The new (old) X-Men cartoon is better than it has any right to be.
End of post.
G’night, everybody!
If you haven’t been firing Disney+ up every Wednesday, they’ve just finished rolling out the inaugural season of X-Men ‘97 — an update (not quite a requel) of the animated series that powered Fox’s after-school programming block for most of the 1990s, launching a toy line, a canned pasta, and the multi-billion dollar Marvel Cinematic Universe.
I haven’t watched the last one yet. No spoilers!
This ten-episode follow up is faithful to the spirit of those old cels, yassified with the shimmer of contemporaneous anime (think Ninja Scroll) and free to explore plotlines that don’t have to please children’s television censors.
Thankfully, this doesn’t mean “gritty re-imagining;” there’s no Snyderversian brooding or Invincible bloodbaths to be found here.
X-Men ‘97 gets it right simply by taking the heightened, histrionic emotions of its newsprint source material seriously.
I don’t know what you were up to as a teenager, but I’m confident you had Very Big Feelings about it. The X-Men have always embodied that existential adolescent angst, even as grown-ass superheroes.
Rebellious powers!
Uncontrollable urges!
Distinctive haircuts!
These were full adults living in a boarding school for gifted youngsters (in Westchester lol), trapped in a cage match against outside persecution, internal self-loathing and each other.
“But… does she like like me?!?”
They’d embark on multi-issue, universe-spanning adventures just to find an answer. Lip locking a mind-reader or going sicko mode on a spaceship of mutant-annihilating robots, everything was a matter of life or death for the MCU’s most emo heroes.
The new series understands this, deep in its adamantium bones.
“Soapy, super-powered, and silly, X-Men ’97 is a Marvel masterpiece.”
Sure, it’s ridiculous — the show is literally a cartoon melodrama — but it hits, even without the backdrop of IRL warfare against the unfairly maligned and marginalized on our own, non-comic book planet.
I’d put S1 E5 (“Remember It”) up against any single episode of anything else this year, then dare you not to be destroyed when the sad version of the theme song drops over the closing credits.
That theme does a lot of heavy lifting in the sense memory department. As does the title, and… everything else.
Nostalgia is X-Men ‘97’s true superpower.
If you haven’t watched “Remember It” yet, please stop reading and rectify that shit immediately. How did they dig up Ace Of Base “Happy Nation” for the Magneto / Rogue slowdance?!?
I don’t know the track’s origins. AoB probably just wanted to get some of Enigma’s monk money, but whatever — this bittersweet, Teutonic Balearic bop is beyond perfect for the scene.
It’s far from the only Clinton-era ref for nerds to Rick Dalton. The fashion choices alone are worth the price of admission! I look forward to Jim Lee's pool party and a certain cajun’s thanksgiving fit making their way into future episodes.
In context, I don’t even think of them as Easter eggs…
More like Gambit’s Proustian doorag.
Channeling (fuck it, actively weaponizing) a wistful, time-traveling vibe is perhaps the most X-Men move this creative team could have made.
I cannot wait to TBT with them again for season two.
