Okay that's enough trashing of X-Men TAS.
Just kidding. But seriously, X-Men TAS is considered one of the greatest superhero/comic book children's cartoons ever created for good reason. They only had 20 minutes per episode and managed to balance a slew of characters(heroes and villains) many different themes and a bunch of different types of stories. Aside from Wolverine and I guess Xavier and Magneto most of the characters are played at their surface level. Which isn't surprising considering it's a kid show. But along the way you got little hints and insights into their characters which I feel they did for all the characters pretty well. Nice little subtle things too. The best thing the show did was get kids to check out the comics for further material on these characters.
To say Gambit's personality in XTAS has little to do with the comics is a bit off imo. It's just very surface level. The first couple of seasons of XTAS was still pretty early in Gambits creation and he was still very mysterious. Would I have liked to see more done in later seasons, sure, but let's not forget either that Gambit along with Jubilee appeared in roughly half the episodes that most of the other characters appeared in. But the cartoon spiked the interest. Once you got into the comics Gambit was even cooler, more bad ass, and had more depth and that's where the fandom really began. Gambit is definitely memorable in the cartoon but he really grabbed the fans who picked up the comics.
That's why I get so annoyed with modern day haters who say, "He's more of a side character" "He has lame powers" "He's just a 90's cliche" "He couldn't hold his own movie" etc. To me, these are people who's total knowledge of Gambit is from that cartoon. You could say that about all the characters pretty much in some way. They're all some type of cliche. Aside from Wolverine, Gambit and Rogue are probably the biggest standouts from the show in part due to look and the best voice acting on the show. Unfortunately Gambit's character has suffered a ton of awful writing over the past bunch of years in the comics so considering how popular he was, hate has eventually taken place. Calling him a "90's cliche" is just straight up hate and no one can actually explain what that means. It's just nonsense people spew and can't back it up with any coherent argument.
The episode Aces and Eights from WATXM is a terrific Gambit episode. Though I agree Phil Lamarr's awful voice acting almost ruins it.
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