So far, I totally love this M.A.N.T.I.S. show. I sort of half watched it when it was on in 94/95. It is totally dumb. It started off a lot more cool, as this one dude on Amazon says:
I distinctly remember taping the pilot for M.A.N.T.I.S. and watching
it over and over. Unfortunately, the series was nowhere near as good.
Why? The pilot was extremely topical. Our hero was crippled by an rogue
police sniper using illegal ammunition during the post-Rodney King verdict L.A. riots. He was shot by a racist white cop simply because he was a black man in the "wrong" part of town. This was typical of the pilot, which never held back from confronting racism.
Also, our hero was much more limited in his abilities during the pilot,
but his origin and powers were retconned for the series. Not cool!
I would purchase the pilot in a heartbeat and show it to my children,
but I can't recommend watching a single episode of the series.
But I still like the other episodes I've seen. The costume gets better in the series (the pilot has the light-up eyes one). I'm still looking for copies for the store. But if you enjoy dumb entertainment, eat this up. I've only watched the first three episodes so far so I'll get back to you if it sucks. So far it is really silly, really pro-black and really simply enjoyable, even without all the overt political stuff the pilot had.
And just because I know ben will mention Mantis style:
Not that Ben Catmull is reading this but one thing that is amazing about M.A.N.T.I.S. is the references to Buckaroo Banzai. I was gonna say the show reminded me of it in the beginning, and then it hit me that the star was one of the Rasta aliens from BB AND then they keep on mentioning Flux Capacitors.
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