Iron man—Armoured Adventures

Madman Entertainment

Review by Stuart Mayne

It was not a surprise to see an animated YA show on ABC TV. What was a surprise was that it was an American super-hero show. Aimed at the young teen market, this show was developed hot on the heels of the blockbuster movie franchise. Produced by a French and Canadian company for Marvel Animation I like to think that taking production out of the US has benefited both production values and storyline in this series.

Personal interaction between the usual group of Iron man characters—Tony Stark, Pepper Potts and Jim “Rhodey’ Rhodes—is easy and complex; by no means is this a one dimensional superhero series. The 3D CGI animation is clean and crisp. Every detail is attended to, the armour is displayed to detail the navigation and in-flight stability and the internal armour environment is an expansively virtual reality area. This is an easy cartoon to enjoy for its visual qualities.

This is a no frills DVD collection of all 26 episodes in the series. There are no extras, no deleted scenes. But you will get a terrific YA show with great visuals, great scripts and complex storylines. Any teen would enjoy this. You may even get more than a grunt if you bring this home. Who knows, sometimes the impossible does happen?

* This review appeared in the aurealisXpress newsletter for August 2010
 

DVD Review: Ghost Hunt

Ghost Hunt

Madman Entertainment

Review by Carissa Thorp

Mai Taniyama is a student who literally stumbles across the investigation into supernatural occurrences at her school's neighboring abandoned campus. Mai becomes a temporary assistant to Kazuya Shibuya, teenage owner of and lead investigator at Shibuya Psychic Research, a company brought in by the school to solve the mystery of the haunted building.

A novice at this kind of thing, Mai is thrust into a world populated by ghosts, poltergeists, spirits, and other psychic phenomena, as well as the strange people who deal with them, including mediums, monks and priests. She takes it all in pretty well, considering, and steps up to play her part in solving the mystery.

An entertaining mix of mystery and the supernatural, with touches of romance and humour, Ghost Hunt feels like a teen X-Files. It's definitely more mystery-adventure than horror-thriller, though, and fairly mild-mannered as these things go. 

The developing relationships and story plots are well paced and complicated, and though many of the characters seem implausibly young to be "professionals" at this kind of thing, they spark off each other nicely.

I enjoyed what I saw of Ghost Hunt. Check it out for yourself.

(You can see full episodes of Ghost Hunt for free on Madman's site.)