Seen today in Disney+90’s X-Men animated series doesn’t seem like much. The animation, which was very good by the standards of its time, looks rough and coarse to the eyes of 2024. The material is also quite familiar today, thanks to seven live-action films. X-Menand who knows how many others Wonder movies and series. I learned this lesson firsthand; I tried to show X-Men: The Animated Series to my kids a few months ago, after they started showing more interest in superheroes. They greeted the first episode with a shrug and asked to watch something else.
X-Men ’97, the new sequel to the old show, might make my daughters rethink that decision. While the show is clearly designed to tug at the heartstrings of nostalgic adults by recreating the look and feel of its predecessor, it simultaneously improves upon X-Men: The Animated Series in almost all technical aspects. Character designs may remain largely the same, but X-Men ’97The animation is as sleek and shiny as a Blackbird stealth jet. By recapturing the heart of the original series and combining it with modern visuals, it transforms X-Men in the kinetic visual feast that hungry Marvel kids imagined they were watching in the 1990s.
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As suggested by the updated title, the new series begins about a year after the events of X-Men: The Animated Series, which ended with the apparent death of Professor Xavier. (He “apparently” died more than once in X-Men comics too, so I wouldn’t shed too many tears over his departure.) As the remaining X-Men fight to defend their late founder’s dream of peaceful coexistence between powerful mutants and ordinary humans, Cyclops (Ray Chase) and Jean Gray (Jennifer Hale ) is awaiting the birth of her first child.
X-Men ’97The first episode of “To Me, My X-Men” is full of callbacks to X-Men: The Animated Series‘pilot, “Night of the Sentinels”. Once again, the X-Men face robotic mutant hunters while rescuing a new mutant (in this case, the solar-powered Sunspot, voiced by Gui Agustini). Furthermore, for reasons they can’t understand, they have to deal with their new boss, as Xavier has bequeathed his school and property (and with them, control of the X-Men) to his arch-nemesis Magneto. (Matthew Waterson).
Some X-Men welcome Magneto’s arrival; others want him gone. And the sudden addition of a (possibly) reformed villain to the group’s lineup doesn’t go unnoticed by the world at large. This creates potential new battles, both with supervillains and the legal system of the human world.
The presence of the former mutant terrorist shakes up the team’s turbulent dynamics. As Jubilee (Holly Chou) even acknowledges in the pilot, the X-Men are less a school than a family – one that fights with each other as much as with the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. If Cyclops irritated Wolverine (Cal Dodd) before, he infuriates him now that he has become the team leader It is is about to start a family with Jean (who Wolverine not-so-secretly carries a torch for).
If the names of some of the cast members sound familiar, it’s because several of them returned from X-Men: The Animated Series to reprise their characters, including Dodd, Leonre Zann (Rogue), George Buza (Beast) and Alison Sealy-Smith, whose Shakespearean performance as Storm has never been surpassed by anyone in any medium. Another ex X-Men voice actors return in new roles. (Catherine Disher, for example, used to play Jean and now co-stars as the X-Men’s government representative, Val Cooper.)
The new actors do a great job of replicating the vibes of the old show. (Ray Chase does a perfect impression of Norm Spencer, the original voice of Cyclops, who passed away in 2020.) Between the voices and the iconic X-Men: The Animated Series theme song, there is a real sonic continuity between the old and new shows. And this sense of continuity over the decades also extends to the stories, which were overseen by the show’s creator, Beau DeMayo (who Marvel reportedly fired shortly before the series premiere).
The former show took inspiration from contemporary X-Men comics – the characters’ costumes were all based on their current looks by artist Jim Lee – but drew on, and sometimes mixed, decades of X-Men comics to inspire your plots. True to that spirit, X-Men ’97The first episodes include elements of Mysterious X-Men #185, 200, 201, 240 and Annual #17, among others. It might be fun for hardcore nerds to pick up on the mix of influences in these topics, but they’ll also work if you only know the old X-Men show and none of the comics.
It’s nothing new for Marvel Studios to do something like a deliberate callback to the company’s past and deploy such a creation as a deliberate play to the affections of older audiences. But little of Marvel’s current work manages to honor the past while updating the core property as successfully as the first few episodes of X-Men ’97 to do. It’s enough to make you hope they do X-Men ’98, ’99, 2000 and beyond.
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