Sean Akizuki's Fantasy Critic

There will always be creative liberties with adaptations. Saban's X-Men: The Animated Series was an adaptation and alteration of the comics. A lot of stuff from the COMICS couldn't fit into a Saturday Morning Cartoon .  One of the many things that shocked me was that Magneto and Mystique didn't work together in the comics. In fact, Mystique actually took part in ARRESTING Magneto and was never part of the OG Brotherhood of Mutants incarnation. It was because Magneto and Mystique were often portrayed working together. The X-Men arcade game featured Mystique as Magneto's cunning second-in-command. It also had Magneto successfully taking over a Sentinel factory. Juggernaut was portrayed as a mutant instead of a mystically-enhanced superhuman -- something I wish was done in X-Men: The Animated Series . Wendigo was still an odd choice, though -- since Sabertooth would've fit better! The game came out in 1992 -- months before X-Men: The Animated Series . The game was base...

Age gaps between couples can be disturbing -- especially if it's between humans -- homo sapiens or homo superiors! One of the strangest X-Men pairings comes in the form of Magneto x Rogue. The two had a brief romance in the Savage Island. Magneto is a recurring enemy of the X-Men while Rogue is a former member of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants under Mystique. Mystique gets often retconned or remade into Magneto's second-in-command -- depending on the writer! Yeah, that's why I usually don't update on comics these days. Now, it's time to look into this May-December Affair. Yeah, this is coming from me who'd shipped Wolverine with other women such as Jubilee (which is pedophilia), Psylocke, or Emma Frost! The Age of Apocalypse storyline presents a different view. Rogue's loneliness comes from the fact she can't control her absorption powers. It should be F*CKED UP that she absorbed her would-be stepdaughter Polaris' powers permanently. AOA Scarlet Wit...

  It's easy to be extremely biased when comparing X-Men: The Animated Series and X-Men Evolution . There are also comic book purists who simply bash any form of adaptation whatsoever. X-Men: The Animated Series had a considerable departure from the comics. It was because this was TV-Y7-FV . That means brutal scenes like Angel's wings getting mutilated would never get past the censors. I was thinking about the missing potential of an otherwise beloved series. Yes, I'm kinda nitpicky so DEAL. WITH. IT. I learned to be nitpicky after I wrote some bad stories. Somehow, being nitpicky can be fun as well. Apocalypse showed up too soon IMHO Some people think X-Men: Evolution was too much of a radical departure. However, that series had some better stuff done like slowly introducing the core team. Saban's version rushed everything for a reason -- something that was a common trend in the 1980s to 1990s. Who can remember the 1980s Transformers cartoon introduced almost everyone a...

I remember playing Marvel Super Heroes and Psylocke was my main character. Psylocke was my top pick either due to the Smurfette Principle or was it because she had cool moves? I didn't care too much about X-Men: Children of the Atom due to its monstrous difficulty. However, Marvel Super Heroes was far more appealing to me. It had better graphics and more reasonable difficulty. I find Doctor Doom and Thanos reasonably difficult compared to how Juggernaut and Magneto were in X-Men: COTA . It turns out Psylocke wasn't popular with the animators but only in the comics. Psylocke was probably an odd choice because she wasn't a regular in Saban's X-Men: The Animated Series . Marvel Super Heroes also featured other villains that were too oddball like Shuma Gorath, Blackheart, and the final boss Thanos. Thanos wasn't featured in any more animated variants aside from the Silver Surfer cartoon. Meanwhile, Magneto, Juggernaut, and Doctor Doom (a boss) are the easily recognizabl...

  Before all the games from X-Men: Children of the Atom up to Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite were coined under the Marvel vs. Capcom series -- we had X-Men vs. Street Fighter as the first official crossover. Apocalypse was also the sub-boss of Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter (criticized for being a cash cow rather than a well-thought game) since Cyber Akuma was the final boss. In X-Men vs. Street Fighter -- he was the second to the last opponent. The final opponent was one's tag team partner. So yeah, a Cyclops vs. Ryu match was always a friendly battle! I could remember the intimidation factor Apocalypse had. Most fighting game bosses were human-sized and difficult to defeat. Apocalypse would grow giant and his life bar was found at the bottom. I remember seeing people trying to beat Apocalypse in the arcade during the late 1990s. I was always intimidated by how huge Apocalypse was. One of Apocalypse's most devastating moves is his drill attack (where one should do a super...

  I confess I hated X-Men Mutant Academy's first entry. Was it because I still think X-Men: Children of the Atom was still better? Okay, the PSX version of X-Men: Children of the Atom lacked the character endings in full for some reason. Fortunately, Marvel Super Heroes did a better job porting the game with the endings. I didn't like the first X-Men: Mutant Academy game but the second game worked wonders. I never played X-Men: The Next Dimension so I'll just review a PSX classic. Yes, that ONLY X-Men   Mutant Academy game that I got to enjoy. The first game started with six characters and unlocked the other four. The second game has no such nonsense. Instead, it's because every character has a different final opponent like in the first two Street Fighter Alpha games. Cyclops has Havok as the final opponent (and vice-versa) and Wolverine has his final battle with Sabertooth. There were also unlockables such as Spider-Man and Professor X (who had very limited gameplay). ...

  I may no longer like Marvel because of how New Disney screwed it up. However, I'd like to share some moments of Cable and Stryfe. Cable is the son of Cyclops and the Jean Grey clone, Madelyne Pryor. Unlike Saban's X-Men: The Animated Series , the comics don't shy away from brutal violence. Apocalypse was awakened when Cyclops' and Madelyne's son, Nathan Christopher Charles Pryor Summers, was born. Nathan's powers manifested since infancy.  Apocalypse would have the right to be amazed and fear the child. Apocalypse kidnaps the infant Nathan and infects him with the Techno-Organic Virus (TOV). Did Apocalypse do it so he could kill Nathan? Nonsense! Instead, it was looking for a new body that would give Apocalypse the longevity to do so.  The decision was painful. Cyclops makes a tough love decision to leave Cable to the mysterious Mother Askani. Mother Askani is actually Rachel Summers - an alternate-reality daughter of Cyclops and Jean Grey. Okay, I'm still...

Before Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers - Saban Entertainment took the challenge of a  creating a TV-Y7-FV version of the X-Men . Hence, X-Men: The Animated Series (X-Men: TAS) was born as a result of that. Before that, there was the FAILED pilot called Pryde of the X-Men  which an arcade came was made LOOSELY based on it . This was one of my favorite shows. I remember throwing tantrums whenever I missed an episode because of a brownout, storm, or those damn days when I had to study. It was aired on Friday evenings on ABS-CBN . It was also when Batman: The Animated Series and Conan the Adventurer were aired on the same network. Yeah, all shows were in 1992. Then in 1993 - Toei Ltd. gave Saban Entertainment the green light to launch the once-monster hit Mighty Morphin' .  I felt that toning down Super Sentai and creating Power Rangers based on it can be challenging. Though, I still think that X-Men TAS was probably a harder challenge. One needs to read the comics which contai...

In January 1981, the X-Men franchise featured the alternate reality daughter of Cyclops and Jean Grey known as Rachel Summers. The word of Rachel was practically devastated by Sentinels and it's a world caused by what if former villain Senator Kelly was assassinated. The setting in itself is very dark and dystopian. Later on, a few years later, Toei Ltd's Akira Torimaya may have read some Marvel Comics, probably decided to make his own version of Cable with Future Trunks, and mix the Days Of Future Past storyline into Cable with Future Trunks! A look at Future Trunks' timeline shows how humanity managed to succumb to a mechanical menace. The Androids practically rule the future and destroy it for fun. Future Trunks tries to go to a time machine to undo the future - pretty similar to Cable except nobody serves as the role of Mother Askani. Future Trunks goes into the present timeline, meets his alternate reality father (like how Rachel meets Cyclops), and discusses how his d...

Way back when Capcom was still cool - I remembered some of the classic crossovers. Such was the Marvel vs. Capcom series which actually started with X-Men vs. Street Fighter followed up with Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter, Marvel vs. Capcom, Marvel vs. Capcom 2, the Marvel vs. Capcom 3 series, and Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite . So far, I hear MVCI sucks so I wonder if I should even buy it just to play as Megaman X and Zero? I thought about how characters from the Street Fighter series were revamped when they were brought over to the MVC universe.  I remembered Street Fighter started adding Super Combos which were super moves that required at least ONE LEVEL of the Super Bar. They could be performed up to three levels while others were strictly Level 3 only. One level determined the strength of the Super. However, these Street Fighter characters that were added to the Marvel vs. Capcom non-canon universe were not given just aesthetic changes but a serious boost. Some projectil...

; I keep hearing that the Legacy Virus was supposed to be a metaphor for AIDS. Sadly, Marvel subscribed to the woke stupidity. However, there was a time when Marvel was more focused on real issues such as racial discrimination. Did Stan Lee have Asian Americans in mind when he wrote about mutant discrimination? Maybe, maybe not but mutants were humans born with the x-gene. Mutants are humans too but why are they discriminated against? It's almost like the issue of racism in the United States of America (USA) and how whites discriminated against Asian Americans and African Americans as if they weren't truly American. American is a nationality - Asian and African are ethnicities. It's like how the mutants are unfairly discriminated against even though they too are still part of the human race. In the X-Force  comics, Stryfe took the Legacy Virus and decided to use it to create a human-mutant war. The trick was to give Gordon Lefferts, an assistant of Mr. Sinister, an empty ...

If we're applying some reality-based logic -- Magneto himself would've probably won against some of Marvel's heroes without using his full potential. He can do cool stuff beyond metal manipulation such as firing dangerous magnetic blasts, fly, knock people into a coma, produce barriers, manipulate electrons, push you back with a magnetic wave but he can simply win by just using ferromagnetism in some instances. You can imagine how Magneto could just crush Ironman with his suit, fire back Captain America's shield, appeal to Hulk using the victim card, rip the Vision apart, deflect Thor's hammer, rip off Bucky's arm, and maybe even steal Thanos' gems because the glove is made of metal. Early on, Magneto also ripped off Wolverine's adamantium from the latter's skeleton or nearly shred Cable to pieces. You can imagine just how Magneto himself as an anti-villain could've also won against others like Ultron, Dr. Doom, the Sentinels (and that's why ...

X-Men Animated presented one case of a lesson in human genetics -- it's when two Mutant Human parents give birth to a normal human child. Graydon Creed is the illegitimate son of both Sabertooth (who was renamed as Graydon Creed Sr. in the cartoon) and Mystique but was abandoned when they discovered he was human. The cartoon did somehow drop a hint that Nightcrawler could be Sabertooth's son too and that Mystique was probably lying about the German count. Remember that scene Wolverine imagines Nightcrawler but also sees Sabertooth? The whole Friends of Humanity movement was founded by Graydon himself for this reason -- to eradicate mutants. He discovered he was the normal human son of two mutant parents who abandoned him as an inconvenience. Him being a normal human is no surprise. His grandparents on his father side were both normal humans and Mystique's parents were probably human too. So why be surprised that Graydon is perfectly human? Creed would use his hate orga...

Love him or hate him -- Haim Saban does have some good points and bad points. I may not like Power Rangers but I do still appreciate the heart he once had with Marvel. Toei once had it with Marvel (for a few shows only) then Saban also ended up owing Marvel for his success. No Marvel, no Toei means no Saban Entertainment success! Now, it's time to consider how Saban's X-Men cartoon nearly had a finale in the four-parter called "Good and Evil" and why I think it should have ended there. The show did have the very finale-seque type of setting such as Jean Grey and Cyclops getting married and Apocalypse executing his final plan. So really, why did it all go for naught and succeeding episodes treated it like it never happened? It's almost like how Mighty Morphin' should've ended with Doomsday Part 1 and 2. Apocalypse was launching his master plan once and for all and was gathering his minions he manipulated such as Magneto and Mystique. While Apocalypse wa...

Graydon Creed is perhaps one of the most complex characters in X-Men. I remembered watching the X-Men cartoon which somehow implied that Mystique may have married the German count but he wasn't the father. It was hinted in a later episode that after Wolverine saw Nightcrawler in a memory that he saw Sabertooth -- suggesting that Sabertooth may be Nightcrawler's father. Mystique could have used half-brother instead of brother in reference to Graydon. Now, this is where I thought about the irony behind Graydon -- I hate him but I also pity him. So what caused his severe hatred for mutants? Well, he did find out that his parents Sabertooth and Mystique abandoned him as an inconvenience. This caused him to grow up hating all mutants because he was a normal human born out of two mutants. This was a plot that was used against him severely in Saban's X-Men cartoon. Remember when Wolverine startled him and later the video about Sabertooth revealed his paternity? I really even wa...

I thought of the many times that some say that Sabertooth could be Wolverine's estranged father though it wasn't implemented. In the X-Men cinematic universe, I thought about it that while I don't like the Cinematic Universe now due to the dumb retcons (and I wish Marvel will restore Scarlet Witch's and Quicksilver's parentage to Magneto by revealing that the current glitch is a result of the House of M and NOT that stupid retcon they're in). But here's my ideal retcon to how I'd actually write Wolverine and Sabertoth as family -- as half-brothers. So what's my own story? Sabertooth was formerly Dog Logan but later took the name Victor Creed to hide himself. Wolverine is still the son of Thomas Logan and Elizabeth Howlett via an illicit affair. Dog Logan is the son of Thomas and his wife. This illicit affair causes trouble especially when Sabertooth is Wolverine's older half-brother on the father side. This would create a rivalry especiall...

There's been various ways that the Wolverine x Jean Grey shipping gets to work. The X-Men cartoons under Haim Saban's production didn't explain much of what happened -- considering that stuff like Angel losing his wings in a very violent fashion, Callisto's deep lust for Angel or stuff like that are considerably cut out for obvious reasons. Wolverine felt like that he was just in love with Jean Grey for the sake of it. But the comics did have a rather bloody backstory which either could have been (1) toned down in Saban's X-Men cartoon or (2) something that couldn't get past the censors. Yes, Wolverine actually had a crush in the past who looked similar to Jean Grey named Rose O' Hara. No, Jean Grey is NOT a descendant of said person either. What happened was that he had feelings for Rose while she had feelings for someone. His crush on Jean Grey and letting her go is somewhat a psychological need -- he wanted to let Rose to be happy and marry Smitty. How...

If there's anything where Saban actually did right (or even better) than his famed alliance with Toei to create Power Rangers -- I think it's actually his alliance with Marvel Comics and Stan Lee in order to produce Marvel-based cartoons. I would say these are still superior over what new school Disney has to offer IMHO. I could remember a few of Saban's adaptations of Marvel where I can appreciate it for not borrowing footage from the source. My favorite cartoons produced by him involved X-Men , Spiderman and the Marvel Action Hour -- where Saban Entertainment and Marvel Comics were in alliance. Hmmm... should I mention that he was partly involved with Nintendo and DIC for the Super Mario Bros. Super Show where the less successful sequels no longer had his involvement. I guess everything started with well -- the X-Men cartoon which was so successful it ran for so many episodes. Sadly, it ended with a dangler where Apocalypse returned into the body of Fabian Cort...