Old Joe Marvel Comic Commercials

[Mandingo Rex]

Someone at HT posted this, but I found it interesting because I'd never seen most of these:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXY8BMXDKSA

It's the Sunbow-animated Marvel Comics commercials, but besides showing early animation with the wrong voices, the main thing that stuck out to me was that this opens up a whole slew of "Sunbow" animated characters that were never in the cartoon show...

Outback, Hit N Run, Raptor, Techno-Vipers, Zanzibar, Battle Force 2000, The Pit! Cobra Island! The Defiant!!! I dunno, I found it kind of awesome. It's also the only non-DiC Battle Armor CC animation that I've seen.

 

[Monkeywrench]

I've seen those before, the first time I saw them, I thought they were awesome too! If there would have been a season 3 of sunbow, I thing Zanzibar would have been a very interesting characther

 

[ThunderDan19]

Wow, that was a blast from the past! I remember a few of those. It was kind of cool to see how the voices (particularly CC and Destro, the Crimson Twins, the narrator) evolved into the familiar voices from the cartoon. Seems like somebody decided they were good enough to spawn the cartoon series (half hour long commercials I guess). Pretty cool!

 

[Mandingo Rex]

I love the fact that they're essentially commercials for commercials. But yeah, the voices evolving was kind of awesome. Sort of like watching the really old Simpsons compared to today.

 

[G.I.*EDDIE]

i think these were posted at the old boards till the tsunami took us out...

I love the fact that they're essentially commercials for commercials.

perfect description!...its so blatant too, at least now...back then i had no clue, i just wanted whatever toy i just saw

and it is really cool to see the charactors that never made it into the toon get some animation...really wish that toon woulda went on longer

 

[Mandingo Rex]

I wish they'd learned with the Transformers film and just ditched the entire "bring on a new crazy alien race to explain the creation of the storyline, and try to replace all the main characters with new crappier replaces" concept. Instead, we got Cobra-La and then Sunbow was ditched for the lower-quality DiC. At least we got 2 more seasons of Joe. The TF movie essentially killed the TF cartoon in the US.

Having only seen a few of these over the years, seeing them all now makes me REALLY wish that Sunbow hadn't lost the contract due to Hasbro being cheap, and had continued on with the characters, art style and storyline.

The first commercials were animated rather poorly in comparison to the later commercials, but the last half had some pretty awesome animation. That's a lot of work for selling a comic book! No way in hell they'd do that today.

 

[ThunderDan19]

I love the fact that they're essentially commercials for commercials.

I love you the narrator makes sure to announce the vehicles and character names very clearly to make sure you went right out to find them... right after you stopped by the comic shop...

...At least we got 2 more seasons of Joe. The TF movie essentially killed the TF cartoon in the US.

Having only seen a few of these over the years, seeing them all now makes me REALLY wish that Sunbow hadn't lost the contract due to Hasbro being cheap, and had continued on with the characters, art style and storyline.

The first commercials were animated rather poorly in comparison to the later commercials, but the last half had some pretty awesome animation. That's a lot of work for selling a comic book! No way in hell they'd do that today.

I don't remember seeing any Joe cartoon on TV after the movie ('course I lived in the boonies, so that's probably partially why). The movie and Cobra-La was definitely the "jumping the shark" moment where the franchise turned downward.

You are definitely right that there's no way any comic would get commericals these days. They certainly put in the investment back in the day (and reaped the rewards). Too bad they won't put anything back into promoting Joe these days. A good investment today would be to develop a "kid friendly" (a la COD/BF, but with no swearing or blood/guts) FPS (not the ROC one) to generate interest among the kids. Sure would beat crappy movies...

 

[G.I.*EDDIE]

Joes been getting the shaft since the 80's turns out...i never knew that sunbow was canned due to Hasbros cheapness