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Iwas supposed to be what Magneto calls a “nostalgic parlor trick” – a revival of the X-Men cartoon that aired on Saturday mornings for most of the ’90s for Disney+ streaming service. Isn’t that what all streaming services do? They’re looking through their back catalog to see what IP can be used, promising both nostalgia and, of course, a fresh new spin on anything you’ve already seen before. So while it was assumed that a certain number of X-Men fans would tune into X-Men ’97 , which just finished its first 10-episode season with a second already on the way, it’s still a bit surprising that the revival of an ambitious, sometimes clumsy ’90s kid obsessed would become one of the most beloved TV shows of the year.
Part of that may be a hunger for any kind of ongoing X-Men series outside of the comics, which, as always, remain a relatively niche interest. (For every No. 1 reboot, there are several volumes of backstory that must be digested to even begin to understand what the hell is going on.) After the Fox network aired the animated X-Men movie, the live-action film studio adapted characters in the first major superhero films of the new millennium, helping launch a major cultural trend. Fox’s X-Men films ran for an impressive 20 years, but Disney’s purchase of the studio coincided with several box office failures in the form of Dark Phoenix and the much-delayed post-pandemic release The New Mutants. This summer comes something of a curtain call with Deadpool & Wolverine, but that film will also integrate wisecracking mercenary Ryan Reynolds (who split from the X-Men movies) into the wider MCU. As such, it’s been four years since there’s been an X-Men movie in theaters — and longer since the last one that really connected with audiences, 2017’s Logan .
But X-man ’97 also has its own style – distinct even from the cartoon that spawned it. For the first few episodes, it felt like the series was completely imitating an outdated Saturday morning cartoon – the nostalgia picture revived, set in a pointless widescreen shot (why is a show based on an old Saturday morning cartoon set in a letterbox like it is designed to play in movie theaters?!). But the show quickly became a more stylized version of the old show, to the point where it looks more like viewers’ memories of the animation than the genuine article. The slightly limited motion remains—the old series was never as fluid as, say, Batman: The Animated Series, and this new one isn’t either—but close-ups are more frequent and evocative, colors are more distorted, views are more unusual than what audiences usually get in their live performances.
Of course, this should always be an advantage when telling superhero stories in animation; see the wildly inventive Spider-verse movies for additional examples. But honestly, the technology exists to create visually stunning action/animated hybrid films; it’s just that big-screen MCUs often use this technology to get movies through post-production to make all-important release dates. Any Marvel fan surprised by the Zoom-call madness of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania can walk away from X-Men ’97 with a sense of new life. The advantage the series has seems to be as much psychological 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; to give the dialogue a certain declamatory poetry as in the comic; to allow soapy love triangles like the one between Rogue, Gambit and Magneto to form. (It also forms a stark contrast to the current MCU, where the 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 good oldies. .. fashion wanderers week after week, unencumbered by a masterful plot, set out for a major crossover.
Technically speaking, X-Men ’97 has its own shared universe with others a miracle cartoon shows from the 90s; those episodes from the current season of Daredevil, Spider-Man, Captain America, etc. are the specific, previously introduced versions of these characters. But they are allowed to remain at the levels of actual Easter eggs without much foreshadowing. (Save that for Apocalypse making two different dun-dun-dun appearances in the season finale, in 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 how unwieldy the X-Men would be for the current MCU — or any live-action universe already populated with dozens of its own superheroes, alternate-dimension, time-travel stories in time and so on. Sure, it’ll probably be fun to see some of our old friends from the Fox version again in Deadpool & Wolverine (expect a world record for superhero cameos), but these are effectively the shortened versions that had their own series to extend years.
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The full X-Men experience encompasses so much lore—from legitimate concerns about discrimination, fear of the other, and surveillance to the vastness of Jean Grey’s Phoenix powers and other impossible cosmic ideas—that it seems like it would take decades to pile up with rate of even one film per year (which seems unlikely anyway). One of the best things about X-Men ’97 is how incongruous it is with the MCU’s military-industrial complex—even in its coziest moments with the government, the characters feel more haunted, hunted, and conflicted than the more straight-laced Avengers . It’s still a silly cartoon show that exists because of 90s childhood nostalgia. But in a world that often dilutes comic book storytelling to a sparse mess, the full soap opera of these animated X-Men feels richer and stranger than ever.
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