At least Stan Lee is still out there trying new things.
Or, perhaps, it would be more apt to say that at least Stan Lee is still out there.
Either way, this sprightly old man has jumped into the Internet revolution with both feet, and this is the first fruit of his labor. It has its good and its bad aspects. Let's hit the bad first.
Seventh Portal is one of the cheesiest cartoons you're ever likely to see--bar none. It is cheesy in ways that only comic books can be. We are talking pure, premium, unadulterated, 100%-genuine dairy LIMBURGER, here. It's full of hackneyed cliches that could cause even non-comic-book readers to go, "Oh, no, not ANOTHER one." The storyline of "kids get sucked into computer and turned into superheroes" has been done so many times before, as has the "alternate world ruled by evil warlord with funky name and rebellious daughter, who wants to conquer earth" one. And some of the character names are even worse--since most of the good ones have been taken already, they had to resort to variant spellings of names (e.g. "Izayus") or flatly ridiculous handles (like "Conjure Man" for their clone of Mandrake the Magician. I mean, really. Does he do whatever a conjure can?). Also bad is the annoying framework for each episode, where about 1/4 of the running time is taken up by opening credits and an annoying "in our last episode" flashback, and the way each episode is really short.
But on the good side, the production values are pretty good--thanks to the magic of Shockwave, the show comes off as better-animated than many Saturday morning cartoons. And the character designs are pure classic 60s comic book style--which means that gravity must work in strange ways on these worlds, at least for the female gender. The plot, comic-bookish as it is (which means that both heroes and villains have to make some stupid mistake with alarming regularity), does grab the interest. The interaction between the characters has some good chemistry, and if Internet terminology is occasionally used in the wrong ways, well, at least they're trying. Watching the show costs only time, and the return on the investment is worth it.
What Stan Lee is really doing here, more or less, is reviving the concept of the "serial"--you know, the short films they showed back in the day to keep people coming to movies week after week. It seems to be working--even if it's a trifle cheesy, I know I'LL be tuning in for the next episode.
