Remember the '90s?

BeaucoupKevin's retrospective on the 90's X-Men Cartoon reminded me of all the joy that came with being a fan of Marvel Comics in the 1990's.

DC fans got Tim Burton's gleefully artistic Batman, which was sweeping and bold. More importantly, DC fans were gifted with Dini and Timm's brilliant Batman: The Animated Series and the slightly less awesome but still delightful Superman cartoon. The 1990's gave us the definitive voice of Batman (apologies to Diedrich Bader, Michael Keaton, Christian Bale, et al, but man, c'mon) and a sense of whimsy, showing how wonderful, clever and interesting the DCU could be.

And what did Marvel comic book fans receive in terms of media adaptations?

Well, there was the Generation X movie . . .


I want to say something funny here but this hurt me in my soul.

The Avengers cartoon that didn't have Thor, Captain America or Iron Man in it . . .


. . . which actually wasn't the problem. If you watched an actual episode of the series, you'd know what I mean.

The Iron Man/Force Works cartoon that sadly did have Iron Man in it . . .


And I just now realized how hard it is for anybody to take an arch-enemy who shares his name with an orange seriously, no matter how powerful he may be.
Iron Man: "The Mandarin is my most powerful foe!"
Deadpool: "And let's not even talk about the implacable evil of the Anjou Pear!"

Oh, and who could ever forget the Captain America movie?


Answer: All of us who tried really, really hard, sometimes using a whole helluva lot of alcohol.

Yes, yes, I know - we also got the passable Spider-Man cartoon and unfortunate DC fans had to deal with Schumacher's Batman films. Still, I think it's an ironclad fact that DC got the lion's share of good adaptations in the '90's. Of course, all of these horrible things made the first Spider-Man movie into a jaw-dropping revelation for me, so I guess some good came out of it after all.

. . . you know what? I almost forgot the Punisher movie. Yes, it was in 1989. I don't care.

. . . so now that I think on it, suffering through all of that wasn't worth the first Spider-Man movie. Sorry. I think we gotta toss in at least Spider-Man 2 and X2 to make things square.