This was supposed to be what Magneto called a “nostalgic parlor trick”; Reviving the X-Men cartoon, which aired on Saturday mornings for much of the ’90s, for the Disney+ streaming service. Isn’t that what all streaming services do? Scanning their back catalog to see what IPs are available to draw from, they promise both nostalgia and, of course, a new perspective on everything you’ve seen before. Although it is certain that a certain number of X-Men fans will attend X-Men ’97, which has just completed its 10-episode first season and has a second season on the way, it is still a bit surprising that a number of actors will appear in this series. The reimagining of an ambitious, sometimes clumsy ’90s kid’s object of obsession would become one of the most beloved TV shows of the year.
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Some of it may be a hunger for any ongoing X-Men series outside of the comics, which remains, as always, a relatively niche interest. (Each reboot in issue #1 has several volumes of backstory that needs to be recapped to even begin to understand what’s going on.) After the Fox network aired the X-Men cartoon, the live-action movie studio adapted the cartoon. helped start a major cultural movement by incorporating the characters into the first major superhero films of the new millennium. Fox There’s a curtain call of sorts coming this summer with Deadpool and Wolverine, but this movie will also integrate the wisecracking Ryan Reynolds mercenary (who’s departed from the X-Men movies) into the broader MCU. So it’s been four years since an X-Men movie was released in theaters; It’s been even longer since the last movie to truly connect with audiences, 2017’s Logan.
But X-Men ’97 has its own style; It’s even different from the cartoon that spawned it. In the first few episodes, I got the feeling that the series was closely imitating the style of an outdated Saturday morning cartoon; the picture of nostalgia has been revived, placed in a pointlessly widescreen frame (why would a series based on an old Saturday morning cartoon be placed in such a letterbox? Was it intended to play in movie theaters?!). However, the show quickly evolved into a more stylized version of the old show; so much so that it looked more like viewers’ memories of the animation than the original article. The somewhat limited movements remain — the old show was never as fluid as Batman: The Animated Series, and this new one isn’t either — but the close-ups are more frequent and more evocative, the colors more vivid, the sights stranger than the sights audiences usually see in live-action shows.
Of course, telling superhero stories in animation is always expected to have an advantage; For more examples, check out the wildly creative Spider-Verse movies. But frankly, the technology to create visually stunning live-action/animated hybrid films exists; The big-screen-only MCU often uses this technology to rush movies into post-production to meet crucial release dates. Any Marvel fan surprised by the Zoom call chic of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania may emerge from X-Men ’97 feeling reinvigorated. The advantage of the series seems to be psychological as well as logistical; As an animated show based on an old Saturday morning cartoon, it feels a certain freedom to indulge its melodramatic side; giving the dialogue a certain comic book-style loud poetry feel; Allowing soapy love triangles to form like the one between Rogue, Gambit and Magneto. (This is also a stark contrast to the current MCU, where characters are barely allowed to kiss.) And unlike overly serialized movies that sometimes feel like big-screen TV episodes, X-Men ’97 is full of the good old stuff. It created cliffhangers from week to week, without the impediment of a grand plan towards a major transition.
Technically speaking, X-Men ’97 has its own shared universe baggage with other Marvel animated shows of the ’90s; This season’s cameos of Daredevil, Spider-Man, Captain America, and similar characters are specific versions of these characters that were previously introduced. But they are allowed to remain at truly Easter egg levels without much omen. (Save that for Apocalypse, which appears in the season finale on what appears to be two different days-on-days in two separate timelines. X-Men really is on another level.)
In fact, the success of X-Men ’97 inadvertently doubles as proof of concept just how unwieldy the X-Men would fit into the current MCU, or any live-action universe already populated with dozens of its own superheroes . dimensions, time travel stories, etc. Sure, it’ll be fun to see some of our old Fox version friends back in Deadpool and Wolverine (we’re expecting a world record for superhero cameos), but these were effectively stripped-down versions with their own series to expand on. years.
The entire X-Men experience encompasses a lot of lore, from basic concerns about discrimination, fear of the other and surveillance, to the breadth of Jean Grey’s Phoenix powers and other incredibly cosmic ideas; It feels like it will take decades to build. even one movie a year (which doesn’t seem likely anyway). One of the best things about X-Men ’97 is how out of sync it feels with the MCU’s military-industrial complex; Even in their most intimate moments with the government, the characters feel more haunted, hunted, and conflicted than their straight-arrow counterparts. Avengers. It’s a stupid cartoon show that still exists because of ’90s kids’ nostalgia. But in a world that often grinds comic book storytelling into thin gruel, the soap opera nonsense of these animated X-Men feels richer and weirder than ever.