X-Men Evolution

As a huge X-Men geek from way back, I was thrilled to find that they made a new series of X-Men cartoons.  No more old-school crappy-animation episodes for me!  (Okay then I sometimes watch them just to get nostalgic.  That's my right!)
That's right, gone are the days when all the female characters had big hair.  Now everyone, even the guys, has shiny, stylish hair to catch them up with the times!  Well everyone except the Professor of course.  But at least his head's shiny, so that kinda counts, right?
All the younger characters have also been shrunk down to teenagers, which I guess was to help attract a younger audience.  A bunch of them are still adults though, so they didn't go overboard and start giving us teenage Wolvies and Storms.  That woulda been something.  *shudder*
I especially like what they've done with Nightcrawler.  Hey, he's my favorite character, so I should take special interest in the way he's drawn and animated.  I like his demon look especially, and he also has some cool running and wall-climbing animations.
One thing I can say is that a lot of the accents aren't as over-the-top as they were back in the old series, but they also seem to be a lot faker too.  This hurts the worst for poor Gambit, whose accent is shaky at best and ridiculous at worst.  But at least he doesn't talk about himself in the third person any more.
Most of the characters are actually treated quite well by the new series, but what's got me scratching my head is why they had to include the New Mutants.  The show already suffers from having a massive cast just from original X-Men,, and adding further to it doesn't seem like the best idea.  Not only that, but all the new characters seem to be a lot more one-dimensional than the original X-Men.  Most of them simply shoot various beams from their hands, and that always bothers me in superhero stories.
A lot of the episodes are refreshing and cool, often exploring the characters and having some interesting interaction between them.  Two events, however, were most heinous, and if you know me you already know that I have to complain about them.  They're both abuses, or rather, non-uses of the character Nightcrawler.  They ignore two major parts of his personality.
The first thing was in the Christmas episode where you see them all doing Christmas-y things: Spyke has a snowball fight with his parents, Kitty lights a Menorrah, etc.  What's missing is Nightcrawler doing anything religious.  This is heinous in my eyes because Nightcrawler was pretty much the most religious character in the X-Men.  Other than Storm talking about "the Goddess" all the time, maybe.  They could have just shown him kneeling in a church or something.
The other one was even worse, if that's possible.  That first bit was just an oversight, but the second gripe I have is about something they have him do that doesn't make any sense at all.  In the episode "Cruise Control" the X-Men are on an island where the people don't hate them for being different, but rather cheer them and think they're cool because they saved the island.  All the X-Men are showing off their powers to the adoring crowds, and what the writers had Nightcrawler doing was turning that hologram watch on and off.  Huh?  That's it?  His freaking watch?  They could have had him teleporting around, that would have been enough.  But even more than that, this guy was from the freaking circus.  Entertaining crowds used to be his livelihood!  He could do just about anything, not just turn that stinking watch on and off.
Okay that's enough bitter complaining.  The rest of the show is actually quite good.  I like a lot of the characters, like Nightcrawler (obviously), Rogue, Wolverine, and even Nick Fury.  Nick Fury's a bit of an interesting character, since he seems to manage to worm his way into just about every story Marvel puts out.  Spider-Man?  He's there.  Captain America?  Good to see ya, Nick.  The Hulk?  I'm sure he was there too.  That guy gets around, man.  Let's see, what other characters do I like?  Gambit has his moments, even though he's mis-handled a lot.  Oh, and Toad is pretty cool.  Yes, I know, who woulda thunk it, but this guy can be hilarious at times!
A quick word, then, about the phenomenon known as "Nightcrawler, teleport!"  This is whenever you're watching an episode and something's happening, and you think to yourself, "This situation/villain could be taken care of so easily if Nightcrawler just teleported!"  This also happens with why Kitty doesn't phase, why Storm doesn't fix certain weather problems, etc.  But there is a good answer, of course: because the writers didn't want them to, duh!