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Trivia / Max Steel

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The show

  • Distanced from Current Events:
    • Cartoon Network's reruns, and even their initial run of the third season, had quite a few episodes skipped over for several iterations. There was never any comment about it (possibly on account of the fanbase being tiny) but all of the episodes skipped over had buildings or otherwise large things blowing up, suggesting 9/11 paranoia (one of the show's animators, when blogging retrospectively about his work on this show in particular, commented that the episode he was talking about probably actually wouldn't be aired again on account of 9/11.) To be fair, when the series went into its last run before it went off the air, the end of the lineup was all the episodes previously skipped over in a row.
    • It's worth noting that, although these labels are never used in the show itself, the show is about a group of counter-terrorists fighting and beating terrorists.
    • One subset of the toyline, Urban Siege, had to be discontinued rather quickly because many of the story cards on the back of the figures' packaging referred to terrorism; one even had a villain destroying New York with energy waves from the top of the World Trade Center.
  • Dueling Shows: With the 2000 CGI reboot of Action Man; ironically, this show would be picked up by that show's studio, Mainframe Entertainment, for Season 3.
  • Fake Nationality: Pennsylvania-born John De Lancie as French mercenary L'Etranger. He's the only one who bothers even trying to pronounce his character's name correctly; everyone else anglicizes it into a hard-sounding "LAY-tron-JAY."
  • The Other Darrin:
    • Most of the original voice actors don't make the transition to the made-for-TV movies, the most egregious being Jefferson and Psycho, who don't even have sound-alikes. In season three of the show, Max himself is switched off on between his normal voice-actor and someone else repeatedly, but it's pretty hard to notice.
    • Latin American Dub examples:
      • Josh/Max went from being dubbed by Kaihiamal Martínez in the first season to Luis Carreño for the second and third seasons as well as the direct-to-video movies up until the dubbing switched to Colombia.
      • Psycho was initially voiced by Luis Guillermo Sánchez in the series, he was replaced by Régulo Ríos in Endangered Species.
      • All of the dub was changed from being based on Venezuela to Colombia starting with Countdown.
  • Rereleased for Free: Starting in 2022, Sony's Throwback Toons YouTube page began uploading episodes of the series for free viewing. Prior to that, in 2009, the series was uploaded on the company's Crackle page for free, before being delisted.

The film

  • Box Office Bomb: Budget, $10.4 million. Box office, $6.3 million. One of the most heavily panned films of 2016, this film has likely liquidated any ideas of a film franchise based off of it and is a serious blow to director Stewart Hendler's career. This is also a serious setback to Mattel's attempt to get into filmmaking.
  • Star-Derailing Role: Ben Winchell's leading man career began and ended when he played the title character. Having appeared in many kid or teen-oriented shows before landing what was meant to be his Star-Making Role, its immense failure forced him to retreat back into television in similar fare.
  • Stillborn Franchise: The film was expected to gross $5-7 million in its opening weekend and allow Mattel to break into film the same way Hasbro did with Transformers (2007), but instead ended up with the 13th worst-ever debut for a film playing in over 2000 theaters, and was panned by the few professional critics who bothered seeing it.

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