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Intrancity — The Complete X's Scorecard

#cartoon #nickelodeon #review #scorecard #thexs
Published: 2017-11-10 21:23:32 +0000 UTC; Views: 16517; Favourites: 24; Downloads: 7
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Description Before I watched The X's, I had no experience with that show, but the only thing that comes out of my head was like next scorecard, El Tigre, where I remember seeing a character from this show on Nicktoons: Attack of the Toybots. It wouldn't be until Spring 2017 when I decided to watch this show alongside El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera by Cinco de Mayo. Since I felt like uploading a Season 2 scorecard is too early, I pushed it back to June 28, then July 13, afterwards an unknown date and finally have then seperate by having El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera upload on Dias de los Muertos and The X's on November 10. When I first marathoned the series for release, I only saw the series up to the episode Y's Up because I was using KimCartoon to watch the episodes. The obscurity of the series most likely prevented me from continuing, so I had no choice but to accept my fate without looking up the rest of the episodes online. I was considering to slap "didn't seen" signs, but that'll only take up way too much space, so I added a reminder instead. What did it read? "(...so I've seen all the episodes up to Y's Up. The remaining episodes I cannot find.)". Plus, I had to call this scorecard "The X's Scorecard" without the word "complete" in the title because that word would be contradictory at the time. However, that all would change exactly two years later when I found the rest of the episodes on not just Archive.org (with a little help from a user in the comment sections who provided the link), but also on Vimeo, allowing me to watch 11 not-seen segments on November 10, 2019.

After all the troubles and delays I had with this show, I completed it and I was surprised. Let me give you a background of how my thoughts on The X's changed over time: While marathoning all Nicktoons premieres, I thought this show would suck due to the characters. When I watched this show for this review, though, I noticed some strong pros in it. That's why there's only 3 meh episodes because they were pretty cruel in a rather unfair fashion. The goods, here, takes up half the pie chart (I guess that describes how solid The X's is). Since this show failed to crack a blessed, there's still 6 great episodes that filled up the Top 5 list. It fitted really well until I recently saw the rest of the episodes.

The X's looks good according to the pie chart, but there's one important aspect that makes up the best this show offered:

Remember when I stated that El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera is better than The X's? Well, I'm gonna have to switch that to say that The X's has better writing. So...the premise is first and from my inferences, it looks like Nick's desperate knock-off of Pixar's extremely phenomenal feature film, The Incredibles. Compare them and you got a family that fights crime. Well, yeah I think that comparison is just as reasonable as people claiming that Welcome to the Wayne is a rip-off of Gravity Falls. But onto the writing, is it any good? How it works as an action series is kind of weak, probably one of the factors for The X's obscurity. Most of the episodes I've seen out of 27 segments are rather cliched. Not only that, but the action scenes from The X's aren't really as spectacular and action-packed as The Incredibles' action, since it's TV quality, the fighting isn't stretched up with suspense and action like how The Powerpuff Girls writes its action scenes (well, in the McCracken era to be specific), but they still stand as their own. Man, the cliches tossed around the show's writing kind of bugs me, which is the reasoning that most of the episodes are good for lacking entertainment. However, there is one hope that keeps the writing strong and not just cliched mess, and that's the show's use of satire. Every episode pretty much uses satire to tell its story and...it really works! The X's does a great job at making fun of cliches and relatable situation and turn them more exaggerated and unique as possible. But how's the humor? Same goes for the satire's contribution to the show because it's not bland slapstick like how CatDog treats it, it feels like something you see in a Dreamworks movie with unexpected jokes and pop culture references (even though The X's doesn't rely on them that much). Even this show relies on audio gags (one of my favorites of these audio gags come from Kimla), with some ironic humor and the X parents yelling at objects to do thing spiffy up the humor of the show. They can also take advantage of The X's spy style as well by putting strangers and other people into training courses, which works because the joke is that The X's don't have experience with something like babysitting. You see all that, the satire is the heart of The X's and it makes fun of these cliches very well. To add up the pro soup, you can also find some nice twists, setups and foreshadowing that also makes the cliches work here. The thing that surprised me the most is that the most of the romance plots are actually written well. Since it stays loyal to the show's satire, I'm glad that the writers know how the make these type of cliches funny again by finding the humor inside them. When you see this show at first glance, it's Nickelodeon's answer to The Incredibles but the network feed it cliches and generic spy action, but when you add humor into the plot, it's clever and it spiffy up the cliches once again.

The animation can be separated from the writing since it doesn't have anything to do with humor:

This is the type of animation style that I see in the credits of The Incredibles, where it gives us that 2D and abstract feeling of superhero flicks. The X's used that as its animation style and it really fits with its theme well. You thought I was going to say "nothing great is about it" at this point? Well, it's great now from what I've seen and I felt like the "tolerable" I placed on one of the episodes might be too harsh. I mean, some might think that I find the animation "ugly" due to how abstract it is, but I find it unique for its time and heck, it can execute decently in the 2010s. The character designs contribute to the abstract feeling of the animation the most due to how it looks like they were formed out of shapes and the 2D aspect added to the show. As for the character animation, it also works well. It makes me think that The X's have the same character animation like in Johnny Test Season 1 where that show didn't make the transition to Flash until it reached its 2nd season. At first, judging by the animation style, I thought that The X's is going to be animated in Flash due to the look and panning it has like how El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera treats its animation, but that proved me wrong. It appears that they move smoothly like other cartoons from the decade. The backgrounds also work very well, with a pretty colorful choice of colors through its settings. What really caught my attention with the backgrounds is Glowface's lairs (yes, he has more than one lair for some strange reason) where it's packed with all these spikes and it's abnormally shaped, which makes it so eye-candy to see. It's the details that makes it look fascinating. There is one thing I have to complain about the designs, and that's the characters' hairs (especially Tuesday and Truman) inconsistently changing colors. For example, Truman's hair would be ginger to blonde, while Tuesday's hair felt like the animators don't really care about her hair color so they gave her hair many dyes of blue, purple and red. I mean, her hair can be either purple or blue when it's nighttime, but it doesn't seem to fit the depth very well because if you add darkness to green, it'll just create dark green and not blue or purple. Speaking of depth, the characters also got a sense of depth on their faces where you can see where their nose and mouths are. This may seem like a nitpick as it doesn't has anything to do with the animation, but it affects how we read it, and that's the title cards. That's why I had to remind you guys to look up the episodes on Wikipedia because the font they used on the title cards are ugly, especially when they are squashed and stretched out. The Powerpuff Girls doesn't squash their title card text but instead stretch it horizontally a little so that it can fit the screen (a technique that the crew used from Seasons 1-3), but The X's, on the other hand, squashes their text too much where it's hard for viewers to read the episode title. But hey, that font at least fits the show's atmosphere. This type of animation style is very unique and it surprisingly fits well with the show's atmosphere.

From your reading of my thoughts on The X's writing, humor and animation, you thought that it'll get something divine, right? Well, the characters affect the show:

Gumball Syndrome looks like something that may invade this show because of the humor and characters? Well, since I liked the writing, The X's isn't the show with the said formula, but it's instead in the good side of it. But I digress, the characters are the ones that definitely need work. They are very often immature and could fight around a lot like a feud like they couldn't agree on things. That kind of explains why the cast is forgettable because the characters are tropes. Glowface is rather a forgettable generic villain whom's goal is to annihilate the X's. For most of the time, development barely shows up in the writing, which also affects my thoughts on the characters some more. But even with those cons, we still have the satire of the show to save the day. While these characters are rather "annoying", they take advantage of character tropes where they use the show's satire to make them better. That's right, the characters make fun of themselves (or their designated character tropes given out by the creator of the show), and you know what? They aren't annoying all the time, they can be funny and could entertain us with visual and audio gags. The satire controls both the writing and characters to where even the characters can be likable with the jokes they toss out. The characters I noticed that makes clever humor are the X parents, Glowface and Kimla, and they seem to execute it well where again, they make fun of the tropes. I mean, characters such as Tuesday X, Truman X and Homebase doesn't make hilarious jokes like the said characters I mention that makes sure hilarity entertains the audience, but these characters are still pretty relatable. Plus, I really like how surprisingly honest they are like whenever someone would lie, they will definitely be aware of it rather than be suspicious for a long period of time. So as you can see, satire showed up on time to spiffy up the characters some more by making fun of them, which means that I love some of them because they are funny and takes advantage of character tropes. Without the satire, they're just crap. With the "crap" I say, it adds to the satire of these characters where the rating for them is rather debatable.

At first I thought this show would suck, but it proved me wrong. The X's is just an annoying knock-off of The Incredibles by filling that movie up with cliches and making the characters annoying as possible. However, this show is just nothing without the satire where it makes fun of the shows' cons and adds a really unique abstract style to the show. Well, I thought The X's would be tolerable, but from 27 segments, it's safe to say that this is a good show (77%). Considering that The X's came out at a time where action cartoons are once again popular (Kim Possible and Teen Titans are probably the ones that started it all), most of the action cartoons are just generic versions/rehashes of these shows like Danny Phantom and Ben 10 (haven't seen it at this point but it's from what I've seen from its images so please don't panic), but this show attempts to be different from these shows and it stands out from them. I hope I find more cartoons like this to have a nice laugh at.
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Comments: 14

Sam19326 [2021-09-01 22:26:08 +0000 UTC]

👍: 0 ⏩: 1

Intrancity In reply to Sam19326 [2021-09-01 23:50:29 +0000 UTC]

👍: 1 ⏩: 1

Sam19326 In reply to Intrancity [2021-09-01 23:53:16 +0000 UTC]

👍: 0 ⏩: 0

Sam19326 [2021-07-09 01:55:24 +0000 UTC]

👍: 0 ⏩: 0

PineapplePan2003 [2019-11-11 22:54:37 +0000 UTC]

So you finally found the last episodes

👍: 0 ⏩: 0

ivanlerma [2019-11-11 19:56:29 +0000 UTC]

Did you find the other episodes?

👍: 0 ⏩: 1

Intrancity In reply to ivanlerma [2019-11-11 21:47:43 +0000 UTC]

And why did you made this comment?

👍: 0 ⏩: 1

ivanlerma In reply to Intrancity [2019-11-12 02:48:10 +0000 UTC]

Because the last time i saw this, there were a few episodes on the scorecard and now i see more. so i wanted to ask how you found the rest.

👍: 0 ⏩: 1

Intrancity In reply to ivanlerma [2019-11-13 23:47:32 +0000 UTC]

Usually, when I update a show that has ended with more episodes I haven't uncovered, I, as well, do the same thing with the description by describing how I found the rest of the episodes.

👍: 0 ⏩: 0

SandalsFish [2019-11-11 07:21:52 +0000 UTC]

Now what is this show which I have never heard of in my entire life?

👍: 0 ⏩: 0

098765four [2019-08-18 02:35:47 +0000 UTC]

Hi there! Not sure if it interests you, but I found a site that has all the episodes of this series, including the ones you couldn’t find. I tested it and it works. So if you ever have spare time, you could potentially complete this scorecard.
archive.org/details/MightyDuck…

👍: 0 ⏩: 0

SaxonPezzollaVGCP [2018-08-28 06:12:53 +0000 UTC]

R.I.P. The X's
November 25 2005 - December 13 2006

👍: 0 ⏩: 0

BeekBeek85 [2017-11-20 23:24:01 +0000 UTC]

I LOVE THIS SHOW so much~!

Sadly, I was unable to find the remaining episodes in English. However, I was able to find the Arabic dub.

👍: 0 ⏩: 0

DTH-Incorproductions [2017-11-10 21:32:29 +0000 UTC]

My god............................................................................................................this is the most consistent show you have ever reviewed even moreso than Evil Con Carne.

👍: 0 ⏩: 0