by It should be what Magneto refers to as a “nostalgic parlor trick” – reviving the X-Men cartoon that aired on Saturday mornings during much of the 90s for the Disney + streaming service. Isn’t this what all streaming services do? They comb through their back catalog to see what IP can be exploited, promising nostalgia and, of course, a fresh new twist on whatever you’ve already seen. So while it was anticipated that a certain number of X-Men fans would be on board for X-Men ’97, which just finished its 10-episode first season and already has a second on the way, it’s surprising it still Revival of an ambitious, sometimes-clunky 90s-kid obsession object would be one of the year’s favorite TV shows.
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Some sort of ongoing X-Men series outside of the comics, which still have a fairly niche interest, as ever, might be starving. (For every reboot in question no. 1, there are several volumes of backstory that must be summarized to even begin to understand what the hell is going on.) After the Fox network aired the cartoon X-Men, the film studio live-action adaptation of the characters into the first major superhero movies of the new millennium, helping to kickstart a major cultural trend. The Fox X-Men movies ran for a remarkable 20 years, but Disney bought the studio at the same time that a couple of box office flops in the form of Dark Phoenix and the much-delayed The New Mutants were released from Pandemic . There’s a curtain call of sorts coming this summer with Deadpool & Wolverine, but that film will also integrate Ryan Reynolds’ wisecracking mercenary (who spun out of the X-Men movies) into the wider MCU. So, it’s been four years since an X-Men movie was in theaters – and longer since the last one that really touched audiences, 2017’s Logan.
But X-Men ’97 also has a style of its own – distinctive, even, from the cartoon that spawned it. In the first few episodes, it felt like the series was closely imitating the style of an outdated Saturday morning cartoon – a revival of the picture of nostalgia, placed in an insensitive widescreen frame (why is a show based on an old Saturday morning cartoon on the letterbox as designed to play in movie theaters?!). But the show quickly evolved into a more stylized version of the old show, to the point where viewers’ memories of the animation look more like the original. The movements are still a bit limited – the old show was never as fluid as, say, Batman: The Animated Series, and neither is this new one – but the close-ups are more frequent and vivid, the colors more cranked-up. , the scenes are more extensive than what audiences usually get in their live-action shows.
This is always thought to be an advantage of telling superhero stories in animation, of course; check out the truly inventive Spider-Verse movies for more examples. But in fact, the technology exists to create live-action/animated hybrid films; it’s just that the big-screen MCU often uses that technology to rush movies through post-production to make critical release dates. Any Marvel fan bothered by the Zoom-call chintziness of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania could come away from X-Men ’97 feeling revitalized. The advantage of the series seems to be psychological as much as logistical; as an animated show, based on an old Saturday morning cartoon no less, it feels a certain freedom to indulge its melodramatic side; giving the dialogue a certain comic-book-y declamatory poetry; to allow the formation of a soapy love triangle like the one between Rogue, Gambit and Magneto. (This is in stark contrast to the current MCU, where characters are barely allowed to kiss.) And in contrast to over-the-top movies that sometimes feel like big-screen TV episodes, X-Men ’97 is full of with good old. seasoned clippers from week to week, unencumbered by a master-plot effort towards a major crossover.
Technically, X-Men ’97 has its own universal baggage with other Marvel animated shows of the ’90s; the current cameos of this season are from the likes of Daredevil, Spider-Man, Captain America and so on the specific versions of those previously introduced characters. But they are allowed to remain at true Easter Egg levels without much thought. (Except that for Apocalypse, who makes two different dun-dun-dun appearances in the season finale, on two separate timelines. The X-Men really are on another level.)
In fact, the success of X-Men ’97 inadvertently doubles as a proof of concept for what the X-Men would fit into the current MCU—or any live-action universe with many of its own superheroes. already there, alternate. dimensions, time travel stories and so on. Sure, it’ll probably be fun to see some of our old Fox friends again in Deadpool & Wolverine (expect a world record for superhero cameos), but those are the versions that have been effectively destroyed and whose series own to expand. years.
The whole X-Men experience encompasses so much lore – from the original concern with discrimination, fear of the other, and surveillance to the breadth of Jean Grey’s Phoenix powers and other unfathomable ideas – that it feels like it could take years to add. . at the rate of even one film a year (which is unlikely anyway). One of the best things about X-Men ’97 is how incongruous it feels with the MCU’s military-industrial complex – even at its coziest moments with the government, the characters feel more haunted, hunted and conflict than the straighter arrow. Avengers. It’s still a silly cartoon show that exists because of 90s nostalgia. But in a world that often dilutes comic storytelling into thin gloom, the all-in soap-opera horror of these animated X-Men feels richer and weirder than ever.
