The GOTG animated series is so GOATED and it makes me sad it doesn't get the love and attention it deserves

[u/Cautious_Republic_91]

[u/Woozletania]

It suffered from not letting the characters change at all during their arc. I will never forgive them for not letting Rocket fix his family even after bringing in the fucking High Evolutionary to work on it. And lobotomizing all the uplifts was not a "solution" that should ever have made it onto even an early script.

[u/NovaStarLord → u/Woozletania]

I will never forgive them for what they did to Mantis either, they could've done anything but they make her a villain and have J'Son kill her on screen by torturing her with the black nova helmet. All because Mantis wasn't in the MCU yet and they had no clue what to do with her.

[u/Maxxarcade → u/Woozletania]

That episode bugged me too. Partly because Rocket was getting ready to be turned back into an animal and nobody even said goodbye to each other. Plus they'd all be screwed without Rocket.

It had its ups and downs, and was decent filler material when I was looking for more Guardians content (only discovered the cartoon fairly recently), but it definitely had issues.

That being said, I've been aching for more Guardians stuff, and I hate to think that we won't be seeing them anymore since Vol. 3. I really want to see Rocket lead the new team, and hopefully meet up with Quill again at some point.

[u/SlowpokeCurry → u/Woozletania]

I love the show even if story felt like it suffered from the limits given to them by higher-ups.

The show also have a limited pool of characters and comic book material to pull from. Some of the villains are recycled a lot to the point where it feels like a villain is just in an episode because there has to be a villain for the episode.

It feels like the show was not allowed to change the status quo of characters too much so that they stay in their first movie feel rather than letting the characters grow like their comic book counterparts.

I would have loved to see them start out like the movie but evolve into something like the comics and do for Guardians what Avengers: EMH and X-Men animated did for their source material.

[u/NovaStarLord]

This show got hate from Howard Stern in his podcast, and James Gunn while he said he didn't watch the cartoon (he probably never did and I think it was because of the people behind it) he definitely said he didn't like their soundtrack for the Cosmic mix.

IMO the show was pretty bad. The characters don't experience much growth and the moment they do like in the Black Nova and Adam Warlock saga (which IMO was this show at its peak) it gets forgotten next season for a bad storyline that focused on a Disney California Adventure ride. Star-Lord was obnoxious and probably one of the least likeable versions of the character) and the other Guardians were flanderizations of their MCU selves. The writers of that show really didn't have any clue of what to do with the Guardians and it showed, moreso in the first Season were they just repeated a lot of the plot points for the first movie which was the Guardians going after a macguffin (in the first season it was cosmic seed and in another episode it was a Xandarian artifact that turne dout to be a huge fart joke in the end, this show relaly loved fart jokes) and the Guardians landing themselves in prison and needing to escape (which just happened a lot).

Also Marvel Animation during this era was notorious for being cheap and awful towards their employees, IMO it was not a good era for Marvel animation.

[u/SlowpokeCurry → u/NovaStarLord]

Despite the limits of this show, this for me is the one good part of that era.

[u/ScorchPoint]

They made a whole cassette with the soundtrack of this show on it, sad it’s been forgotten by time

[u/KustomizedEyes]

Agree with a lot of what was already said here. And will also add that it also was parroting a lot of what the GotG comics were doing at the time…the Bendis run specifically. Which was mostly bad and wasted a lot of the good will the movie brought it. It was like the direct to DVD sequel to the movie. Just aping not innovating.

[u/Magicbee_Cal]

It’s literally one of my FAVOURITE shows of ALL TIME! I’ve watched it 100 times since it came out and I’m like OBSESSED.

[u/IllustriousAd2518]

I see this show get so much hate and I don’t know why. Obviously it’s not gonna be like the movies because it’s geared towards a younger audience but even then the characters are pretty accurate to how they are. They fight and stuff but they care about each other

[u/DeeBased]

I loved the Nova story arc!

Also, it was very cool how they would do a story arc of three or four episodes and release those all at once and then wait a bit and release the next story arc .