Episode #1 - The Origin Of The Silver Surfer, Part One
Original Airdate February 7th 1998

When the peaceful planet of Zenla is threatened by Galactus, Devourer of worlds, Norrin Rad attempts to reason with the giant..

Credits
Written By: Larry Brody
Music Composed By: Shuki Levy and Kussa Mahchi
Guest Starring: Paul Essiembre as The Silver Surfer/Norrin Radd, Camilla Scott as Shalla Bal, Colin Fox as Uatu the Watcher, Aron Tager as Master of Zen-La and James Blendick as Galactus

Review: With their main stars on the verge of having their series wrapped up or already finished, Marvel went into the well of some of it’s lesser known, obscurer characters for their new show. In the end, they choice to go with Silver Surfer, one of Stan Lee’s personal favourites, best known to most as a character who repeatedly turned up in the early Fantastic Four comics. He actually got picked instead of Daredevil, or so the story goes.

Regardless, my memories of the show’s premiere aren’t happy ones, as I had waited months to see Spider-Man season six in order to find out if he found Mary Jane or not. We always got a new Marvel cartoon in September over here, and more often than not, we never, ever knew what we were about to watch. I remember my brother and I debating what exactly was going to be featured on The Marvel Action Hour (the only preview we had was a 5 second transformation clip of the 1980’s Hulk, which was enough to have my brother jumping up and down.

So to my 10 year old mind, we were getting The Silver Surfer, the lame Fantastic Four guest star instead of another season of the best cartoon on TV? I wasn’t amused, to be blunt. I never gave this show a chance when I was a kid and to be blunt, the disappointment of not getting Spidey back probably put me off. I remember literally nothing else of the series, so this is essentially a new show to me, which is a lot different, I’ve practically memorised every line in most of the other Marvel cartoons…

The immediate thing I noticed was the show employed a similar visual style to X-Men, including the big black inking found of the characters and backgrounds. It does come across slightly better than the aforementioned show and there’s clearly a very, very heavy Kirby influence but the animation and inking doesn’t do it justice. Simple cheekbone links look like someone has drawn on the characters face with one of those big black marker pens I sometimes steal from work.

This particular episode is slowly paced, but given how it’s part one of three, it’s forgivable as the ending of this episode does indeed leave one curious as to how it’s going to be included, as the Surfer isn’t simply going to find planets for Galactus to feed on now, is he? I couldn’t help but feel slightly sorry for Rad as he looked towards his beloved planet and remembered nothing of it’s people, it’s way of life or why he sacrificed his own life to save it.

Whilst the beginning suffers from a slightly too slow pace and some relatively unneeded scenes with The Skrulls and The Cree’s, the ending peaked my interest greatly. It’s not as good as some of the other Marvel episodes but on the same note, it’s nowhere near as bad as others.

And you already know it was better than The Silver Surfer And The Coming Of Galactus, don’t you?

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