Iron Man: Armored Adventures - First 5-6 episodes: 5/10. Final 19-20 episodes of the first season: 8.5/10
Man, this is one very strange show. I basically started watching it because I was a big fan of Spectacular Spider-man, and I was in the mood for a good Comics superhero show I hadn't seen before. Besides, Iron Man looked decent enough in both the recent Animated and Live Action movies. Nothing could have prepared me for this series, though: a cel-shaded (think the MTV Spider-man show, only cheaper-looking) series that turns Tony Stark into a 16-year old kid and basically reshapes the Iron Man concept into something like Spectacular Spider-man-meets-Johnny Quest (not in itself a bad combination, but it's just a complete 180 degrees from the core of the IM character). This is a show you just have to stick it out for a handful of episodes, because the opening batch are average at best and do a poor job of selling the show's concept with annoying characters and "lame supervillain of the week" plotlines. The animation also comes off poorly, mostly because the animators for some bizarre reason decided to set action scenes involving laser blasts and explosions...at high noon outdoors, where absolutely nothing in this series looks good. The show also suffers from the same problem that the MTV Spider-man series had: the animation looks decent enough in the action scenes, but as soon as the costumes come off the characters move and act very robotically.
Then something miraculous happens around episodes 6-7: something snaps and suddenly the show gets dramatically better. The animators finally show some sense and start staging battles in areas with decent lighting and solid action, the writing starts involving actual drama, characters stop being (as) obnoxious, and the show's concept starts showing the heart (franchise pun not intended) it needed to convince me this was a show worth following. By the end of the first season, I'm definitely looking forward to season 2. It's definitely not a fantastic show up there with Spectacular Spider-man, Beast Wars, the DC AU, or Avatar...but it's decent enough if given the chance to iron out the problems, much like I saw with The Batman (another show that started out as utter crap, but got increasingly better with each season until by the end there were episodes that could hang with the best of the DC AU).