5/5 Great Fun with Iron Man
  by Jeff A. Spain (Mpls, MN)
Great fun! I grew up watching the Iron man cartoons on the 1960's. This reboot of Iron Mna provides fun for a new generation while staying treu to the original. Love seeing the Iron Man villains, though few but the hard core fans will remember who they are. Your Pepper is cute and fun as can be. Highly recommend for old duffers like me and kids alike.

3/5 "His teenaged life will never be the same... He's Iron Maaaan!"
  by H. Bala (Carson - hey, we have an IKEA store! - CA USA)
Thanks mostly to Robert Downey, Jr. and Jon Favreau, Iron Man has been elevated to top tier superhero status. And since this kind of unexpected success simply cries out for an animated TV show, sho 'nuff, we get one. Thing is, one pretty important change was implemented. And, so, if you can get past Tony Stark being reinterpreted as a teenager, then you may find this to be a dang watchable series - but that's a big if. IRON MAN: ARMORED ADVENTURES Vol. 1 collects the first six episodes of Season One, and my 3 star rating reflects the sheer suckability of the powers-that-be once again dishing out meager servings as opposed to releasing the entire season in one package. I'd say the show itself is worth a 4-star rating. But that's 'cause I pretty quickly got over Tony Stark's age reduction.

Maybe that's because I wasn't ever that big a fan of Tony Stark. Until Robert Downey, Jr. got his mitts on the character, I saw Stark as a smug, egotistical genius industrialist/superhero. In the comic books, I feel he got what he deserved in the aftermath of the Skrully Secret Invasion. Still, I can appreciate that what made Stark so interesting is what's been stripped away in this cartoon series. The adult Stark trotted out several weaknesses which humanized him to his readers. First, Iron Man's roots go back to a near-fatal injury. When Stark was kidnapped during an explosion in Stan Lee's original story, a shrapnel had penetrated his flesh, threatening to puncture his heart. A magnetic device was implanted in his chest to keep this shrapnel at bay, and this device became the first component in the Iron Man armor. Stan Lee gave us an irresistible dichotomy: on the outside, an invincible warrior encased in a hi-tech exoskeleton; except that this armor in fact housed a man with a severely weak heart. Young Tony Stark shares this same ailment (he has a heart implant that regularly requires charging), but, although it's come up in several situations, this vulnerability has yet to be truly explored and translated into a compelling story.

Gone also is Tony's mammoth guilt over being a weapons merchant. It's Stane who's weaponizing each of the Starks' inventions. And, with Tony being a teen and this being a kid's show, there's no chance the show will ever introduce Tony's other albatross, his crippling alcoholism. So what we're left with is this sixteen-year-old engineering prodigy who had designed his armor not out of sheer desperate necessity but because he was trying to outdo his inventor father. When his father dies, Tony decides to don the armor and fight crime, easy as pie. You can see how this origin doesn't resonate quite as deeply as Stan Lee's take. Young Tony Stark comes off as Peter Parker-lite (the SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN incarnation, that is). Which, okay, isn't a bad thing.

Also getting the teen treatment are Tony's friends Rhodey and energetic chatterbox Pepper Potts, as well as Happy Hogan, now rendered a dimwitted jock. Thankfully, Obadiah Stane remains a bald-domed adult, still very calculating and sinister. With the passing of his father, Tony inherits the family business and would like to get more involved in it, except that CEO Stane isn't about to let him get a whiff of running the vast Stark International empire. Enmity, established.

Gene Khan is introduced early on, and he's not exactly your typical teen. He manages to befriend Tony Stark. To backtrack a bit, Tony's dad had been obsessed with the fabled Chinese Makluan rings, which supposedly contain great mystical power. Gene Khan means to collect these rings and believes the diary of Tony's father to be a means to this goal. So, yeah, he buddies up to Tony. The pursuit of the Makluan rings becomes a running plot element in Season One.

Like Peter in SPECTACULAR SPIDER-MAN, Tony juggles high school and crimefighting, and we've seen all this before, including the bit about Tony's missing or cutting classes, or as Pepper remarks to Rhodey: "I know I just met Tony, but he's been in the bathroom... a really long time." There's an interesting twist, too, in that Tony before had only had private tutors, so public schooling is something that's very new and sometimes cryptic to him.

The big draw for me was in checking out the young shellhead going up against his hi-tech rogue's gallery. Iron Man's cast of bad guy heavy hitters pops up (Stane, Mandarin, Crimson Dynamo), and these cats have recurring roles. CGI-wise, IRON MAN: ARMORED ADVENTURES reminds me of past shows like MAX STEEL, Roughnecks - The Starship Troopers Chronicles - The Complete Campaigns, and MTV's Spider-Man The New Animated Series: Season One. It's cool animation, but there are a few times when the graphics go wonky, as if the onscreen product were actually some unfinished, preliminary-staged work. Sometimes, it feels like there's no depth or weight to what we're seeing. But the CGI shines whenever Iron Man is doing his thing, and the action is always explosive and kinetic. The designs on Iron Man and his supervillains really look great (Whiplash, Blizzard, the Crimson Dynamo, and my favorite looks: Killer Shrike and Unicorn). So, again, if you can get past Tony as a teen - and I remember that it didn't go over well years ago in the comic book, either - and if you can forgive the at times (but not too often) shady animation, then this may be your huckleberry. The storytelling is sharp. The dialogue is believable and will occasionally crack you up. There's good continuity to the thing, a feel that the overarching story is being advanced. Another cool thing is that, like WOLVERINE & THE X-MEN, there are 26 episodes in this Season One. So we have these to look forward to in upcoming episodes: Black Panther, Nick Fury & S.H.I.E.L.D., the Hulk, and one pretty intriguing development: Tony's friendship with Whitney Stane, the daughter of Obadiah Stane. And in Season One's final episode: War Machine. So cue Black Sabbath... Or not.

Here are the six episodes on this DVD (but I'm still personally holding out for the full season release):

- Episodes 1 & 2 - "Iron Forged in Fire, Parts 1 & 2" - The origin story which goes into the murder of Tony's father, Obadiah Stane's usurping of Stark International, and the genesis of Iron Man. Also, Tony meets Pepper Potts.
- Episode 3 - "Secrets and Lies" - When the Maggia abducts the step-son of a Chinese importer, Tony and Pepper also get taken.
- Episode 4 - "Cold War" - Iron Man partners up with Blizzard to take down common foe Obadiah Stane. But it doesn't take Tony too long to realize that Blizzard is seriously wackadoo.
- Episode 5 - "Whiplash" - Investigating the assault on her hospitalized FBI dad, Pepper bites off more than she can chew and runs into the deadly Whiplash.
- Episode 6 - "Iron Man Vs. the Crimson Dynamo" - Two years ago, the Russian cosmonaut codenamed the Crimson Dynamo was abandoned while out on a space mission. Today, he's back on Earth, and he's sort of miffed.

Predictably, the DVD Special Features ain't much: 4 Suit Profiles which break down the Iron Man armor's tech and weaponry; the music video of Rooney's IRON MAN: ARMORED ADVENTURES theme song; and trailers for IRON MAN: ARMORED ADVENTURES, WOLVERINE & THE X-MEN, the All-New SUPER HERO SQUAD SHOW music video, and the promo for an Iron Man online game on [...].

1/5 No caption or subtitle
  by Igor Bilis
This DVD did not have closed caption or subtitle to allow deaf people like me to enjoy it. Am disappointed.

4/5 A series that succeeds despite itself
  by Christopher Mcfeely (Londonderry, Londonderry United Kingdom)
"Iron Man: Armoured Adventures" did NOT fill me with confidence when it first came to light. After the huge success of the live-action movie, the news that the series would be presenting Tony Stark as a teenager seemed an unnecessary storytelling device (the movie didn't need to make the character younger in order to sell him to a younger audience, why should the cartoon?), and compounding that was the fact that it harkened back to a very unpopular period from the character's history in the mid-90s, when he was replaced with a teenage version of himself. After all, by removing the adult Stark from the equation, you remove the opportunity to tell some of his greatest stories, like the seminal, alcohol-fuelled "Demon in a Bottle", or his many tales of loves lost and won. The concurrent age-regression of many of his supporting cast like James Rhodes, Pepper Potts and Happy Hogan was a rude accompanying shock, albeit a neeeded one to make the ensemble work. The discovery that his arch-enemy, the Mandarin, recieved the same treatment, however, was very nearly the last straw for me, as this just wasn't *necessary* the way it was with his friends and allies. What was next, I wondered? The Melter, science geek who creates a raygun in the shcool lab? Whiplash, sports jock famed for his locker-room rat-tails? Fin Fang Foom, cabin boy of an alien spacecraft, able only to breathe flame when he sneezed? Top it all off with some flat-out ugly cel-shaded CGI animation, and redesigns of supervillains that made them look nothing like themselves, and I resolved that "Armored Adventures" was not the show for me.

And then... it... got... GOOD. Barrelling through all of my greivances, the show began juggling multiple ongoing plotlines (Tony's struggle to reclaim his company from Obadaiah Stane, Tony and the Mandarin's quest for the Makluan rings, the war between the Mandarin's Tong and the criminal Maggia, the terrorists of AIM working on their MODOK project...), brought in guest characters from all over the Marvel universe, forging all the character relationships I expected and *wanted* to see (Pepper's crush on Tony, Tony and Rhodey's strained relationship over Tony's lying and manipulation), and made the absolute *most* it possibly could of Iron Man's admittedly limp rogue's gallery (you've got the Mandarin, and everyone after that is C-level at best), refraining from de-age-ing any characters save for Madame Masque, and eventually even refining their design process so that characters like the Ghost, the Black Knight and the Black Panther *looked like* their comic-book selves, where Mandarin, Blizzard, Whiplash and Crimson Dynamo had been unrecognizable, uninspired jumbles of indistinct armor. Breaking down every barrier that stood in its way, even those very barriers that were built into the show's basic concept, "Armored Adventures" has absolutely succeeded in being a worthy version of Iron Man, and a great superhero cartoon that easily outstrips its contemporary, "Wolverine and the X-Men," in my book. It's not quite "The Spectacular Spider-Man", but it's a country mile better than some of the other animated offerings Marvel has given us over the years.

So, if you have any of the hang-ups about the show that I did when it began that have kept you from watching it, do yourself a favour and give it another try. The two-part pilot throws a lot of the concepts that you may have trouble with at you all at once, but it's all uphill from there. Definitely reccommended!

5/5 Invincible
  by Lucas Miller (California, United States)
As a college student, the concept and idea behind this show was something I did not think I would enjoy. After tuning in for a few episodes, I was hooked on the idea that a show like this could possess not only a well-crafted storyline, but also an interesting cast of characters that would help carry it; both things I didn't think could be found in a superhero cartoon. Howard Stark is killed in the first episode, and his son Tony must carry on his father's goal of collecting and researching the five magical Makluan rings. During this journey, he must also come to terms with his father's death, and the legacy he left behind when Tony is set to inherit the company when he turns eighteen. Along for the ride are Tony's friends, who all contribute something to either the storyline itself or to the development of our hero; who grows over the course of the series. The villains who are introduced feel like actual fleshed out characters, from the unstable Living Laser to the enigmatic Madame Masque, rather than obstacles that the hero must fight for the sake of filling time. As the show progresses, Tony begins to realize hidden secrets about his father he didn't know about and things begin to tie back to the late Howard Stark.

The cel-shaded animation is a unique look for the show, and helps it stand out from not only the other CG properties currently airing on television, but also the traditional animated shows as well. The cinematography is creative and dynamic; not only making the fight scenes fun to watch, but everyday tasks look and animated beautifully. While no match for the theatrical works of Pixar and Disney, this show certainly feels like an aesthetic standard that all CG properties on television should strive to achieve.

Overall, I found this show to be a lot more than I thought it would be; especially in a genre I lost interest in long ago. I recommend this show to any sci-fi fans, superhero fans, or anyone simply looking for an animated show with a good, developed story and a memorable cast characters.