What a good last few days it has been for Hasbro! First, they got Weird Al Yankovic to guest star on My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, and the episode called Pinkie Pride was fantastic! Hopefully, we will see a few more celebrities guest starring on My Little Pony for season 5!
And during the big game, we got to see a trailer for Transformers: Age of Extinction! And yes, the Dinobots are here! The movie will come out on June 27, 2014. And yes, I will go see it and review it on Geek Alabama.
But the reason why I am writing this Animation Monday post, is because the Hub Network premiered Stan Lee’s Mighty 7 over the weekend. Stan Lee’s Mighty 7 is a fictional superhero team published as a Stan Lee Comics line comic book title. The concept is that Stan Lee is a character in the story, as himself, who runs into two groups of aliens that he mentors to be a superhero team while he uses them to write comic books. Yeah, it sounds like Stan Lee is using these aliens for his benefit, but they get to live in his home!
For starters, the voice cast was pretty good. Of course, Stan Lee provided the voice for himself. The rest of the voice cast includes Armie Hammer as Strong Arm, the superhero with super strength; Christian Slater as Lazer Lord, the superhero who hurls balls of laser energy; Mayim Bialik as Lady Lightning who possesses super speed; Teri Hatcher as Silver Skylark, the superhero who flies; Flea as Roller Man, who rolls into a big ball and launches at high speed; Darren Criss as Micro, who shrinks in size; and Sean Astin as Kid Kinergy whose superpower is telekinesis.
Additional voices include Jim Belushi as Mr. Cross, the leader of a covert operations military division assigned to investigate UFO sightings; and Michael Ironside as Xanar, the leader of the warring aliens from the planet Taegon who enslave other planets and raid their natural resources. The voice talent did a good job with their voices in this pilot movie. The storytelling was good, I loved the action scenes and seeing the US Military doing anything possible to capture these aliens, while Stan Lee protects them. By the way, if you try to extract the memory of Stan Lee, you are going to get lots and lots of stuff!
But sadly, I had some issues with the animation. In my opinion, Archie Comics was trying to take their comic book animation to TV, but it did not work very well. For starters, I noticed a lot of scenes where the character’s mouth movements was not in sync with the voices. I noticed a lot of lip-syncing issues in this pilot movie. Also, I noticed the animation of the characters was stiff at times throughout the movie. In a cartoon, the characters should be free-flowing and easy to follow. But in this movie, the characters at times were like being forced to move. I hope this movie did not sacrifice the animation for the famous voice actors. Hiring on screen actors to voice characters is more expensive than hiring professional voice actors. Could it be that the animation budget suffered or was cut so that they could pay these famous on screen actors a huge salary? I hope not!
Overall, other than some of the animation issues. I enjoyed this pilot movie! For now, I am going to give the animation issues a pass since this was the pilot. I know there are more animated films coming and a TV series with 26 episodes which will air on the Hub Network. The Hub Network has become a de facto home for us geeks and nerds with some classics like Animaniacs and current fandom hits like My Little Pony. If they can fix some of these animation issues, I believe Stan Lee’s Mighty 7 can become a great success for the Hub Network!
Learn more at: http://www.slam7.com/
All images and videos copyright from Hasbro, Hub Network, and Stan Lee Comics
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