If you’re anything like me, X-Men: The Animated Series was an enormous part of your childhood. The hour-long Marvel block of Spider-Man: The Animated Series and X-Men: The Animated Series were the anchors for the newly launched Fox Network and its Fox Kids programming. If you look at the shows on Fox Kids, it’s not hard to understand how the network became a literal juggernaut for animated shows. Whether it was X-Men: TAS, Spider-Man: TAS, The Tick, Animaniacs, Batman: TAS, Transformers, or any other number of hit television shows, Margaret Loesch, the head of the network’s children’s programming, was deeply plugged into what kids wanted and craved from their shows.
Say whatever you want about the current state of Fox — believe me, there’s plenty to say that we won’t even get into here — but their early cartoons and kid’s shows were, without question, appointment and necessitated viewing if you wished to be considered among the cool kids come Monday morning. The rise of the X-Men’s popularity in comics with artists like Jim Lee and Todd McFarlane introducing a newer and more edgy style of art directly influenced Loesch’s decision to place the franchise at the forefront during a time in which the concept was definitely not considered safe or wise programming. It’s a bit beyond the scope of this article but if you’re interested, the book Previously On X-Men, written by showrunners Eric and Julie Lewald, outlines the gamble Loesch took on the franchise at a critical time in Fox’s beginnings. It’s also a must-buy for any X-Men fan.
Of course, Loesch and the Lewalds would end up delivering in spades and ended up giving fans a cartoon so poignant, that it’s still considered one of the best cartoons ever made. When your cartoon is put in the same sentence and articles as Avatar: The Last Airbender, The Simpson, Batman: The Animated Series, Rocky and Bullwinkle, and South Park, you know you’ve created more than a cartoon, you’ve created a cultural phenomenon. When the show went off the air after five seasons, it left a void so huge that fans began clamoring for the show to return not even a decade later, eventually reviving their demands during TV and film’s great 90’s revival during COVID. This time they were successful.
The relaunched show is called X-Men ‘97 and it picks up right where season 5 left off. Returning every possible voice actor except four character voices — Magneto, Cyclops, and Senator Robert Kelly’s voice actors passed away, we don’t know why Charles Xavier’s voice actor didn’t return. Slash Film provides a great in-depth explainer on who returned and which roles they’re currently playing, as not everyone resumed their same role. A perfect example of this is Jubliee’s previous voice actor, Alyson Court, who felt an Asian American should be voicing Jubilee and ceded the role to Holly Chou while she took on the role of Abcissa. But outside of a few actors returning and playing different roles, fans can expect largely the same actors and characters as the beloved 90’s series.
The very recently fired Beau DeMayo was the showrunner for the first season, but it’s not clear and extremely frustrating for some that we don’t know why he was terminated. Marvel won’t elaborate on the situation and in a recent exclusive to EW, the head of Marvel animation, Brad Winderbaum, would only say that “we parted ways,” was the best way to describe DeMayo’s ouster. Either way, DeMayo reported wrote season 1 and most of season 2 before being fired, but it remains to be seen how much of his content will be used going forward. All we know is that season 2 is in the process of being completed and work has already begun on season 3. Maybe the silver lining here is that we know there will at least be two more seasons of this show, but I doubt DeMayo sees it that way.
As for the show itself, X-Men ‘97 if faithful to both the comics and the original show. The show picks up with Xavier’s death at the hands of Gyrich, which fans should remember from the series finale… sorta. The original show ended with Lilandra of the Shi’ar taking Xaver to her homeworld where they would be able to provide medical support to him, but he would have to leave the X-Men and Earth behind, as his new care requires him to remain with the Shi’ar. It seems unlikely that Xavier’s “death” in the new series means he’s truly dead. This is comics, after all. The more likely scenario is that the story is being used as cover while Xavier is away.
While he’s away, Magneto is placed in charge of the X-Men and all of Xavier’s previous assets by the last will and testimony of Charles Xavier, much to the chagrin of Cyclops, who is currently being pressured by Jean to leave the life and raise their new baby, Nathan Charles Summers AKA Cable. The birth of Cable is where the premier episodes leave off and they’ve seeded plenty of content for the remainder of the first season. It’s truly astonishing how much stuff you remember just watching the first two episodes of X-Men ‘97.
The show even went as far as mostly keeping intact the original and GOATed theme song but with updated animations and a bit more ferocity. I cannot begin to explain to you what it meant to me to hear that theme song again before a new episode of the show that I had never seen. It is as though I was instantly transported back into 1994. It was a truly emotional experience and not something I imagine will go away as the season progresses.
If you were a fan of the original series, you genuinely owe it to yourself to watch the new show. Not only is it not “new,” it is very much old in all of the best ways possible. Marvel did an outstanding job of honoring the history of this amazing show while updating it for the modern era. I can only say that I hope this series gets far more than five seasons. It has the potential to run for at least a decade if it’s managed properly and shown the right amount of respect and based on everything I’ve seen so far, that’s exactly what they’ve done and intend to keep doing.