shows creation. So sound effects are okay. Too bad everything else about the show isn't.
There's the saying "anything worth doing is worth doing well." I really like this saying because it states that if we are going to do something then we should put in some real effort. Also, it doesn't say that it should end up being "good" or even "great" but that it should be done "well." Generally if something is done well then it will be good but not necessarily. Maybe it will end up being just okay and that's fine. Iron Man is clearly not done well and so it is not even okay, it's crap and that's really sad because the franchise has far greater potential. This show should be really cool and in a way pay homage to the film that rejuvenated the franchise paving the way for a television production. This show may not last long.
Here is a commercial for the Show:
And because you all deserve some truly magnificent entertainment after all that here's a commercial for the Japanese Spider-Man. If only what we got was this good:
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