Marvel Action Hour
All the heroes. All of ‘em.
Ep. 202 is live!
Make Mine Marvel Month marches forward with a little gem from the 90's near and dear to me. This week sees me and the boys revisiting the syndicated package Marvel Action Hour, which gave us both Iron Man and The Fantastic Four in animated form. I truly enjoyed this little programming block, and I suspect a good measure of that stems from how it came onto my radar. Without going down a wild rabbit hole, I will just say that my step mother's insistence on me handling all the cleaning and laundry for our household every weekend is responsible for me finding this show. I happened to find the show by chance when I had gotten up extremely early to get started on the house work. I started sorting the laundry and turned on FOX 43. To my surprise, there was Stan Lee opening a show with some description of what we were about to see. Soon enough, the Iron Man cartoon starts up, followed by the FF. With that, I was hooked and The Marvel Action Hour was a part of my Saturday Morning routine.
Now, the show wasn't without its determinants. The animation in the first seasons of each show was not exactly top notch. This did improve for season two, however this didn't help as the shows would not be renewed for third seasons. Iron Man did make an attempt at using some computer animation that no one would ever accuse of holding up. However, at that time...it was pretty rad. The opening theme for FF's first season is still an effort that just elicits a guttural groan from me... "...Just call the Four...Fantastic Four, DON'T NEED NO MORE, that's ungrammatical!" Real lyrics. Honest to God, real lyrics. Is what it is, I suppose. Still, despite its flaws we were treated to numerous Marvel Characters in animated form, and saw some fun storylines adapted as well. What was truly impressive was the toy offerings from each show, especially the Fantastic Four line. There's honestly too many to post here, but by all means...look them up. These are lines I'm honestly considering adding to the collection in time.
It would have been interesting to see what other storylines and characters we could have seen had a third season happened for both shows. You look at these lines and consider that Iron Man's delivered Fing Fang Foom, while FF gave us a decent set of Inhumans characters...I don't think it's too crazy to wager that some more interesting characters would have shown up in the toy aisle. That is going to wrap things up this week for Make Mine Marvel Month here on Yesterdaze, but join us next week for the first Patron Pick of the new year! Tune in as we discuss Spider-man: The Animated Series, with some elements of Spider-man Unlimited. Thanks for reading & listening, and we'll see you next week! -Derek
