When I rewatched the original 1990’s X-Men cartoon it was interesting to see that it wasn’t nearly as competent or as well put together as I remembered it being. It was still (largely) a pile of fun. The new X-Men 97 series is intended as a direct continuation of that original series and based on the first two episodes it has done something quite clever.
It really does look and sound the same…in the sense of what you might remember but not in the sense of how that 1990s series actually was. The animation is much better, the backgrounds are properly drawn and everything is visually a lot more consistent. However, it really does capture the style of the original but just done better. I suspect if you haven’t done a rewatch, it may well match how people remember the series being.
I was genuinely excited to hear the theme music start up and the opening credits again introduce each of the main X-Men with their own name…but with some additions. Bishop now gets his own moment and more importantly so does Morph, who has been in the show since the original first episode and by episode 2 there’s another name on the roster.
Very quickly we are into the mixed-up, soap opera world of the X-Men as they cope with the loss of Professor Xavier. The Friends of Humanity are still causing trouble and there is still sentinel technology around but the political mood has shifted towards more acceptance towards mutants. Meanwhile, Jean is pregnant and so as to not spoil which kid that might be I won’t say their gender. Either way it means timeline shenanigans are going to be happening. There is also a nice twist at the end of episode 1 (shown in the trailer).
Are the usual suspects going to complain that it has gone “woke”? Yes they will, particularly as the second episode has a bigoted mob invading a court building in a scene that feel more 2021 than 1997 and yet there is nothing there that couldn’t have been in the original show. The main difference is that it is better drawn.
By the end of episode 2 things have already got complicated both with super heroics, the battle against bigotry and romantic relationships…and then we get yet another big twist which will make X-Men fans go ohhhh we are getting a version of that storyline as well.
I think this will be fun.
Camestros Felapton 
9 responses to “X-Men 97 is bottled nostalgia”
ive never seen the entire run of the original, just a few random episodes. My animated superhero watching on the 90s was very scatter shot and patchy
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Same. I used to catch episodes occasionally when they were on Australian TV in the mornings before I went to university in whatever idiosyncratic order the network decided to play them. I’ve probably seen three or four episodes several times, and others not at all.
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Not at all familiar with the animated series buuuuuut…..
Anyone ever who complains that ANY X-Men property is “woke” is a special kind of stupid even beyond anyone who uses that word unironically.
As a civil rights allegory from the very first issue ever printed, X-Men is “woke” down to its’ DNA.
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Very much so and the way the cartoon Friends of Humanity were presented in the 1990’s version already resembled MAGA types. Just redoing that now the writers would have to tie themselves in very strange knots to create a distinction. The show did use the word “insurrection” about them though, so 100% they knew what they were doing but it was essentially unavoidable.
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I watched the first episode last night – and suddenly it was the 1990s again.
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I only caught a few of them, because I was already past 30 and the art didn’t appeal to me.
My 90s toons were Batman: TAS (still great), plus Tiny Toons and Animaniacs, which were all before 97 IIRC. I may have been between cartoons by then, actually.
Nowadays I’m hoping there’s another season of the adorable anime-style “My Adventures With Superman”, which has blessedly done away with all the secrecy about Clark/Supes for Jimmy and Lois; a thing that always frustrated me since at least the mid-Bronze Age.
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Apparently the current big upset about the show is that Gambit wears at one point a pink (his signature color) crop top of the sort guys wore in the late 1980’s and 1990’s. They think that this is feminizing woke stuff added in, when it’s period accurate and also accurate to what was in the comics back then.
We were buying comics then, including the X-Men, but I didn’t actually ever get to watch much of the cartoon show. I wasn’t going to bother with this sequel because of that, but the actual fans are raving about it and it sounds like they are doing fun comics storylines from the past, so I may need to watch it.
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It’s not the greatest show on TV or anything but it is doing what it set out to do nicely.
This response on Gambit’s clothing choices was apt https://twitter.com/WednesdayPull/status/1771239420915539974 it includes the line “his powers are he turns thing hot pink and then they explode”
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I was in grad school and never saw the original series. But I heard good things from fans so I watched the first two eps of the new series. They have already given us the best Cyclops ever, simply by letting him using his optic blasts as a means of moving around the battlefield.
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