YMMV / Mighty Max

• Alternative Character Interpretation: With the final episode's revelation that the wall of Virgil and Norman's cave has a mural that shows everything that has ever happened in the show, so Virgil knew all of it was going to happen before it did... so, all of those times when he seemed like he didn't know what was going on... trying to destroy the cap when Max was pursued by the Atlantean zombies, yelling at Max for releasing Skullmaster from his prison at the center of the Earth, testing Max in the episode "Max Versus Max", desperately using up their one real weapon against Hydra in the episode "I, Warmonger"... was he just playing along with the prophecy and pretending to be surprised for Max's sake? Had he misinterpreted the prophecy those times and figured out what it really meant later? Or was he honestly trying to subvert the prophecy and simply kept failing?
• Awesome Music: The soundtrack is REALLY good, especially the opening theme.
• Complete Monster: See here.
• Cult Classic: Between its deconstructive take on the Kid Hero and associated tropes and the often dark and shocking nature of the show, combined with Mattel seemingly forgetting about the franchise's existence, it's definitely this.
• Fan Nickname: "Polly Pocket For Boys"
• Fanfic Fuel: The reversed timeline that Max produced within the finale. Just exactly how much different his adventures would be now that he has the knowledge of his previous ones? Also, would his allies from the previous episodes survive their fate now that Max has the ability to do so? Would make a nice Set Right What Once Went Wrong story.
• Fridge Horror:
  • The portals themselves. It's ludicrously easy for Max or anyone who happens to be near Max to blunder into them, especially since the portals are said to be invisible (except to the audience). At the very least we've seen Max and some of his friends blunder into them. The fact that Max could just blunder into a portal and end up on the other side of the planet is already pretty scary, but now consider that some of the portals lead to places like over the open ocean (or at the bottom of it, one is said to go to the bottom of the Marianas Trench), or to the center of the Earth, or even into outer space. Yeah... imagine, just walking past some kid on the street and suddenly you find yourself halfway past Jupiter.
    • Made worse because the portals are all one way. When Virgil and Norman used Max to get them to Greece so Norman could take his immortality trials, they took a rather convoluted path, only pushing Max himself through the final portal so he'd wouldn't have to be present if Norman lost. Max, being Max, determined to go back, but had to use the same chain of portals from before, rather than leap back through the portal that had sent him home.
    • The visibility of the portals may be a case of Depending on the Writer. Max is clearly able to see the portals in "Dawn of the Conqueror".
    • Well, the Mariana Trench portal is in the middle of nowhere halfway down a cliff. Not exactly easy to accidentally fall into.
  • Exactly how many children Freako The Clown kidnapped? Calculate that and the ones who weren't lucky enough to be saved by Max.
  • So, "Norman's Conquest" ends with Norman body-checking Spike off the side of a high cliff, resulting in him plunging offscreen to the ground far below whilst his wrathful promise to return echoes in the viewer's ears. Now, why does this sound familiar...? Oh, right, that's exactly what happened to Spike 10,000 years ago in the exact same place! Given how indestructible Spike has been through this episode, realistically, he survived what Norman just did! Norman better hope that Spike wound up trapped in another icy prison like the last time...
• Genius Bonus: The concept of Lemuria comes primarily from Helena Blavotsky's The Secret Doctrine, published in 1888, in which she describes Lemurians as darkly colored, non-mammalian, and reproducing via eggs. So it makes sense that the Lemurian Virgil would be a bird. It doesn't explain Skullmaster, unless he's Lemurian by nationality and not by ethnicity. Or he did... something to himself after betraying them.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • How does a race of highly evolved, technologically superior brain-sucking aliens store their plans for an invasion of earth? On a floppy disk. Said disk can also be reprogrammed (by a teenager no less) to cause the entire ship to self destruct, which sounds similar to a certain film that involved uploading a virus into an alien mothership.
  • One episode involves aliens after "The Source of All Power" on earth. It turns out to be nuclear waste. Nuclear waste can be processed into Thorium, a fissile salt that can be used in liquid core nuclear reactors, a design entirely immune to catastrophic meltdown. One of the byproducts of this process is Plutonium, which is Uranium's big brother in terms of weapons proliferation. Also a Genius Bonus unless the writers were going for a "Solid Gold Poop"-type joke.
• Narm Charm: When we see the previous Mighty One with Virgil what we see is a Greek warrior dressed in battle attire and a '90s baseball cap. It should look ridicules but the weight the Cap carries is so great that it transcends being a mere baseball cap and makes him look like someone that should be called the Mighty One.
• The Problem with Licensed Games: There were three licensed games: two handhelds made by Tiger Electronics and Systema which were generally considered So Okay, It's Average by LCD handheld standards and faded into obscurity, and the much more notorious The Adventures of Mighty Max for both the SNES and Sega Genesis. The Adventures of Mighty Max was so horrible that the publisher didn't even put it on sale in most markets; it could only be rented at selected Blockbuster stores. In markets where it was available, it was packed with tapes of the episodes ("Day of the Cyclops" for the SNES version, and "Let Sleeping Dragons Lie!" for the Genesis version) presumably because they knew they needed to sweeten the pot to move copies.
• Special Effects Failure: in "Zygote Music" Dr. Zygote evolves himself really far into what's supposed to be some kind of Energy Being, but, due to Limited Animation and unfortunate coloring choices, looks more like a flying, spinning beach ball.
• Values Dissonance: "The Brain Suckers Cometh!" ends with a comical scene of Ernie being Captured by Cannibals, which, back in The '90s, wasn't seen quite as racist as it is today.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: One of the shining examples of this among kids' animation in the '90s. The Totally Radical humor was really the only thing that diminished how much Nightmare Fuel and Family-Unfriendly Violence the show was able to pack in. The show killed off extras in incredibly horrible and varied ways on a near-Once an Episode basis—everything to monsters cutting apart loggers with their own chainsaws to mummies conducting onscreen child sacrifice—usually to set up the episode's villain. The Grand Finale went even further by killing off the entire supporting cast onscreen and the hero being completely unable to beat Invincible Villain, albeit still foiling his plans and allowing for second shot at beating him.

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