Leniency on the 90's Spider-Man animated series?

http://darafla.blogspot.com/2013/03/leniency-on-90s-spider-man-animated.html

The Hobgoblin before the Green Goblin!: Oh boy, this one was rather infamous. During the show's first season (there were five of them!), there was a small story arc about the Kingpin spreading his criminal influence in New York by teaming up with Spencer and Alistair Smythe, and Norman Osborn of Oscorp. The Kingpin also sought to take Oscorp from Osborn, ensuring that Osborn would keep working for him. However, Norman Osborn wasn't taking any of that. So he was going to become the Green Goblin and sabotage the Kingpin's whole operation, trying to take over the crime of NY for himself. It'd be very much like the Green Goblin vs Big Man feud we got in "The Spectacular Spider-Man." But the guy running the show (John Semper's predecessor) had the bone-headed idea to make Norman become the Hobgoblin rather than the Green Goblin, since Green Goblin was irrelevant at the time the show was being made. Everyone, up to Stan the Man himself, disagreed with this: Norman Osborn was the Green Goblin, no one else! However, a toy line featuring the Hobgoblin was already being made, so Hobby had to be in the show. So eventually a compromise was made: the show ended up having Norman Osborn plotting to take out the Kingpin by creating and selling Goblin gear to this anonymous punk, who became the Hobgoblin to do Osborn's bidding. Of course, Hobgoblin ended up double-crossing basically everyone so that he could take over as the Kingpin, so Osborn and Spidey had to work together to stop this. It's really jarring considering that in the comics, the whole point of the Hobgoblin was that he was taking up the Green Goblin's legacy, and so there was this huge mystery about who he was under the mask. Here, we didn't know who he was but that wasn't really an issue since he was the first Goblin supervillain to show up on the scene, leading Spidey to contently think of him as "Hobgoblin." But y'know what? I think they made this one work out. They got to build towards Norman's descent in madness and becoming the Green Goblin, and give Hobgoblin the screen time he needed to be an awesome villain: probably the best villain on this show. Now the handling of the Green Goblin that came later? We'll get to that later on down the line, but for now let's just say it's kind of a letdown.

Horrendous voice acting, especially Mary Jane!: Giving one example of horrendous voice acting to justify the claim that the whole show had horrendous voice acting, are we? For one thing, MJ's voice (by some person named Sara Ballentine, if anyone cares) was indeed terrible and the delivery atrocious. That, along with MJ's hideous appearance, actually managed to butcher the "Face it, tiger: you just hit the jackpot!" moment. And for another thing, while there were some terrible performances in the show, it was usually a case of horrendous voice direction rather than truly bad acting. Greg has gone on to realize this, seeing as the voice director, Tony Pastor, had a terrible resume and was not a good, experienced voice director. At all. Out of the whole cast, there are about three performances that I found to be perfect in spite of the direction: Roscoe Lee Brown as the Kingpin, Mark Hamill as the Hobgoblin, and the always great Jim Cummings as the Shocker. ("SHOCKEEEEER!" XD) Everyone else was either bad or misdirected. For misdirected, let's look at Christopher Daniel Barnes as the main character. Throughout the show, he had great comedic timing for Spidey's various one liners. But that was all he was good at. For his regular moments, he sounded bland. For his dramatic or angsty expository moments, he spoke in a forced, whispery voice and talked at a ridiculously rushed pace. And for his "emotional moments", good lord was he a ham! His yells were over-the-top and ridiculous, most famous being the abovementioned yell at Shocker and of course "MARY JAAAANE!". Even when he almost got it right in a scene where he chews out Madame Web, he ends it with a needless "DO YOU HEAR MEEEEE?" Years later, Barnes would return to voice a version of Spidey in the "Shattered Dimensions" video game, under expert voice direction by Jaime Thomas, and he was natural and fantastic in the role. Another great example of a great voice with poor direction was Ed Asner as J. Jonah Jameson. Brilliant casting! Asner has a perfect grouchy, gravelly voice for this character. This should be great, right? The one problem: his performance is too restrained. He usually just grumbled and made angry declarations like a normal guy. JJ is not a normal guy: he's supposed to be super-animated and over-the-top. He's been so since the early comics, and it's faithfully represented in the performances of people like Darran Norris and (of course) JK Simmons. Asner wasn't allowed to go over-the-top all that much in this role, something that allegedly bothered him.