Marvel’s latest hit is way better than it needed to be.
The question “Who is this new X-Men ’97 cartoon for?” is answered mere minutes into its first episode, when, after winning a pitched battle against some thugs who are trying to detain a young superpowered mutant named Roberto DaCosta, our X-Men return home to find Remy LeBeau (code name: Gambit) merrily frying beignets in the kitchen, sporting a sleeveless pink crop top. The show shares an animation style, several voice actors, and a DuckTales-tier earworm of a theme song with the beloved Saturday morning cartoon from 1992, and if you were worried that Marvel might try to update the series conceptually, you can rest easy.
This is a nostalgia trip to the year memorialized in the show’s title—not the year the Fox Kids X-Men animated series began, as you might expect, but the year it ended, where this revival resumes in the exact same spot the original show left off. Assuming that the series was still pretty kid-friendly, I put the first two episodes on the iPad when my 7-year-old son and I were on an airplane last week. He watched it in a corner of the screen while he played Monument Valley 2, which is a reasonably good review.
The X-Men are different from other superhuman crews. They’re not jingoistic superpatriots, gods, or merciless crime fighters. Though the team shares superficial characteristics—amazing powers, bright costumes—with the Justice League of America and the Avengers, its story is only nominally about the adventures of superheroes. The team includes Rogue, a mutant who can absorb and redirect any other character’s powers; Bishop, who can redirect energy after absorbing it; and Gambit, who, when attacked, can absorb and then—look, it’s not that important. The point is that the characters all hang out together, joke around, tease one another, have crushes, bicker, make up, get married, and even occasionally die.
At its beginning in 1963, Uncanny X-Men was probably the least of Jack Kirby’s flagship creations for Stan Lee’s Marvel Comics. Kirby penciled only the first 11 issues, and the series was insignificant enough by 1970 that Marvel ran just reprints for the next five years. Then, in issue No. 94, a writer named Chris Claremont took over the series and, with artist Dave Cockrum, reworked the entire idea—about a school for heroes who fought monsters and spies and were hated for their superiority—into something much more interesting. Claremont was interested in bigotry: who indulges it, whom it harms and how. He also enjoyed giving his characters rivalries and unrequited loves, and readers loved him. He wrote the main series and several of its related books until 1992 and remains a kind of writer emeritus, dropping in regularly to pen special issues.
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