YMMV / The Mind's Eye

• Awesome Music: When you have people like Jan Hammer, Thomas Dolby, and Kerry Livgren doing the music, of course there's going to be some great tracks.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: While no character has enough screen time to be considered "major", some have made bigger impacts than others.
  • The Mind's Eye (1990) segment "Creation" submission "Chromosaurus" features several Tyrannosaurus Rex as chrome-plated Mechanical Lifeforms. They have at most 30 seconds of screen time, but they have become a popular symbol of the Vaporwave genre. It helps that they were created by Pacific Data Images.
  • The Gate segment "Nuvogue" submission "Laser Broadway" also features chrome-plated mechanical lifeforms, this time as birds. They also have almost 30 seconds of screen time, but seem to make more of an impact than the chrome musicians and the American presidents, both of which more than double the birds' screen time.
• Shocking Moments: Two of them happen in The Gate.
  • The first is segment "Planet of Lost Souls" submission "Liquid Selves". This shows a field of human faces, with one human face representing mountains in the background, and more in the sky as clouds.
  • The second is segment "The Ascent of Man" submission "Legacy". This shows a cave painting animal getting speared by unseen beings (presumably early humans).
• Special Effect Failure: While most of the primitive-ness of the CGI can be excused since it was made in The '90s (and some submissions made in The '80s), there are some things that should have been easy to avoid, even then.
  • Beyond segment "Too Far" has two errors in the submission "Viomechwars", both of which have to do with the red dinosaur. First, when a missile destroys a small vehicle, the dinosaur freezes in place in the background. Later, the camera clips into the dinosaur.
  • The Gate segment "The Ascent of Man" shows a plant on the left side of the sceeen rising with a camera tilt, as if it hit the floor of the frame. Rather than disappearing beneath the frame.
  • The Gate segment "Nuvogue", when it shows a band themed after American money, many of the members have duplicate arms.
• Tear Jerker: "Armageddon": Alloy receives a vision of what will happen if Armageddon comes to pass. He watches in horror as every inhabited world is destroyed, then is taken to a thermal vent with the spirits of various people reflected therein; it gives way to a field of masks underneath a grey sky, then finally an expanding cloud of plasma—the only evidence that humanity ever existed, never to be viewed with living eyes. Of course, this strengthens Alloy's resolve to prevent the apocalypse.
• Unintentional Period Piece:
  • The Mind's Eye series was intended to showcase state-of-the-art computer graphics and animation. Most of these animations, with their clumsy appearance and occasional glitching, were rendered obsolete within a decade of their release. The series itself shows the astounding difference in quality of computer animation from the beginning of the decade to about the middle.
  • Some of the art styles, the use of simple and colorful geometric shapes to depict various items including people is very indicative of the visuals used in media in the late ’80s-early ‘90s. This is particularly prominent in Beyond, where the sequence “Too Far” features musicians composed entirely of building blocks.
• Visual Effects of Awesome: Even if the animations are a bit primitive by today's standards, they still feature some very striking, almost dreamlike, imagery.

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