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What first sent me into my downward spiral into true comic book geekdom was the X-Men animated series that premiered on Fox in 1992 as a part of their revamped Saturday morning line-up. It featured a team line-up very similar to the one in the comics at the time, and had storylines ripped straight from actual comics, but adapted for the television format. It was quite popular, and lasted for 5 seasons with over 70 episodes made. It’s popularity paved the way for the animated series’ for Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, and Iron Man, which each met their own levels of popularity. It has often been criticized for “poor animation”, however I firmly disagree with that idea. For the time, the animation was on par with all other shows. This was a few years before computers became the go-to for animation, and on X-men, all the characters looked the way they did in the comic, which was very appealing to me in my early years of fanboy-ishness.

So what?

Well, in an age where every show is getting released on DVD, this important television moment of my adolescence is sitting in a vault somewhere doing nothing. Apparently Disney bought up the rights to a whole bunch of Fox-related animated series, including most of, if not all the Marvel Comics’ related series. Including the 90’s X-Men Animated series. And now they are sitting on it. I was in Wal-Mart, land of the probably brain-damaged and mostly ghetto, and saw a giant display in electronics containing DVD’s for every Superman movie, and cartoon appearance. Where was this display for the X-men movie. Hmmm!? 3 highly successful live action features, and no release scheduled for the animated series which is sure to make them a little, if not a lot of money. Dammit, I have a birthday coming up, and X-mas after that, and these DVD’s should be on my wishlist. And I could easily by the bootlegs online, but I want official ones. I want pretty packaging, bonus features, and I want to show the “man that there is a market for this stuff. So I did some more research online, and for what it’s worth, I found an online petition that has already been signed by 4600 people. If you want to add to that, here is the link:

X-Men: The Animated Series DVD Petition

Thanks for listening, here’s hoping that Santa can bring me these this year.
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