It Is My Pleasure to Tell You That 'X-Men 97' Kicks Ass

We are so back, bub.

I love the X-Men. Readers know this. I have always loved the X-Men. I have loved the X-Men ever since that Pizza Hut campaign they did when I was 10 years old. I have loved the X-Men since my twelfth birthday when me, Micah, Mark and Jeremy spent $20 in quarters beating the old X-Men button smasher of an arcade game at the bowling alley. I have loved the X-Men ever since I sat like four feet away from the TV on Saturday mornings eating Lucky Charms and watching the old cartoon. 

I’ve written about that cartoon before, which punched above its weight thematically even as the cheapo animation looked absolutely embarrassing next to the wonders DC was pulling off with Batman at the time.

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Nevertheless, I didn’t expect a whole lot from Disney+’s X-Men revival. For one thing, it’s an animated show for kids and I'm ostensibly a grown man. For another, the last couple years of Marvel content has been so lazy and uninspired¹ that it was hard to get interested in yet another Disney+ show. I assured myself that the whole thing would just be nostalgia slop, and I’d turn it off after hearing the updated theme song. 

So imagine my surprise when I discovered that X-Men ‘97 …kinda kicks ass? Cue the theme!

Talk about understanding the assignment! This is a show that knows its most likely viewers are either old fans now pushing 40 or those old fans’ kids, and it has plenty to offer both groups. There’s a lot of bright, splashy fun for kids who want to see the BANG! POW! stuff², but the writer’s room is also developing sharp and complicated relationships. Cyclops, Jean, Storm, Rogue, Magneto and the rest all have well-rounded personalities and motivations and things they want that sometimes bring them into conflict with the world around them and with each other. It’s not exactly rocket science but it is wild how much modern storytelling forgets to do this!

The most serious, grownup version of the X-Men is about the different ways marginalized groups seek justice and equality. This can be interesting when done well and an absolute snooze when done poorly. X-Men ‘97 is mostly the former, weaving the social commentary into the big fights. To the show’s credit, the social commentary is often quite a bit more interesting than “bigotry = bad.” In one conversation with an anti-mutant bigot, Storm says that human cruelty has only made mutants seem more sympathetic in the eyes of the public. 

“No,” the man sneers. “You’re just in vogue, Storm. A fad. ‘Look at my mutant friend!’ But under all that fashionable sympathy, normal people know the more room we make for your kind, the less we leave for ours.” 

I’ve heard sharper critiques of the limitations of trendy liberal allyship, but I don’t think I’ve encountered it in a superhero cartoon. And then in the second episode, a group of anti-mutant bigots storm the UN in a scene clearly ripped from January 6. “You freaks think you’ve got it so bad!” one rioter shouts at a mutant. “Normal people have it hard too. We just have the dignity not to whine about it!” 

Or just look at this clip. What was the last superhero story you saw that included two women just talking about motherhood?

Most of this comes and goes fast enough that your six-year-old kid won’t have time to wonder what’s going on before the X-Men are zipping off to blow up a few more Sentinels. But the fact that it’s there adds a vibrant sheen of timeliness that keeps this legacy reboot from feeling like a tonal dinosaur. If this is what Disney plans to do with its newly acquired X-Men franchise, I’m on board. 

Look, I do not have a high bar for my superhero entertainment. You put a bunch of people in brightly colored costumes and have them start punching each other, and I’m well on my way to satisfied. So it doesn’t speak well of the superhero content genre that I find most live action X-Men movies to be somewhere between middling and godawful. For every inspired sequence (Magneto hunting Nazis in First Class, Iceman “coming out” to his parents in X2) there’s a lot of stuff that just sucks. We’ll be here all day if we start talking about all the things the live action X-Men movies get wrong, but one big one is that the creators approached these movies primarily as superhero stories. But the X-Men is not first and foremost a superhero story. The X-Men is first and foremost a soap opera. 

Like a soap opera, it’s less about good guys and bad guys than it is the ever-shifting alliances of a collection of extremely messy weirdos. Like a soap opera, it has a comically large cast whose professional, romantic and familial entanglements look certifiably insane when plotted on a flow chart³. Like a soap opera, it’s built of largely disposable episodes strung together over a long period of time that looks both very silly and very intimidating to outsiders. And like a soap opera, fans end up developing an unhealthy obsession with one or two favorite characters who may disappear for months or years before popping up in a dramatic reveal that causes us to hoot and holler like cowboys.

None of this works very well in big budget live action, which is supposed to stand alone and be relatively accessible for big crowds. That’s why you’ll never see Days of Our Lives: The Movie. It’s also probably why X-Men: The Movie is sort of a doomed idea from the jump. But X-Men: The Animated Series? Now we’re talking. 

This is also a reminder of something I’ve started to believe more and more: most superheroes just work better as animation. Whether the Spiderverse movies or Bruce Timm’s old Batman series or Teen Titans GO, the whole concept of superheroes just goes down a little easier when you’re not forcing real people into these goofy costumes. In the MCU, I have no idea why Steve Rogers feels like he has to wear the Captain America duds whenever he’s called into action. But in a cartoon, you can stylize the whole world however you want. And the world of X-Men ‘97 just seems like the kind of place where some people might decide to suit up in primary colored spandex to make a case for their coexistence. I love that. Oh, and the theme song is back. I love that too.

1. There are some exceptions. Particularly Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3, which I thought was as good as anything the MCU’s done.

2. It’s me. I’m the kid who wants to see the BANG! POW! stuff. The first episode has an absolute show stopper of a finale.

3. Unlike a soap opera, those entanglements are further complicated by time travel. At least, I don’t think other soap operas do a lot of time traveling.