Xcalibur

Watching this series now for the first time, and being free of any emotional attachment of happy childhood memories, these thoughts come to mind:

For its age, the visuals no doubt are impressive. Especially in the first half of the episodes, a lot of mocap was used, and other than the very creepily animated horses, it's not terrible. You can spot a lot of the old tech that still ships with Autodesk Maya these days!

The quality of the writing though *is* terrible. It being a childrens TV series is no excuse for a plot that never goes anywhere and full "Let's reset everything again!" style episodes. There is little if any character development, the villains and heroes equally prove to be immune to learning from their mistakes, and plot devices so laughably flawed as to being a bad joke are being introduced and broken within minutes. You begin to question whether this series was written by adults or by pre-school children because it literally is this bad.

Starting with episode 19 - so about half-way through the series - the production company was changed.

This is immediately evident in a massive drop in quality. No more mocap is being used, the character models look a whole lot uglier, visual effects are scaled back, and the writing gets even worse (very impressive how this is possible).

The only thing that improves is the animation of the little sidekick dragon. Production company 1 made him have a serious case of derp-face syndrome, while company 2 at least figured out how to animate his eyeballs and snout a little.

This does have value if you wish to study what 3d rendered TV series looked like in the early 2000s - or if you're nostalgic because you've seen it back then.