Les 4 Fantastiques

The first season, particularly the initial episodes, are real rough in animation, writing, and acting, but it picks up as it goes along. The Silver Surfer episodes are good and the second season is a vast improvement.

The first season (or episodes 1-13 if you're watching on Disney+) is really quite poor. This is apparent fairly immediately too as you're hit by a dreadful disco opening theme. The animation isn't terrible but it's not good either, villains especially look bad, most notably Dr Doom and the muscle-bound Silver Surfer (serving a poor Galactus). Unlike the other Marvel cartoons there is no depth to any storylines, they're quick, easy, and very conveniently finished by having Mr Fantastic just saying something about science and you're done. It's a kids cartoon that can only be enjoyed by kids. It's super camp as well, in one episode Johnny Storm even has a musical number for no reason.

5/10

The second season has far better animation, dialogue and plots. It gets a lot more interesting as in the last few episodes there are a lot of crossovers with other characters from the Marvel universe. Perhaps with it being the same release years as other cartoons then plots could have interlinked instead of being repeated though (mostly with Silver Surfer). It's still far from perfect, especially with one of the last episodes just being a very lazy clipshow, but majorly improved.

7/10.

This is a good cartoon adap of the F4 and manages quite easily at times to capture the flavour of the classic F4 tales from Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. By the time of the second season at least, it had matured into a fine Superhero animated series, that while not being able to evoke the magic of the original run of comics, or even the 1967 Hannah Barbera cartoon, is a good representation of the Fantastic Four. The only problem i have really is that the style of humour is too screwball to swallow. The producers clearly set out to make this series a comedy, and this shows in the representations of the characters, which are very cheesy to say the least. But aswell as that the humour misses the mark almost all of the time in the first series because it is trying to be too clever. The irony of this is that the original comics were cleverly funny. Still, by the time of the scond season the problems had been ironed out. The storylines had become stronger, and the representations of Mr Fantastic, Invisible Girl, Human Torch and the ever lovin' blue eyed Thing, had become simply fantastic. This is a good series, every episode is packed with action, good animation, a good theme tune and capable villains each week, from Dr.Doom, The Kree Skrulls, Galactus and the anti hero Sub-Mariner. It can hold it's head up as being a good representation of the F4, and at the very least is far superior to the the 1979 Animated series, and even the underrated 1994 movie.

This series (which was based on the Marvel comic of the same name) initially ran for two seasons in syndication as one half of a weekly show called The Marvel Action Hour (the other half was Iron Man). Perhaps The Fantastic Four was a rare case on a series that actually improved later on. The first season was lacking in various areas. The animation was stiff and appeared to be lacking with the textures (they looked very bright and rough to put it in other words). Somehow, there was at times a feeling that the stories were boarding towards camp. What stands out the most about the first season of The Fantastic Four is the theme song. Although the theme song was catchy, it was also really cheesy and sounded more like a jingle than anything else. Throughout the series, certain annoying factors tended to surface whether it was the theme from the first season or some fairly irritating supporting characters. When the second season came along, several improvements were made. The animation was better, a stronger theme song was put into place, and the episodes felt more action packed.

This Fantastic Four cartoon was part of the Marvel Action Hour along with Iron Man. At first, the animation and dialogue was pretty bad and they had annoying supporting characters, but the series remained true to the comics. The story lines they took from the comics were done very well, like episodes involving the Silver Surfer. When the second season began, animation vastly improved and the series became more serious. Too bad it was the last for the show.