I just finished watching the G.I Joe: Resolute mini-series that aired on Cartoon Network last year. As someone who grew up in the 80’s with the animated series and corresponding toy line, I was amazed that they geared this particular incarnation to my generation, far better than the recent live action movie. It was really fun to see the characters from the 80’s series faithfully carried into the 21st century, costumes and all, but with a more adult target demographic and story telling. I hope they continue producing more full length episodes.

I also watched recently, for the first time since I can remember, the 1978 animated version of Lord of the Rings. The animation is really quite unique. They combined rotoscoped cartoon characters with live action costumed actors that were poorly put through some kind of filter to make them blend in with the cartoon characters a bit better. It reminded me of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and more recently that really awful Dragonlance direct to video adaption. I don’t know, I once thought about doing 2D animation via rotoscoping, but I guess now I just don’t like the look of it.

I just finished watching the Robotech series on Hulu. It was the first time that I had seen the show in it’s entirety in over 20 years. My cousin got me into this show when we were kids and I even had all the toys for it at the time. But, seeing Robotech now, like many of my childhood shows, has not aged particularly well. I mean the scope of the war is really well done for a kids show, even as far as showing death on both sides, including casually killing off main characters, something shows like G.I. Joe went to ridiculous extents to avoid. I also thought the continuity from one episode to the next and continuing a major plot thread through 30 some episodes was surprisingly well done. However, the love triangle between Rick, Lisa, and Minmay that’s dragged out through almost the entire run of the show is about as asinine as they come. Writing a love story on the backdrop of a intergalactic war needs to be treated more delicately than the way it was handled for this show. In the end, I think the overall storyline is good enough to be made into a modernized live action movie/TV series reboot someday.