This Thanksgiving weekend brought the opportunity for a shared father/son event. The live-action version of Ben 10 hit the small screens on Cartoon Network. If you missed it, I’m sure it’ll be repeated soon and the DVD has to follow.

Ben 10 is about ten-year-old Ben Tennyson’s discovery of an alien device called the Omnitrix that allows him to change his form into that of ten aliens. Hence the name. However, he soon adds more aliens to that list.

Created by Man of Action, a collective of four well-known comics writers – Joe Casey, Joe Kelly, Don Rouleau, and Steven T. Seagle, the series is currently in its fourth season. It also spawned a recent animated movie, Ben 10: Secret of the Omnitrix.

The show’s enduring popularity resulted in the live-action movie. The show profiles high among pre-teen boys, but the network wanted to go the live-action route with a lot of CG effects to draw in young girls and adults. Graham Phillips (Evan Almighty) stars as Ben and brings with him all the cuteness pre-teen girls can stand. And the CG stuff is really well done for a show with a $5 million budget.

Since I like my kid and I’ve been a follower of the series, I joined him for the movie when it premiered. We had a blast. Granted, some of the action was schlocky, the humor was juvenile (such as Ben’s revenge on the bullies in the local café), and there was way too much touchy-feely on the part of Ben’s incredibly weird parents, but it was a fun watch. It was really cool getting to see the live-action fight scenes.

But like my son said, there was really a lot more talking in the movie than action, which isn’t like the animated series. More than that, in the cartoon series Ben is usually trying to save his life or maybe even the future of the world as we know it. Getting dissed at school was just boring after everything he’s been through. However, for people who hadn’t seen the series before, it was probably a good introduction and geared more toward plotlines they were used to.

It’s just that Ben 10 has been so much more than that in the animated series.

But this movie did give us a deeper look into the Plumbers, the super-secret organization that Ben’s Grandpa Max belongs to. We’ve been hearing about them for years, seeing a few of them, and even looking at all the technology they had. But we hadn’t seen them in action.