The X-Men movie universe has officially expired. Cause of death: corporate merger. Fans have probably pre-mourned the first superhero franchise of the modern era, which has been on life support for years, as Disney cleared its slate of leftovers — like Dark Phoenix and The New Mutants — in preparation for an inevitable Marvel Cinematic Universe reboot.
But anyone who’s been waiting on a more ceremonious farewell to the Fox years can find it in the closing credits of Deadpool & Wolverine, when this gleefully irreverent movie suddenly gets all mushy about the films it’s been mocking. The only thing ironic about the closing montage of valedictory behind-the-scenes footage is the use of Green Day’s eternally misunderstood Good Riddance (Time of Your Life) to set the sentimental tone.
But don’t cry for the X-Men. As one era for the Marvel mutants ends, another is just getting started. Make that restarted. Months before Deadpool desecrated the corpse of an X-Man, Disney reanimated a whole team of them — the superheroes who raced into battle to a war cry of synth in the hit cartoon that aired on Fox in the 1990s. As far as doing right by these characters, Deadpool & Wolverine has nothing on the year’s other X-Men-related smash, the Disney+ throwback X-Men ’97.
Make no mistake, fan service is the goal of this small-screen sequel, just as it drives the new big-screen sequel for the Merc with the Mouth. Picking up right where the original animated series left off — as if no time had passed since its series finale back in, yes, 1997 — X-Men ’97 is deeply faithful to the spirit of its basic-cable predecessor. Though a little slicker and more polished, the animation evokes the bright, splashy colors of the earlier show. The voice cast has been almost completely reassembled for the full aural flashback effect. And if you don’t get goosebumps from the way that same old score ramps up on the soundtrack at the start of the opening titles, chances are you didn’t spend your Saturday mornings enthralled by the globe- and time-jumping adventures of Xavier’s gifted youngsters.
X-Men ’97, in other words, blatantly bids for the eyeballs of not just young viewers, but also their millennial and Gen X parents. But the show is more than nostalgia bait. Watching it churn through a frankly absurd amount of plot over 10 episodes, you start to wonder if any adaptation has better approximated the full appeal of X-Men — the way the comics, at their best, fold an allegory of prejudice and alienation into a sprawling melodrama with a Tolstoy-sized cast of characters and a rather bottomless reservoir of thrilling science-fiction developments.
Not that the show is aiming for the exact experience of reading the comics. Perhaps even more so than the ’90s cartoon, this relaunch blows through story at a pace that would leave Quicksilver winded. Giant crossovers that spanned months — like Inferno, the kooky, convoluted, yearlong X-Men-versus-Hell Spawn event that launched in 1988 — are knocked out in a half hour flat. Other episodes mash together multiple plotlines, combining, say, the trial of Magneto with an attack by the enhanced-human terrorists of the Friends for Humanity. A more conservative show could get an entire season out of the story arcs X-Men ’97 covers in miniature. It’s like speed reading a stack of back issues.
You could call the storytelling rushed, but there’s a lot of fun in how much this show tries to pack into one TV season. X-Men ’97 plays like an enthusiastic remix of X-Men lore, mixing and matching elements from different arcs of the comic. The show splits quintessential Storm story Lifedeath in two, eccentrically pairing its first half with a Jubilee one-off that evokes both Scott Pilgrim and the old X-Men arcade beat ’em up. Meanwhile, no fewer than three major crossover events are blended together for the three-part season finale. It’s as if the creative team, led by Beau DeMayo, were operating under the assumption that they’d never get another shot at the X-Men, so they might as well throw in everything and the kitchen sink. It’s the polar, refreshing opposite of a Netflix show where nothing happens for eight episodes. You better believe Surf Dracula surfs, early and often.
Clones, demons, intergalactic empires, time-traveling robots, spirit animals, a parallel dimension ruled by a rather Trumpian reality-TV executive — you get all of that in X-Men ’97. Watching the show underscores what a narrow conception of this world and these characters the X-Men film franchise provided. Despite lasting for a quarter century — and setting aside the odd outlier like Logan or Deadpool — the series kept repeating itself. The fights looked the same: The good mutants trade blasts with the bad mutants in the woods or a quiet suburban backdrop. Sometimes the plot recycling was literal. Did we really need two adaptations of The Dark Phoenix Saga from the same damn screenwriter? And over and over again, we got some variation on the same conflict between Xavier and Magneto, as if that was the only kind of X-Men story worth telling.
Magneto and Xavier both appear in X-Men ’97, of course. But their relationship frames the season without defining it. Nor does the show play like Wolverine & Friends — that is, like a starring vehicle for the most famous mutant that happens to toss the other X-Men a few lines. This is a true ensemble series, carving out narrative space for many of the characters. Storm gets a sensitive, smoldering romance. Cyclops ends up tangled in a love triangle with … two versions of Jean Grey. The two later have a conversation with their adult son, Cable, that genuinely (if by obvious accident) recalls All of Us Strangers. Rogue grapples with grief. Beast struggles with guilt over providing cover for unscrupulous journalists. At heart, X-Men has always been a soap opera. X-Men ’97 unabashedly embraces that, finding room for interpersonal drama even as the larger plot races forward.
It also boasts some of the best action scenes of its genre — further evidence, after the Spider-Verse movies, that animation might be the ideal medium for comic-book adaptations. The new series peaks, dramatically and in the set-piece department, with Remember It, which shifts from aristocratic mutant politics to a lengthy battle against the giant, robotic sentinels that’s at once thrillingly kinetic and a bleak realization of the genocidal impulses the X-Men — as characters and symbols — have always opposed. We also get some of the coolest Gambit action ever thrown up on screen; with apologies to Channing Tatum, this is the year’s mic-drop moment for the Ragin’ Cajun. You could call Remember It the event of the series, but the truth is that just about every episode of X-Men ’97 is an event. There’s no filler.
The thing about the X-Men comic is that it was never just one thing. Yes, there were issues where mutants fought other mutants, and other issues where they fought hateful humans. That’s the bedrock stuff of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s seminal team book. But the premise was malleable; it could accommodate all manner of sci-fi weirdness. X-Men ’97 is deeply keyed into that aspect of its source material. It gives you the full scope of what X-Men can be — the whole universe of comic-book lunacy it can traverse — without losing its utility as a moving civil-rights metaphor. The movies never made room for any of that. Good riddance indeed.
X-Men ’97 is now streaming on Disney+. For more of A.A. Dowd’s writing, visit his Authory page.
