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5 Reasons Why The Iron Man Animated Series Was Insane (And Why That’s a Good Thing)

4. The producers cut costs, and with it, logic 

Cut costs

My theory? The producers of Iron Man must have just dumped so much cash into their two CGI scenes, the aforementioned awkward Stark power up shot and a shot of Iron Man rocketing out of his laboratory, which for 90s based technologies must have cost a fortune in spite of its ugly nature, and then just tried to save costs across the board in an attempt to break even somehow. That’s why Stark’s voice suddenly changes if he has any lines during these CGI armor bits, reflective of animators realizing they had dead-air in these sequences and ran out of funds to call the voice actor back in. So instead they just got some guy to growl a bad Stark impression into a microphone before saying screw it and calling it a day. Likewise, although Fresh Prince alum and voice of The Shredder, James Avery is one of the few glimmers of hope in the first season as the voice of War Machine, Avery was apparently unavailable at times, or the producers only wanted to write one pay check, as War Machine’s voice changes from Avery to Jim Cummings (MODOK’s voice actor) and back to Avery in certain episodes.

Of course, every animated show at one point or another featured cost-cutting measures such as this, but the Iron Man producers also phone it in when it comes to plot points. For example, there is an entire episode surrounding an irradiated group of Russian submariners who have been turned into zombies. Tony Stark and crew fight these radioactive zombies for the length of the episode, as well as the Mandarin’s grab bag of villains who live with him. The foes clash, every team member does a flamboyant display of their powers, and Force Works is able to beat back the Mandarin’s horde to fight another day.

After Iron Man and friends spent the entire episode fighting irradiated Russian submariner zombies, and with about two minutes left of airtime, the British warlock Century just turns the zombies back into humans at the end of the episode. It’s like, seriously guy? You literally could’ve solved this problem at any time but you just wanted to punch some radioactive Russians in the face, huh?

Seriously, in the first episode Tony needs to do some deep-sea work, so he dons an Iron Man armor that allows him to explore the bottom of the sea. That’s fine, but when he is ambushed by Mandarin’s cronies and gets back up support from Force Works, everyone is just wearing a bubble helmet, until Fing Fang Foom is ultimately summoned into the fray. The Scarlet Witch is just wearing a cocktail dress mind you.

If you think that’s bad, Tony Stark once was able to power up his armor by siphoning the energy off of a Walkman — full power, off of something that runs off of like eight AAA batteries. I don’t even need a joke here, as the show did my job already.

Playing Devil’s Advocate, this is a show for children right? So it makes sense as to why there would be some holes in logic. Iron Man is the only one who needs to wear a deep diver suit because kids don’t understand underwater pressure. Here’s the thing though…

About the author

Chris Davidson