YMMV / Iron Man: The Animated Series

• Adaptation Displacement: In the cartoon, the Mandarin kidnapped both Tony Stark and Yinsen. Years later, in The Invincible Iron Man and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the Mandarin (indirectly) is involved with their kidnapping, which led to the creation of Iron Man.
• Bizarro Episode: Season 2's "Distant Boundaries" is one, as the show takes Iron Man and War Machine to an alien planet, facing off against a newly-introduced villain named Dark Ageis, and also includes the reintroduction of Titanium Man, who proceeds to (rather quickly) undergo a Heel–Face Turn and sacrifice himself to stop Dark Aegis. While aliens and outer space aren't exactly unprecendented in the Marvel universe (and the show already had alien antagonists in the form of Fin Fang Foom and Ultimo), it's the only time the show did something like this; otherwise it kept strictly to Earth-bound plots and villains.
• Can't Un-Hear It: Before RDJ made the role his own in live-action, Robert Hays's voice as the Golden Avenger was the voice you'd hear when reading the comics. Same with either James Avery or Dorian Harewood as Rhodey.
• Complete Monster: "Distant Boundaries": One-shot villain Dark Aegis outstripped any other villain in sheer monstrosity. A foe of Tony Stark, a flashback sequence shows Dark Aegis hijacked one of Tony's satellites designed to destroy asteroids and intended to turn its firepower upon the Earth. Tony managed to stop him and launched Dark Aegis into the depths of space, with him eventually landing on the planet Elysian. Drunk with his immense power and declaring himself a god, Dark Aegis nuked the planet and slaughtered its inhabitants for being "grotesquely less than human". Promising Titanium Man upgraded weapons in exchange for luring Iron Man to the planet, Dark Aegis tried to convince Tony to join him, promising him godhood in the process. Dark Aegis demonstrated his power by destroying two of Elysian's moons and requested Tony's help in destroying the planet's dual suns. Titanium Man ended up helping Stark and Rhodes fight Dark Aegis and later gave his life to stop him for good, as Titanium Man found that no weapon was worth the price of letting Dark Aegis live.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: To a small degree, Hypnotia. She wasn't popular enough to make it into the mainstream comics, but those who remember the show's first season think of her fondly as an interesting and competent hench villain for the Mandarin. Had she been given more screen time, her popularity might've been more noticeable.
• Fan Nickname: The series is often referred to as "Iron Man: The Animated Series" among fans (the official title is simply Iron Man).
• Growing the Beard: Season two is generally agreed to be a vast improvement over the first season due to being more serious in tone and more faithful to the original comics.
• Harsher in Hindsight: In "The Grim Reaper Wears a Teflon Coat", Tony shows a simulation of his Grim Reaper fighter jet attacking New York, complete with it blowing up the World Trade Center. Later in the same episode, the Mandarin plans to use the Grim Reaper to blow up the Pentagon and demonstrates by having a model of the plane crash into a scale replica of the building.
• He Really Can Act: Robert Hays is better known for Airplane! than anything else; his first season performance was, like the rest of that season, mediocre at best. In season 2 however, he demonstrated a lot more range — being snarky in a manner similar to Airplane, but also plumbing the depths of Tony's fragile mental state, particularly in the Armor Wars two-parter (when at times he genuinely sounds like he's teetering on the edge of madness from guilt):
  Tony: Don't you see? Too much blood has already been spilled with my sword! It has to end!
• Inferred Holocaust: The events of the two-part series finale. The Mandarin's anti-technology mist temporarily covers New York, shutting off anything that requires electricity to work, with the same thing later happening to Hong Kong. The viewer isn't really shown the extent of the damage caused by the mist, but such an attack likely would've resulted in many deaths, as hospitals and traffic lights would've been without power. And that's not even getting into what would've happened to any airplanes or helicopters unlucky enough to have been flying over the cities when the mist was released...
• Stock Footage Failure: The scene where the Bruce Banner Hulks out in "Hulk Buster" was actually recycled from the character's prior guest appearance in the Fantastic Four animated series. This is why Banner's outfit suddenly changes with no explanation, as well as why the Hulk's design looks drastically different (especially his hairstyle). The gamma bomb going off is represented by a shot from "The Beast Within" of Fin Fang Foom and his gateway blowing up, cut short to prevent you from see the Mandarin's rings.
  • Constantly in the first season — pretty much any time Tony armored up, no matter where he was, it would cut to the stock footage of him armoring up in his office.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Hypnotia, despite clearly being one of the only competent henchmen the Mandarin has coupled with a snarky sense of humor as well as her interest in Tony Stark while Dreadknight and Blacklash pine for her, was not fully utilized as a character. She in fact disappeared for most of the original episodes of the first season, even though she was the first of the main cast to actually appear in the first episode.
  • MODOK's sympathetic backstory in the first season — working for the Mandarin in hopes of being returned to his normal human body after the Red Ghost turned him into what he was — was completely ditched in the second season in favor of making him a comic relief villain. It's a shame since his origin was perhaps one of the few compelling parts of the first season, and could've easily led to a Heel–Face Turn with MODOK joining Stark Enterprises.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Despite being broadcast alongside a Fantastic Four series, the only crossover we got was IM cameoing as part of The Avengers in a couple of FF episodes. (Perhaps if both shows had gotten third seasons, we could've gotten such a crossover.)

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