Adamantium Rage
Marvel wanted to see Wolverine star in his own series around the time of the X-Men Origins: Wolverine film was hitting the big screen. Fortunately, Greg Johnson, series writer, and others, were able to reach an agreement that instead resulted in a cartoon with Wolverine and a supporting cast of X-Men. The story, however, had to pit Wolverine as the leader, so Professor X and Cyclops had to be situated accordingly.
The show creators decided to send Professor X into the future, in a time where mutants were stalked and killed by humans. The events in the present, at the start of the series, give early warning that this was indeed where things were going. Senator Kelly and his mutant task force were growing increasingly strict against the mutants. In the first episode, there is also a massive explosion that sees the disappearance of both Professor X and Jean Grey. The X-Men are stunned and disband, at least for the time being until Wolverine decides its time to fight back.
Wolverine finds his long time friend Hank, aka Beast, and together the two begin to find and recruit the old team. This team would include the likes of Shadowcat, Ice Man, Emma Frost, Cyclops, and Night Crawler, but many other Marvel characters have important roles in this show. You’ll see favorites like Magneto, Hulk, Colossus, The Blob, and others that are either friend or foe to the X-Men as they fight to find Professor X, Jean Grey, and to create a better future for all mutants.
The story unfolds patiently across twenty-six captivating episodes. If you’re looking for an intelligent action cartoon — one that has as much drama and character development as raw action, this should appeal to you. To me, it definitely felt like a throwback to the classic cartoons of the 90s that I very much enjoyed. While intended for a younger audience, the structure and maturity of the show can definitely appeal to all ages.
Looking Sharp On Blu-ray
This Blu-ray release is nicely packaged in a single case with three discs. I love the box art and the label on each disc. The disc labels are plain, but informative — there is a basic logo plus a number (1, 2, or 3) and the episode list printed on each. Each disc label also has a different color. The menus, however, are all the same, featuring the theme song with a collection of clips from different episodes. Menu options include enabling English subtitles, switching between 5.1 DTS-HD audio and 2.0 stereo, Playing All Episodes, selecting an episode, and looking at the Special Features. Also, rather interestingly as I don’t think I have seen this before, you can turn down the volume of the menu audio within the menu itself.
Each disc contains about nine episodes. One nice thing too is that in the menu, if you go to Episode Selection, a still image and the episode name for all twenty-six episodes is shown, but if the episode in question isn’t on the disc you are currently browsing, a small icon appears next to the still image to tell you what disc it’s on.
As far as the presentation quality, I was disappointed at all. The image quality is very sharp and I didn’t notice any technical issues or shortcomings. No artifacting or blockiness was dedicated, but as most folks know, animation in HD pretty much always looks great. The 5.1 audio sounds great too and was normalized nicely to where I didn’t have to adjust the volume.
As for extra features, there are actually twenty-nine different audio commentary tracks (multiple ones for some episodes, and not every episode has a track) with show creators. There are also two features:
–Making of Wolverine And The X-Men (SD, 5.5m) – A quick making of feature that has some of the gentlemen behind the series talking about how it came to be and what their goals were.
–The Inner Circle: Reflections On Wolverine And The X-Men (HD, 18.5m) – This is a much better feature than the ‘making of’ one. In it, many of the same creators from the ‘making of’ feature talk about all things related to the show while lots of clips from the series play. It’s well worth a watch and looks quite nice in HD.
With that, let’s get to the summary…