moriarty@fluke.UUCP (Jeff Meyer) (10/07/85)
Somewhere, someplace, Chris Claremont, the scripter of Marvel Comic's THE
NEW X-MEN title, is bouncing up and down on a couch, watching this show, and
going "Mine! Mine!". Not plagarism, mind you; but whoever put this show
together took the central point that Claremont used and emphasized to make
the X-Men Marvel's most popular comic over the last 10 years: the outsiders.
This show suffers from a lot of flaws (listed below), but I still found
myself enjoying the pilot because you have a group of people who have
amazing powers who are *shunned* by the rest of mankind (up till the end of
the show); and this "misfits" theme works very nicely at many points.
However, this is not to say that MoS is excellent, or completely palatable;
it suffers from several popular TV diseases which make it very difficult to
digest at points. Chief among these is A-Team Gunnery Arm, an affliction
that causes both good guys and bad guys to fire several hundred rounds of
ammo from machine guns and still not hit anyone. MTVitis rears its ugly
head in this show, with attempts at making video-style action sequences;
most fail miserably here (especially the final credits, which were getting
on my cat's nerves... the main singer sounded like a Pomeranian in heat).
Also a plot device going around called Straw Dogtitis, where the villains
are so utterly reprehensible that putting them through a meat grinder would
probably generate audience approval in 83.2% of American homes. Also many
jumps in logic (how does the TV reporter know when the Misfits are "on the
move"? A mole in The Marines)? Still generally likeable, though 5-2 odds
that this turns into another A-Team clone. On Probation.
"You can thank the Rock 'n Roll
detector for leading you to your
doom!"
"Thanks!"
Moriarty, aka Jeff Meyer
ARPA: fluke!moriarty@uw-beaver.ARPA
UUCP: {uw-beaver, sun, allegra, sb6, lbl-csam}!fluke!moriarty
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