Marvel fans right now the character of Tony Stark / Iron Man is a household name and alot of that is due to the MCU and how well the character was portrayed and written in those films. However the character wasn't always that well known and so it's baffling that he got his own animated series in the early to mid nineties and what's even more odd is that for alot of kids myself included this was there introduction to Iron Man and those characters and so here is my review of the 1994 Iron Man animated series debut episode which is called "And The Sea Shall Give Up Its Dead" enjoy.
The plot to this episode is The Mandarin captures and somehow turn a bunch of sailors into zombies all to try and take down Iron Man once and for all. Yeah the plot really is that ridiculous even for an animated show based on a comic book the story is absurd and honestly it was at the point where the zombies were introduced that the episode lost me because of how silly it all was which is a shame because the story had some sort of potential to be good but for some reason the writer didn't care about making a good story he just cared about making something that even little kids would struggle to take seriously.
Starring in the episode is Robert Hays as Tony Stark / Iron Man and the late and great James Avery otherwise known as Uncle Phil as Jim Rhodes / War Machine. Also starring in the episode is Ed Gilbert as The Mandarin and Admiral Younger , Voice acting legend Jim Cummings as Modok and E.L.F. , Tony Steedman as Justin Hammer , James Warwick as Century , John Reilly as Hawkeye and Gletkin , Casey De Franco as Julia Carpenter / Spider-Woman , Katherine Moffat as Wanda Frank / Scarlet Witch and Radar Technician , Jeanine Elias as Veronica Benning and Computer , Chuck McCann as Blizzard , Neil Dickson as Dreadknight and Scanner Voice and Linda Holdahl as Hypnotia.
The acting in the episode is a little better then the actual story but that's more down to who's in the cast rather then the script. Since alot of these actors do deliver solid performances and are enjoyable to watch and listen to on screen but sadly what let's pretty much everything down is the script which as I said before when talking about the story is just so bad and it gives the actors nothing to work with in terms of character or a character's personality as such the actors only do the best that they can to make the script work.
Now for once I cannot find who did the animation for either this episode or the series as a whole which given what i'm about to say is most likely a good thing. Since yeah the animation in this episode is pretty freaking bad I give whoever did the animation credit because it most likely wasn't easy working on this show but the finished product is clearly not a good example of good animation and if i'm being honest it looks cheap as hell.
Making things worse is for at least the shows first season the show would make use of CGI which as you can see in the above picture looks laughable at best. I will give the CGI this tho for early to mid nineties CGI the CGI isn't that bad the problem is it's aged horribly and it comes out of know where they only use it for two scenes in this episode and that's it I have a feeling that the animation studio only included CGI just to prove that they could do it and not because it was something that actually looked good.
I have to talk about the zombies because it's such a strange and weird thing to have in this episode hell it's strange and weird to have them in this show. Why writer Ron Friedman thought including zombies was a good idea is beyond me because it's no stupid and so out of place with everything else that's going on in the episode I have to assume that he was high as a kite when he wrote this episode because that's the only logical reason I can think of altho he is the guy who milled Optimus Prime in The Transformers: The Movie so maybe he was getting back at the adults who demanded Optimus be brought back by giving them something mother freaking stupid.
Yeah incase I haven't made it clear I don't like the fact that there's zombies in this episode because one as I said it's a stupid idea and two the designs for the zombies are just bland and uninspired. Honestly the writer Ron Friedman could have come up with something a little bit better and something that would have made sense but nope he chose not to any of that which just makes the idea freaking stupid as all hell and I wouldn't blame anyone if the episode lost them the second they entered the picture because that's when the episode lost me.
I will give not only this episode but this series this they do The Mandarin alot better then how Iron Man 3 did the character. Granted that's not really a high bar to reach but it's still something since this version of the character is still trying to be menacing and is actually evil instead of whatever the version in Iron Man 3 was meant to be. However what let's the character down is the fact that his evil plan for this episode is just to kill the hero and nothing more which just makes him blend in with all the other villains which is a shame because his design is pretty cool and the fact that he uses to rings to magic stuff is a pretty unique idea.
Now this show didn't actually have a network that it started on it started airing in syndication so basically a bunch networks had the rights to air the show.I honestly think that this is a first for a Marvel animated show but I could be wrong. the show aired for two seasons spanning from September 24th 1994 until September 23rd 1995 with the series having a total of twenty six episodes which I believe makes this shortest of the nineties Marvel animated shows but again I could be wrong when I say that tho.
Now then since this is an action show that does mean that we have to talk about the action that's in this episode. Which in my opinion is one of the better things in the episode not that the action is any good but when you compare it to literally anything else in the episode (apart from the acting that is) however if I was comparing the action to something like the acting in this episode then the action would come of looking worse because the action is just boring to watch in my opinion but when you compare to all of the bad things in the episode the action comes of looking better because of it.
Overall to say that this was a bad episode would be like saying alot of people dislike the Captain Marvel movie no duh. There are some good things in this episode the issue is there's alot more bad things with the episode which make this episode pretty bad and since this was the debut episode it gives people a bad impression of the series as such this episode gets a 6 out of 10 from this Marvel / comic book and animation fan.
All the images that I used in this review were gathered from the official Marvel Animated Universe fandom wiki page. As such I have no choice but to recommend them for images from this show or any of the animated nineties Marvel shows but with that being said alot of the images are fairly low quality which is to be expected given the time period that this show came out and so don't expect to find that many if any high quality images from either this show or any of the Marvel Animated Universe shows because you won't find them.