I've been watching the upcoming Fantastic Four Animated Series box set, which is due out on July 5th, and I've had to take notes. I seriously have a sheet of notes that I've carried with me, folded up small in a pocket. On this sheet are very complex equations about this series; phrases like "Power greater than mine!" and "I must not intercede!", interspersed with drawings of apples sporting ribcages and a Starship Enterprise made out of bacon and eggs. The bacon is the warp nacelles. It flies at the speed of bacon. To the Wheat Toast Nebula.

The Fantastic Four Animated Series box set, as culled from the complete 26 episode collection of episodes from the 1994 series (and not the earlier 1967 or 1978 cartoons, which would still be wonderful to see) is a really great, bewildering, two season ordeal. Buena Vista does a great job collecting these forgotten Marvel Cartoon series for we, the geekXcore, flaws and all. Over the course of four discs, quite appropriately, we're introduced to the familiar tale of this third animated incarnation of the Fantastic Four. Brainy scientist takes family into space under mysterious conditions, flies through bizarre space phenomenon, in this case we have cosmic rays and some kinda crazy clouds, because that kind of thing happens all the time in space, and DNA gets all mixed up, and instead of dying, they all get random superpowers. Not oft spoken of is the fifth Fantastic, Thomas Applebaum, who gained the power to die very painfully and get hidden in a trunk in the Baxter Building, because space clouds are jerks.

This time, though, Reed Richards and company aren't so financially well off. Instead of being a millionaire genius rich off of patents and inventions, they have to rent an apartment and settle for being animated poorly! Cue the antics. Not only do they have to rent an apartment, but they have to rent it from an incredibly disgruntled woman who completely takes the cruel throes of menopause out on them at every turn. Don't ask why it takes 5 minutes to run from one end of the apartment to the other and how it houses an incredibly high tech lab, or where they hide the Fantastic Jet, or why they can afford to pay for a New York City apartment for Alicia Masters in the second episode. Just don't. Marvel Cartoons in the 1990s didn't have to make sense, as long as they had character recognition. Lord knows that X-Men was the most convoluted disaster of a cartoon ever. The Fantastic Four had, at least, a really excellent range of guest characters from Terrax to Silver Surfer to Namor and the Inhumans, which is something that X-Men's Akron could never be. You name a character after a place in Ohio and you're just asking for a problem. The cartoon was so ill-received that Tom DeFalco actually made fun of the show in FF #396 and subsequently got in whatever trouble Marvel was equipped at dishing out.

The DVD set itself is beautiful. Slipcased, four discs tipped into 2 fold-out pages (with some fairly goofy, 1990's styled computer art on the packaging), and an episode guide on the first page. As a bonus to this set, we have the terminally excited Stan Lee introducing each episode. I swear to god that there's nothing on this planet that Stan Lee couldn't give an overwhelmingly confident and enthralled introduction to.

"In this EXCITING operation, we'll be trying to remove your FANTASTIC kidneys and replacing them with FIVE AWESOME lobsters. Will you survive the EXCRUCIATINGTASTIC pain? Stay tuned to find out who wins in this THRILLING battle of SURF versus TURF! NUFF SAID!"

As a bonus feature on the first disc, we get Stan Lee's Soapbox, in which he talks about the origins of the idea of the Fantastic Four, which is pretty fascinating stuff. It's not terribly obscure stuff, but it's always awesome to hear a comic vet warmly recount the early days of comics.

While the two seasons are not delineated, they mark a significant change in the attention being paid to the show. The last episode on the second disc, 'And a Blind Man Shall Lead Them' heralds the beginning of the second season, for those of you keeping track, and until this point, we've pretty much had 3 guys and a superintelligent bowl of ravioli doing all of the voices. Now, we're getting Michael Dorn, Mark Hamill, Kathy Ireland, Ron Perlman and even John Rhys-Davies as Thor! Thing might sound like a half-dead Rodney Dangerfield, and Family Guy fans will recognize the Invisible Woman as news anchor Diane Simmons, but it's a pretty successful voice cast overall.

If you've never seen this darling of a show, here's a short list of things I've compiled from the first disc alone that are noteworthy:

- The entire series begins with Dick Clark's Scholarship Telethon, during which Thing threatens to kill the audience about 50 times. Everybody knows that Dick Clark is a dessert, not an appetizer. Never start with Dick.
- Those of you who remember the jarring, awful, overdramatic music from the background of the Spider-Man cartoon, which never let up for a split second to allow the audience to breathe, but instead let them choke and sputter on crescendo after crescendo... will find more of the same. Not quite as relentlessly, but you'll notice it.
- Someone gets killed with an electric eel, which is thrown like a javelin after being made rigid somehow, which seemingly only involves a gentle stroking.
- Puppet Master sees Mr. Fantastic stretching his arms up to the top of a bridge and freaks out because "HIS POWER IS GREATER THAN MINE!" I don't know when stretching your arms became a greater power than unfettered mind control over the known universe, but clearly, the Puppet Master's priorities are not in order.
- ... which is completely reinforced in a later scene, as he has undressed his stepdaughter down to her skivvies and just spends some time, like, you know, looking at her and mincing around. Later, he'll fly through an open window to the sound of breaking glass, because defenestration MUST be dramatic, glass or not.
- Mr. Fantastic gets about 35 medals from the Skrull for showing them old monster movies.
- The Fantastic Four agree to be in a music video and be 'rock stars'. The Thing raps.
- And the theme song. I thought that the Swamp Thing theme song was bad, but this takes the cake. Take 90's era soft rock, throw in 60 pounds of exposition, add a closing theme with completely different words, and some guy interjecting 'that's ungrammatical!' in the middle of the song, and you have the perfect reason to commit suicide.

In addition to this, I also think that this is the perfect cartoon to make a drinking game for. I'm a non-drinker, but I'd make an exception for the Fantastic Four, though I'm more inclined to cream soda than whiskey. You know the drinking game formula - character X does Y, drink Z.

Take 1 drink for :
- Mr. Fantastic explains something and Thing gets angry at the big words.
- Johnny idly plays with a random ball of fire.
- Johnny, in Human Torch mode, touches someone or something and they do not get burnt.
- Sue reprimands Thing or Torch.
- Something completely, ridiculously unexplainable happens.
- The Fantastic Four get completely fooled by a hologram. Again.
- The shemale landlady instructs her dog to harm someone.

Take 2 drinks for :
- Mr. Fantastic explains something and Thing gets sad at the big words.
- Thing gets impatient and does whatever the hell he wants anyhow and gets thrown on his ass.
- Sue reprimands Thing AND Torch at the same time.
- Thing uses the word 'shmo'.
- The shemale landlady expresses complete obliviousness that the world was about to end 5 minutes ago.

For all of the fun flaws of the cartoon, this is nostalgia all the way. It does a very efficient and accurate portrayal of establishing the personalities of this version of the FF, which is comic accurate except for the surly stupidity of the Thing (whom I prefer to see as a bit more sullen), and the guests from the Marvel Universe are most excellent. The video transfer quality is great, and it's good to see the episodes without the 'FOX KIDS' logo in to top corner. I'm always excited to see new incarnations of my favorite characters, be it in cartoons or action figures or, hey, even the comics. They still make those, right? This is a must-have for your slowly expanding animated Marvel universe.

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