Review, buy Family Favourites: Beast Wars - Vol. 6, Snoopy And The Peanuts Gang - Fun With Snoopy, Care Bears - Day Dreams, Rupert 2 - Rupert And The Runaway Dragon, Care Bears - Magic Mirror, Sesame Street 5: Play Along Games & Songs/Big Bird's Story Time, The Sly Fox And Red Hen (Ladybird video with book), Sleeping Beauty, Rockin' With Judy Jetson, Snoopy And The Peanuts Gang - Happy New Year Snoopy! / The School Day Out [1973], Bedtime Stories - Tales From The Brothers Grimm [1978], X-Men - Vol. 1 - Night Of The Sentinels, Rumpelstiltskin / The Emperor's New Clothes [1989], T-Rex - The Adventures Of T-Rex - Dinosaurs With A Difference, Rupert: Twelve Delightful Stories on One Video, Beast Wars - Vol. 5, The Smurfs - Tailor's Magic Needle/Petrified Smurfs - Animated [1989], Snoopy And The Peanuts Gang - Snoopy's Getting Married / Snoopy The Detective [1974], Exosquad [1993], Scrooge / Tom Brown's Schooldays [1951]

It took a while for Marvel Comics' X-Men to make it onto the big screen, but in retrospect they were always an obvious target for kids TV. Theirs is the classic tale of teenage alienation, given a comic book twist: when puberty hits, as their peers grow hair in funny places and discover the joys of the opposite sex, certain young people begin to manifest strange super powers. Dubbed "mutants", they find themselves with any number of abilities that set them apart from their human peers. Some can fly, some can fire force-beams from their eyes, some can read minds, some are super-strong, some sprout wings; there are as many different powers as there are mutants. However, normal humans are jealous of mutants, and mutants find themselves hunted and/or ostracised by society. In order to fight this prejudice, the heroic X-Men were brought together as teenagers by the telepathic Professor X and trained to use their powers for the good of all humanity. The animated X-Men series, which first debuted in the early 1990s, remained fairly faithful to the classic comic book series, inheriting several of the more popular characters (Wolverine, Cyclops, Rogue, Gambit, Storm, The Beast, etc) and, for the most part, leaving their personalities intact. Wolverine is still a surly little thug with a heart of gold, although his razor-sharp claws are now mainly used to slice up robots and other machines (less blood that way); Cyclops is their relatively square leader; The Beast is a bookworm, prone to literary quotations at random points in his conversation; and Gambit is the charming Cajun rogue. Unfortunately, the animation of X-Men is, quite frankly, just not up to scratch, especially when judged against the much more stylish Batman: The Animated Series, which was on televisions at the same time. Moreover, the pacing of X-Men is, at times, painfully slow, so the action sequences plod along at a speed that would probably bore most Pokémon addicts. [+]

-Robert Burrow.

More info…

Rumpelstiltskin / The Emperor's New Clothes [1989] (Carlton Visual Entertainment Ltd)

Run time: 38 min.
RRP: ~~£7.99~~
Price: £7.95