YMMV / Alienators: Evolution Continues

• Alternate Character Interpretation: General Granger is convinced that humanity is made up of misguided and self-destructive fools and that any means necessary (including siding with invaders and handing over half of the planet to them) should be used to achieve a "decent, moral society" that he will rule and keep in line with "an iron fist." A Well-Intentioned Extremist and wannabe messiah who genuinely believes that he is doing what needs to be done to save humankind from itself, or a sociopathic misanthrope who is invoking In Your Nature to Destroy Yourselves to excuse being a wannabe dictator who is willing to let billions (including, it's implied, anyone who he has not deemed "useful") die to attain power?
• Anvilicious: The show had a lot of Green Aesop episodes, with the most overt probably being "Meltdown." The Genus manifest in a Derelict Graveyard and plan on causing an atomic disaster by detonating three nuclear submarines that have simply been abandoned there, so we get a lot of Lucy and Ira bickering over the negligence of the military-industrial complex in-between other scenes discussing such topics as conservation and the folly of man.
  Scopes: See how we thrive on your mistakes, see how you have fed us with this radiation. See how you have given us a home by your carelessness. You and your kind are not worthy inhabitants of this planet. Soon, that will change. You will inhabit it no more.
• Awesome Music: SAY HELLO TO EVOLUTION!
• Base-Breaking Character: Ira (who is much, much more science-obsessed here than he was in the film) is either Awesome Ego or such a borderline-smug Insufferable Genius that you sometimes couldn't help but sympathize with General Woodman.
• Complete Monster: General Granger is a high-ranking general with ambitions of establishing a New World Order to control humanity, believing that humanity is prone to violence and self-destruction without the guidance of a strong leader. To achieve this goal, Granger allies with SCOPES and the Genus, supplying the Genus with missiles to infect the entire planet and breaking SCOPES out when the latter is captured by the Alienators. During the series finale, Granger plans to launch more missiles to spread the Genus across the planet and planning to give the Eastern Hemisphere to SCOPES so he can rule over what's left. When the Alienators foil project Alpha-Omega, Granger tries to restart the project through using the satellite defense system to launch a nuclear strike on the moon so the Genus cells there could be spread across Earth and successfully acquires most of the launch code. During the final battle, when Ira reveals to Granger that SCOPES has no intention of keeping his end of the bargain, Granger refuses to listen and continues to believe that SCOPES was under his control.
• Creepy Awesome: Scopes. Repetitive dialogue (something that they admittedly lampshaded at least once) aside, he's a cool-looking Large Ham who, surprisingly for a Saturday morning cartoon villain, never suffered too much Villain Decay ("Cradle Will Fall" was probably his worst showing).
  • Wayne, though squarely a good guy, occasionally has some rather disturbing-looking mutations, such as his giant wasp form in "The Swarm" and his clones' monstrous Genus forms in "Dead Wayne Cells".
• Engaging Chevrons: The Lock-and-Load Montage, which oddly became less prominent as the series wore on.
• Genius Bonus: In his second appearance the lead Genus was accompanied by several primate-based subordinates, so Ira dubs him "Scopes."
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: According to series director Will Meugniot (most famous for Exosquad) it was rather popular in France.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The Twin Towers are briefly seen twice in background shots of New York in "Genus in Your Tank". Keep in mind this series aired in 2002, a year after 9/11 (and considering various other Fox Kids series, Power Rangers Time Force chief among them, had been edited in the wake of it...and yet they somehow missed this).
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Ira's insitence of not calling the flying reptilian Genus a "dragon" is especially funny given that in the original film Ira encounters a creature that basically is a dragon, yet he refers to it as a "bird thing".
  • The episode where gasoline-eating Genus take over car bodies and use them as armored shells is somewhat reminescent of Monster Trucks.
  • Ira, with his lopsided spiky hairstyle, smug cocky attitude and tendency to get out of difficult situations by ridiculous thinking out of the box, might remind anime fans of Joseph Joestar.
• Nightmare Fuel: Genus cells contaminate a reservoir, resulting in Body Horror for anyone who obliviously drinks the water.
• The Scrappy: General Woodman is dismayed that a smarmy loose cannon like Ira Kane saved the day and got to meet and be given an award by the President, so he spends a little over half of the series being an Obstructive Bureaucrat Jerkass, pissing on the Alienators' parades while trying to make himself look good, at one point even claiming sole credit for having saved the day, something which the team doesn't contest, presumably assuming that it'll get him off of their backs for a while. He starts to soften from "French Underground" onward, however, and by "Itching for the Genus" (which introduced General Granger) he's become a full-fledged Reasonable Authority Figure.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: While all of the characters that originated from the film were Flanderized to a degree, Harry was the most detrimentally affected. In the film it was a running gag that he had a thing for women's sports. In the show he has an all-encompassing obsession with all sports, which he prattles on about endlessly when not freaking out over things (like bugs) to an almost Uncle Tomfoolery extent. That he was a professor (like Ira) and a geology expert is only brought up twice and one those times was as part of a Cutaway Gag (he was shown teaching a class full of Wayne duplicates).
• Spiritual Successor: In a way to Godzilla: The Series, with the protagonists being a special anti-monster squad and the complex and alien-looking creature designs being quite similar to the mutants of the Godzilla animated show.
  • Also to The Real Ghostbusters (based off an Ivan Reitman film, though the Cool Car and crazy weapons, as well as the Team Pet, were all invented for this show) and even Power Rangers (given the colored armor the heroes wore).
• Squick: The Genus are... gross, and were frequently shown reproducing by vomiting more of their kind; on one occasion the "children" were somehow even bigger than the "parent" that threw them up.

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