X-Men ’97 review: Marvel’s omega-level nostalgia game

Aside from a few recent cameos, the X-Men have been conspicuously absent from Marvel Studios projects thanks to a year-long corporate dispute with Fox, which used to own the rights to the characters. It’s been fascinating, but strange, to see Marvel build an entire cinematic multiverse without a mutant in sight, considering the popularity of X-Men: The Animated Series It’s part of what led to the X Men movies and the modern boom in comic book movies. But after almost 30 years, Disney Plus’ X-Men ’97 The series gives cartoon mutants their due, with a few caveats, by revisiting their history and shining a nostalgic light on what made them ’90s icons.

There was nothing like it X-Men: The Animation series before debuting on Fox Kids in the fall of 1992 and introducing a generation of viewers to altruistic telepath Charles Xavier. After five seasons and 76 episodes inspired by comic book stories like “The Dark Phoenix Saga” and “Days of Future Past” X-Men: The Animated Series It finally came to an end leaving Charles Xavier’s students to determine their own destiny. As some of the world’s most powerful superheroes, Cyclops (Ray Chase), Jean Gray (Jennifer Hale), Storm (Alison Sealy-Smith) and Rogue (Lenore Zann) saved humanity countless times by fighting enemies like Magneto (Matthew Waterson). But X-Men ’97 begins at an interesting point in the X-Men’s lives when their heroism has changed public opinion and led the United Nations to dismantle the Sentinel mutant-hunting program.

Although ’97 is a continuation of The animated series, sets out to give newcomers to the franchise an easy way in by introducing Roberto da Costa (Gui Agustini), a young Brazilian mutant with solar powers who plays a similar role to Jubilee in the original cartoon. There, Jubilee was a teenager on the run from killer robots who found a family in the X-Men after being rejected by her adoptive parents. And here, Jubilee is one of the X-Men who saves Roberto from a group of anti-mutant militia before taking him to his headquarters, which is also a school, in upstate New York.

At first, X-Men ’97 uses Roberto to remind you who older characters like time traveler Bishop (Isaac Robinson-Smith) are, but the show becomes much more fluid as it dives into the soapy drama unfolding between the team’s veterans. With Xavier seemingly dead, there’s a different kind of intensity to the way Cyclops leads the X-Men on missions. With a baby on the way, Jean’s priorities have changed, and while she cares deeply for Wolverine and the others, a part of her also feels that Xavier’s departure is one of many signs that it might be time for her too. Go away.

In the show’s first two episodes, written by recently fired showrunner Beau DeMayo, X-Men ’97 It sets in motion a classic story about how moments of relative peace and acceptance tend to be brief for Marvel’s mutants. The way X-Men ’97 frames the persecution of mutants as a parallel to racial discrimination in the real world is nothing you haven’t seen before if you’ve read some X Men books or watched some of the original show. But after years of Marvel Studios releasing projects that mostly avoided talking about things like racism, the mutant-as-minority metaphor seems significant because of how explicitly and repeatedly it’s spelled out here.

Although supervillains threaten both mutants and humans, X-Men ’97 uses characters like Henry Gyrich (Todd Haberkorn), an extremist who equates tolerance with extinction, to emphasize how racist acts of terror are byproducts of societies poisoned by narrow-minded thinking. Magneto, once a megalomaniac in his own right, helps the show deepen its exploration of this idea as he becomes a different, even thornier, presence in the lives of the X-Men. And by characterizing Magneto as a complicated man who has weighed his past actions against his hopes for the future, X-Men ’97 does an effective job of making you feel like you’ve grown over time.

Still, be familiar with X-Men: The Animated Series makes it much easier to appreciate the work ’97The creative team strove to make the show feel like a Saturday morning cartoon. For every poignant line delivered, there are three more with a theatricality that reads almost as camp. Sometimes, X-Men ’97 is just as cheesy as the original show, made in the ’90s for kids. But The animated series It also gave rise to one of the sickest theme songs ever aired on television, and X-Men ’97 Composers The Newton Brothers work wonders with a score that fantastically amplifies the new show’s striking pieces.

The action-focused scenes where Cyclops and his team unleash their powers are where X-Men ’97 – which was produced with Studio Mir – is at its best visually. But the force of X-Men ’97The explosive fights are contrasted by a distracting stiffness in some of its slower moments. You can clearly see that the new program takes visual design cues from its predecessor. But why X Men ’97’s backgrounds are often highly detailed to convey depth and their lighting is more naturalistic; the characters themselves sometimes feel comparatively under-animated.

X-Men ’97 It also flows a little differently than The animated series. This is partly because the new show wasn’t created with commercial breaks in mind, but also because the creative team is working within the confines of a 10-episode order for its first season. X-Men: The Animated Series always moved at a fast, comic-like pace, but the speed at which X-Men ’97 Progressing through its first major arc makes it feel quite rushed as it comes to an end.

The breathless plot doesn’t seem like something that will be resolved over the course of its first season. But at a time when Marvel’s biggest project has started to feel a little stagnant and directionless, that might not be the worst thing. Marvel has been trying to recapture the energy that made its first films so successful, and X-Men ’97 is doing something very similar. But by having such a clear vision of himself and then sticking to it, X-Men ’97 It makes it hard not to feel nostalgic for the days when comic book adaptations could do something specific, free from the pressures of a cinematic universe.

X-Men ’97 It also stars Eric Bauza, Gil Birmingham, Christopher Britton, George Buza, Alyson Court, Cal Dodd, JP Karliak, Ross Marquand and Chris Potter. The first two episodes are already streaming on Disney Plusand new episodes debut on Wednesdays.