While the X-Men’s popularity is unquestionably due to their unique powers, colorful personalities, and persecuted-minority storylines, they’ve also remained superhero mainstays thanks to their endless soap opera dramas, and no screen version has captured that element of their appeal quite as perfectly as X-Men: The Animated Series, a 1992-1997 half-hour TV cartoon that embraced the characters’ wild love-triangle entanglements, paternity revelations, and deaths and resurrections. Over the course of five seasons, the kid-centric show proved a faithful smorgasbord of apocalyptic threats, over-the-top mayhem, and tortured romantic and familial dramas, along the way solidifying the franchise as one of Marvel’s most outlandishly gripping. Far more than the feature films that followed in its wake, it was just about an ideal X-Men adaptation.
Thus, as the MCU plans its inevitable live-action multiplex reboot of the iconic mutants, Disney+ has returned to the proverbial well with X-Men ’97, which premieres March 20, a decades-late continuation of The Animated Series that picks up right where its predecessor left off. Though featuring updated aesthetics, the 10-part follow-up—created by Beau DeMayo, who was fired from the project mere days before its premiere—is largely more of the same, except this time drenched in an unmistakable sheen of x-treme nostalgia. Clearly aimed at thirty- and fortysomethings who grew up with the original rather than newbies, it’s a mixed-bag venture, delivering on its promise of cornball throwback action and adventure, and yet generally resonating as a shallow stunt designed to tap into grown-ups’ fond feelings for an archaic Saturday morning show from their youth.
(Warning: Spoilers ahead.)
The first thing fans will notice about X-Men ’97 is that its style is both in tune with its ancestor and, from an artistic standpoint, a significant improvement, free of the material’s prior janky animations. In most other respects, however, there’s little separating then and now, including a serialized narrative whose bits and pieces are loosely based on famous X-Men sagas—in particular, Episode 3’s rendition of “Inferno,” in which the dastardly Mr. Sinister (Chris Britton) gets in-between Cyclops (Ray Chase) and Jean Grey (Jennifer Hale) by creating a clone of the latter, thereby impacting the couple’s newborn baby Nathan, who’s destined to be sent off to the future where he can have his techno-virus cured and grow up to become the time-traveling Cable. Such convolutions have always been the order of the day for Marvel’s mutant altruists, and they’re ever-present in this series, whose epic-scale skirmishes are often window dressing for tangled tales about fitting in, finding happiness and defining identity.
Without X-Men leader and mentor Professor Xavier, who was assassinated by anti-mutant villain Henry Gyrich (Todd Haberkorn) at the conclusion of Season 5, Cyclops is wracked by bitter anger and intense stress, and the latter is compounded by Jean’s ongoing pregnancy. He’s at least temporarily distracted by the need to join some of his buddies—Wolverine (Cal Dodd), Beast (George Buza), Storm (Alison Sealy-Smith), Gambit (AJ LoCascio), Rogue (Lenore Zann), Jubilee (Holly Chou), Bishop (Isaac Robinson-Smith) and Morph (JP Karliak)—on a mission to save a solar-powered mutant named Roberto Da Costa (Gui Agustini) from the clutches of the Friends of Humanity. “I was born this way,” says Roberto, quoting Lady Gaga, and he reluctantly agrees to join the X-Men back at their mansion HQ. If Roberto is a (temporary?) new addition to the squad, Cyclops and Jean are thinking of permanently leaving the team to raise their family in peace. Alas, such dreams are immediately put on hold when they interrogate Gyrich about the Friends of Humanity and learn that their old nemesis Bolivar Trask (Gavin Hammon) has resumed building giant mutant-hunting robots known as Sentinels.
The X-Men soon discover that they face an even more daunting challenge courtesy of Professor X, who in his last will and testament left command of the X-Men to none other than his lifelong best friend and rival Magneto (Matthew Waterson). As before, X-Men ’97 is as melodramatic as Days of Our Lives or General Hospital, thwarting its characters’ quests for happiness with one shocking twist after another. During its initial three installments (which were all that were provided to press), those extend to rekindled amour between Magneto and Rogue (much to Gambit’s chagrin), and a loss of power suffered by Storm. In terms of plotting, the series moves at a frantic pace that’s punctuated by moments of agonized brooding and hot-blooded passion, and per tradition, it features plenty of x-related puns (facing off against demons, Bishop declares, “Time for an x-orcism, punks!”) and the occasional PG-13 quip (in reference to Morph hurting Gambit’s pride, Wolverine remarks, “I think you just sent his hush puppies up into his stomach").
Anyone who watched X-Men: The Animated Series either back in the ’90s or recently in preparation for this sequel (via Disney+) will likely view X-Men ’97 as a success. There’s a sense throughout, however, that this is a spot-on retread with minimal purpose other than preying on the sentimentality of adult aficionados. Without any fresh perspective, it’s primarily mimicry for mimicry’s sake, and while it accomplishes that goal with aplomb—right down to its swift and inventive battles, dreamy transitions, and trippy psycho-sexual sequences inside characters’ minds, which in this case include Jean encountering a giant fetus coming out of a glowing vaginal cavity—there’s something depressing about its contentment with being merely an authentic photocopy.
Then again, considering the unevenness (to put it mildly) of other X-Men adaptations over the past thirty years, X-Men ’97’s expert evocation of its characters’ dispositions, wit, and tormented dynamics isn’t wholly unwelcome. In fact, the harder it leans into its heroes and scoundrels’ overwrought internal and external dilemmas, the more the series resembles not simply a skillful example of fan fiction but a potential template for the MCU’s preordained X-Men movies. Highlighting their bedrock principles, ideological debates, strained bonds and creative collaborative combat, the show recognizes that what makes these do-gooders so compelling is the way in which their personal and political concerns combine and clash until the two are inextricably intertwined. It may not reinvent the wheel, but in a certain sense, it does lay the groundwork for what Marvel hopes will be an, ahem, x-citing future.
