I love the DC Animated Universe. I love Batman: The Animated Series, Superman: The Animated Series, Justice League, Justice League Unlimited, and all of the other shows that were produced featuring DC super heroes. But for the Marvel fan in me there was also the X-Men Animated Series, and I loved it. Sure, the animation seems kind of weak in retrospect, and the voice acting sometimes left something to be desired, but the show was one of the first times I had ever seen comic book super heroes and their fans treated with anything approaching respect.
Super heroes had been a staple of Saturday morning cartoons for a lot longer than I can remember, but they have always been presented as silly and somewhat childish. The classic example of this sort of thing is the Superfriends shows, which transformed the most popular and longest running DC heroes as a band of silly, wise cracking goofballs with even sillier villains to contend with. But when the X-Men series aired, it took a different approach. Yes, the characters still wore funny looking spandex outfits, but the stories that the series told were, in many cases, drawn directly from the comic books themselves. Granted, the stories presented in the 1980s era X-Men comic books were sometimes a little on the frivolous side, but the series included the entire Dark Phoenix saga, a version of the Days of Future Past story, and other quite involved and serious story lines.
I will say, however, that I was never a big fan of Jubilee as a regular character. If given the choice to replace her with a different regular female character I'd have preferred someone like Shadowcat or perhaps Polaris. And leaving out Nightcrawler and Iceman as regular members of the team was, in my opinion, a bad move.
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