Mini reviews of Television seasons old and new. No fuss. No spoilers. Occasional bunnies.

Tuesday, July 2, 2013

Mortal Kombat: Defenders of the Realm (1996)

Animated MK nonsense that did almost everything wrong from the get-go. The animation is awful but I suspect the budget was too, so it'd be wrong to expect something as sophisticated as what Marvel or DC put out. I’m willing to overlook that aspect of it, but there are plenty of other problems to focus on.

Being aimed at kids meant it was bloodless, but it was also soulless and guilty of flat, emotionless dialogue. Kids want to be Batman or a Ninja Turtle, not these clowns. If I ever meet a kid that wants to be Liu Kang, I’ll slap the parents.

The show had some familiar voice talent, such as the always reliable Olivia d'Abo, the bad-ass Ron Perlman and good old Clancy Brown (who’s in every cartoon ever), but the characters they had to voice and the stories they were squeezed into were scraped from the bottom of a very old barrel.

The combatants had a super-secret high-tech base from which they monitored 'dimensional rifts.'  The rifts appeared all over Earthrealm and enabled the bad guys to come through from Outworld (and various other places); they’d then cause havoc and upset the happy equilibrium. If the rift happened to be on the other side of the world, then the team jumped in their super-fast high-tech Dragon Jets (that can even go underwater) and traversed the globe in seconds. Then, destination reached, every episode they’d fight a horde of similar looking villains/creatures/brain-dead henchmen and win. If there was a moral lesson to be learned at the end of it… well, you’d be lucky to get that kind of depth.

The worst aspect, the thing that made me physically wince with pain, was the awful, unending techno music. It accompanied every battle and even sometimes the journey to and from the super-secret high-tech base. Any time a quick fix was needed to fill the emptiness of the story they’d blast the music. Bastards!

It managed 13 episodes before getting the chop, which, frankly, was an achievement in itself. Only 2 of those 13 episodes were passable.

1 pair of bleeding ears out of 5

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