Ok, so here goes – let’s just dive in and get the painful part of this review over with right up front and then spend some time on meaningless rambling and thoughts. Avatar, the movie, was much, much better than I expected – surprisingly so, but still not the masterpiece that you would expect or possibly hope based on the intense amount of effort and money that has been put into it. Why is that the painful part? Well… because I was hoping for a disaster of monumental proportions that I could make fun of endlessly and think back on in my old age fondly as the height of Hollywood overindulgence.

I’ll admit right up front that I’m not really familiar with Astro Boy. I know he’s a hugely popular Japanese character, and has been since the early 1950s, I know that there have been many cartoon and manga (or as they call it in Japan, “Comics”) iterations of him over the last half century, and I know that a lot of people are fanatical about him. I’ve even seen a few minutes of cartoons here and there over the years, and I recognized him on a poster in one of the later episodes of Macross/Robotech (In the newstand the three Zentradi spies are running)

Iron man’s unexpected winning streak continues with what is unquestionably my favorite episode of the series so far. I initially decided to start reviewing this series on a lark, since Marvel is woefully underrepresented on our site (Owing mostly to the fact that I don’t really like it, and the guys on here who do like it don’t wanna’ write about it), but Iron Man is really the only Marvel Hero who works for me (I think mainly because Rocket Red was so woefully under-used in the DC universe).

Let’s just get this out of the way before we go any further: yes, I cried. Despite my right-leaning conservative status, I’m secure enough in my manhood to admit I was crying several times in this movie. I wasn’t bawling like a six-month-old baby girl or anything - and if I did, I wouldn’t admit it because I’m not *That* secure in my manhood - but there were definitely some water streaming down my face at several points in the movie. And there were several *other* points that my eyes were definitely stinging and my throat got kinda’ tight.