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STUDIO: Turner Home Entertainment
MSRP: $14.99
RATED: Not rated
RUNNING TIME: 299 minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES:
- Deleted scenes
- Character gallery
THE PITCH
The cartoon with more aliens than a border crossing.
THE TOONS
Ben, Gwen, Grandpa Max, XLR8, Four Arms, Heatblast, Wildmutt, etc.
THE NUTSHELL
Ben
Tennyson is an average kid who happens to find an alien watch called
the Omnitrix. When he puts it on and activates it, he can assume the
form of any of 10 aliens, including an alien dog, a diamond creature,
magma generator, super smart alien, and several others. Using this
newfound ability, Ben becomes a super hero and travels the country with
his cousin, Gwen and Grandpa Max in an RV over a summer vacation.
THE LOWDOWN
This
is a fun cartoon. I covered Season 1 (here) and liked watching it.
With all of the aliens that Ben can turn into, and all of the
adversaries he faces, it makes for a show with a lot of story
possibilities. And the stories themselves are well written and better
than you might find in a lot of cartoons. What’s also interesting is
that all of the seasons take place over the same summer vacation that
Ben and Gwen spend with their grandfather.
The opening episode,
“Midnight Madness” finds Ben, Gwen and Grandpa in a mega-mall where they
encounter Sublimino, a hypnotist who manages to mesmerize Ben and use
his alien forms to commit crimes around the mall. “Ben 10,000” finds
Ben and Gwen transported 20 years into the future, where Ben is an
obsessed, overbearing workaholic who has little regard for Gwen, who
is now an adventuress with martial arts abilities and magical powers in
her own right, and Grandpa is an 80-year-old cyborg.
“Benwolf”
has Ben encountering an alien werewolf, who manages to bite Ben and
also to scratch the Omnitrix, which adds the wolf’s DNA to it,
generating another alien form that Ben can later transform into. In
“Game Over”, Ben and Gwen get zapped into a Sumo Slammer video game and
Ben doesn’t have access to any of the aliens. So they have to play the
game for real in order to get the Upgrade token, the cybernetic virus
alien that Ben can transform into in order to leave the game. In
“Super Alien Hero Buddy Adventures”, Ben tries to resurrect his
favorite show, Kangaroo Commando, which has been replaced by a new
show, Super Alien Hero Buddy Adventures, whose characters closely
resemble some of Ben’s alien heroes.
“The Unnaturals” finds
Ben helping his favorite Little League team when they’re playing a team
of robots. The robots also plan to capture and replace the President
and Ben must act to stop them. Finally, in “The Visitor” Ben and Grandpa Max
encounter an alien, Xylene, who was an old friend of Max’s. Turns out
she was the captain of the ship which brought the Omnitrix to Earth,
and she intended to give it to Max, not Ben. They all have to team up,
however, in order to stop a drone belonging to Ben’s archenemy, Vilgax.
Ben 10 is one of the more enjoyable cartoons of recent times and is accessible to adults as well as kids.
THE PACKAGE
The
animation is sharp and the transfer here is nice, and the sound is
serviceable. There are some deleted scenes on various episodes and a
character gallery.