After much anticipation, X Men ’97a direct sequel X-Men: The Animated Series from the 1990s, appears this week on Disney Plus. But it’s not the first time Marvel has dusted off the old series and revived it for a nostalgic new millennium.
Marvel Comics itself started working on it X Men ’92published in 2015 and technically a Secret Wars connect (but don’t worry about it). For ’92writers Chad Bowers and Chris Sims and artist Scott Koblish had to figure out how to create a comic book story that felt like a beloved cartoon series based closely on ’90s comics, without just replicating the ’90s comics themselves. X-Men: The Animated Series certainly had its own vibe – but blocky animation doesn’t translate to still images, and when you put character designs ripped straight from the comics back on the page, they just look… like they came from comics. Rogue and Gambits scandalous accents? From the comics. Storm’s operatic diction? The comics.
X-Men: The Animated Series was beloved because it was a truly excellent introduction not only to the characters of the time. And so Bowers, Sims and Koblish made an interesting choice: according to them X Men ’92What makes a story feel like it’s an animated series from ’92 is… censorship.
In the field of cartoon adaptations of long-running comic book series, X-Men: The Animated Series has always stood out for how closely it mimicked the comics it was based on. You could almost call The animated series more of a translation than an adaptation, with the way it even directly adapted comic strips published during the show.
Or at least it adapted them as best it could – given a very different set of content standards.
Shall we go down the list? No swearing, so everyone, even Wolverine, uses incredible chopped eden. Every villain must show signs of life after being taken down. Minimize direct and implied references to sex, religion, drugs, torture, funerals and also every word derived from ‘kill’. And no blood! Sure, Wolverine has a healing factor, but we can’t show him getting beat up too badly or running around too naked (comics love this). Instead, let’s highlight his enhanced senses. And make sure the Sentinels are front and center; Censors are great at cutting up robots or electrocuting them with Storm’s lightning, blasting holes through them with Cyclops’ power beams, smashing them to pieces with Rogue’s super strength, and making them explode with Gambit’s playing cards.
X Men was not unusual for its time in the restrictions imposed on it. But those lines were one thing for shows where Spider-Man or Batman punched bad guys until they fell to the ground and groaned. It was something completely different for the X-Men, whose most popular man was a man made of blades who suffered constant wounds. And it was even more fraught for a close to film adaptation of X-Men stories, whose general popularity has to do with romantic and sexual tension in the soap opera. Gambit and Rogue don’t want that get engagedPeople, they want scalding hot, impossible sex before marriage because of her mutation.
So if you want to define what a “X-Men: The Animated Series-style story” different from a “comic-style X-Men story,” at some point you’re just going to list all the ways the comics had to change for children’s television. Like a comedy series that tries to… Animated series show, X Men ’92 just leaned into that, with a story about the X-Men fighting censorship themselves.
In ’92, the Cassandra was Grant Morrison and Frank Quietly’s first major villain New X Men, a run that is still known today for its radical redefinition of the X-Men. The first page of their first X-Men comic is a splash image of Cyclops and Wolverine casually chopping up a Sentinel, as Cyclops pointedly says, “Wolverine, you can probably stop that now.”
Cassandra Nova was Morrison and Quietly’s first attempt to fill the antagonistic void left by killing off Sentinels; a moral counterpart to Professor X, who wanted to destroy everything he wanted to uphold. But for ’92 Bowers and Sims and Koblish gave Cassandra a new hook – this time she doesn’t want to kill all the mutants. She wants clean all mutants.
Image: Chad Bowers, Chris Sims, Scott Koblish/Marvel Comics
She captures and brainwashes the Ultimately, Wolverine regains his claws after once again realizing that they can be used to help people; Rogue and Gambit are shocked to realize that there is more to touching someone than sex and marriage. The X-Men win the day and achieve a victory over the simplistic reductions of morality.
The team behind it X Men ’97 it seemed they had asked themselves the same questions as the team behind it X Men ’92: Is this children’s show a revival for kids, or for the grown adults who loved the first show? Are we keeping the tone of the 90s? Will it even feel like the ‘real’ X-Men cartoon without it?
Time has added a certain amount of humor to the idea of a Wolverine who can’t cut anyone but robots and only drinks beer when someone could reasonably mistake it for soda. It’s strange to look back on a time when children’s cartoons were so limited in what they could portray, all because of the assumption of a pearl-clutching audience.
Those assumptions have evolved – but it’s worth remembering that they have didn’t leave. There are new boundaries in the slow war of attrition between children’s TV showrunners and studio censors, and new creators pushing the boundaries. After all, you’ll find every episode of it X Men: ’97 on Disney Plus, but you won’t find every episode of it Bluish.
Here’s hoping that in a few more decades, the broadcast standards of 2024 will seem as strange as those of 1997, bub.