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Category:    Home > Reviews > Science Fiction > Fantasy > TV > Mutant X Season 2 (DVDs 1 & 2)

Mutant X – Season 2 (Discs 1 & 2)

 

Picture: C+     Sound: B-     Extras: C     Episodes: C-

 

 

What happens if you take the X-Men, cut down the cast, cut down the budget, send the show to TV and make everyone almost the same?  You get the unfortunate syndicated series Mutant X, which just by the name seems to be an X-Men knock-off.  Marvel Comics has their name on the box, but this is not as Marvel-affiliated as that would indicate.

 

Leaving that as a separate essay, the first five shows of the second season are offered here on 2 DVDs and they are as follows:

 

Past As Prologue

Power Play

Time Squared

Whose Woods Are These Are

The Future Revealed

 

I was shocked at how consistently bad the teleplays were, how unimaginative they were for works of a potentially more creative genre, and the digital work seems at least five years behind the currently bad computer-generated work we keep seeing.  Group leader Adam Kane is played by John Shea, who is so bored looking and petulant that it made Parker Stevenson seem like a better choice.  The rest of the cast, including Victoria Pratt, one time soap opera star Victor Webster, Forbes March and Lauren Lee Smith have no chemistry and make the empty, tired set designs seem all the more empty.  I do not know what the point of this series was supposed to be, but it is not entertaining, looks cheaper than expected, and is another example of where the Science Fiction genre has gone wrong.  This is also a very lame entry into the Superhero cycle, made al the worse by the much more interesting big budget feature films we keep getting.

 

The anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 image is often digitally degraded and even footage form the outdoors does not look as naturalistic as it should.    Images also often have an odd softness that does not necessarily seem to be the problem of the actual transfer.  The Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo offers Pro Logic surrounds and is the highlight of the set.  An image gallery, ADV trailers for other DVDs, John Shea interview, original TV promos and a couple of featurettes are the extras, but they do not enhance the shows much.

 

The saddest thing is that this show could have been interesting on its own, but instead seems like the end of the line of a series of decades-long live-action failures in bringing Marvel Comics alive in the live-action world.  That all ended with the first Blade feature film in 1998.  Mutant X is hopefully the end of that tired legacy as Marvel’s big-screen adaptations for the most part blaze the trail as some of the most interesting commercial filmmaking of late.

 

 

-   Nicho0las Sheffo


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