So, before we get started, I’ve got a confession to make – back when the X-Men animated series first came on, I never usually made it past the (admittedly amazing) opening credits.
It wasn’t because I disliked the show or Marvel’s not-so-merry band of mutants – also I was much more of a Spider-Man guy at the time – it was because I preferred the style taken by that other groundbreaking 90s animated show, Batman: The Animated series, that chose to avoid building up an intimidating continuity by making each adventure a stand alone deal. In comparison, the X-Men’s desire to realise many actual comic story lines on the screen meant that if you didn’t know your Sentinels from your Brotherhood, starting somewhere in the middle of a season was something of a confounding affair.
However, times have changed and as Marvel Studio first proper, official swing at the team, it was time for me – finally caught up in all that mutant lore – to sign up and join the team.
Welcome to the X-Men, I hope I survive the experience.
Plunging right back into that infamously dense continuity, we rejoin the X-Men a year after Professor Charles Xavier was seemingly assassinated by ex government agent Henry Gyrich. Scott “Cyclops” Summers has since started leading the team in a world that now no longer hates and fears mutants as much as they used to. However, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t still forces out there that aren’t concerned about being on the wrong side of evolution, and after a raid on the domestic terrorists known as Friends Of Humanity, some the X-Men manage to save young mutant, Roberto da Costa from their clutches.
However, Cyclops is caught between some frustrating poles as he tries to juggle multiple worries at the same time. While he frets that the FOH was using Sentinel tech, the fact that girlfriend Jean Grey is heavily pregnant means that they’ll have to leave the team soon to raise the child and none of the other X-Men seem overly keen on stepping up.
However, between shooting hoops while dressed in the most offensively 90s gym gear you can imagine and lounging around the X-Mansion while obsessing over their cooking, the likes of Wolverine, Storm, Gambit, Rogue, Jubilee, Beast, Bishop and Morph all soon snap into action when they discover that Sentinel creator Boliver Trask is up to his old tricks and is in the midst of building another Master Mold to create a new mutant killing army.
But when the dust settles, the team will be rocked to its core when an old foe returns with a shocking claim that comes straight from the last will and testament of Professor X himself.
Once again, I have to be honest and admit that I did absolutely no homework before hurling myself before the mercy of X-Men ’97, but while skipping rewatching the entirety of the original series in preparation, the fact I skipped it and wasn’t immediately lost is an immediate clue that there’s some surprisingly solid writing at work here. Yes, my memory was hazy concerning the likes of Proffesor X’s death (isn’t he living with aliens?), Jean’s pregnancy (is this the Madeline Pryor/clone stuff?), or the appearance of Morph (I thought he was dead), but it turned out it didn’t really matter as the plot moves ar such a confident clip, it eases you in without allowing to time to be confused. If I put my hand up once again and make another confession, another sticking point of the original series for me was the relentless pace the show set as the showrunners seemed utterly terrified kids would switch off if either Gambit or Wolverine didn’t do something cool. However, these days, shows like this are allowed some much needed breathing space to expand on the characters beyond popping claws and making playing cards go boom.
However, for this first episode, the writers keep things nice and basic with all the characters stick rigidly to type to get us all orientated. Gambit and Rogue flirt shamelessly, Wolverine gets in Cyclops’ face, Jubilee aches to date and Beast is adorably pompous and none of it is particularly original – but what it does do is give a chance to give newcomers a chance to get orientated while giving that feeling to the more nostalgic viewers that over thirty years hasn’t passed between episodes.
Impressively the animation style is as balanced as the plotting, finding that sweet spot between sticking too lavishly to the original and pushing the visuals and this is never more evident during the extended action scene that closes out the episode. Starting with a Sentinel attack on the X-Jet (the damn thing could last one episode before being destroyed again) and ending with the whole team spanking the shit out of a rag tag battalion of giant rickety robots, its essentially a statement of intent to remind us how fucking cool the X-Men can be long before Deadpool & Wolverine hit the cinemas. Literally no mutant is left behind as Cyclops dissects a Sentinel with his eye beams hundreds of feet about the earth and them calmly uses them to slow his descent before calmly announcing “to me, my X-Men” thus making it possibly the coolest thing the character has ever done on screen by a country mile. From then it’s just superlative fan service a-go-go as the group display more on-screen team work than all of the Twentieth Century Fox movie put together (seriously, what was up with that?). Gambit charges Wolvies’ claws in order to help him detonate a Sentinel head like a bomb, while Beast pilots one from inside like something out of Pacific Rim and you can barely even hear the resplendent theme tune of the sound of your own psyched up nerdgasm.
However, the show hasn’t forgotten that possibly its predecessor’s greatest asset was that it stuck somewhat tightly to comic history which made it the perfect gateway drug for both those who wanted to read comics even though at the time, I personally wasn’t one if them. This means we’re served up a humdinger of a cliffhanger as, in the final moments of the episode, Magneto shows up and claims that Charles always desired for his greatest enemy to take over in his stead should he ever die – or go live with alien bird-people; whichever came first.
So after a spirited refresher course back into the throwback stylings of the 90s animated series, the first real plot starts to rear its head just in time to moves us into the chewier stuff.
Now that the X-Men are fully back with Marvel Studios, it’s clear that mutants are about to be the next big thing once the MCU is done with all this Multiversal stuff (Phase 7 will apparently bring mutants to the forefront of the movies), but at this rate, their animated kickoff might give them too high a bar to clear.
Newsflash, younger me… It took you thirty years to do it, but you now no longer hate and fear the X-Men Animated Series.
🌟🌟🌟🌟
We Have Issues 