Bring Back That Classic! #3 - X-Men: The Animated Series
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In this time of cinematic universes and big budget super-hero films, it's hard to imagine a time when animations and cartoons ruled the TVs and was the original cinematic universe. Well, to the current generation that is. I remember watching this series every Saturday morning as it felt like a cult-like hypnotizing trap (for lack of a better word). The colorful drawings, the unforgettable theme song (how many of you have the theme song playing in your head as your are reading this?), and the captivating stories kept kids entranced to the series for five seasons, and then the re-runs after the series was over. This has no doubt influenced the X-Men movies to follow, and therefore, the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe as a whole. So let's dive into it.
Let's first touch base a little bit about the history of the X-Men comic, created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and first published in September 1963 as The X-Men #1. After the success of comics like Fantastic Four, Hulk, Iron Man, Thor and Spider-Man, Stan Lee wanted something different from what he had previously done with radioactive freak accidents, so he decided the easiest thing to do was to make a team of mutants led by the telepathically powerful Professor Xavier. Professor X, as he would later be called would have a school of 'gifted mutants' namely Cyclops, Beast, Iceman, Angel and Marvel Girl/Phoenix (Jean Grey). Their main villain would be the magnetically powerful villain, Magneto.
The X-Men issue #1 published in September 1963 Source
Moving forward to 1989 and TV executive Margaret Loesch had been taken by the X-Men team of ragtag mutants, so she pitched ideas for an animated series which would later become the pilot episode 'Pryde of the X-Men'. The pilot became a flop and was never aired. In 1990, she began her role as Fox Kids CEO and she convinced the head of Fox, Jamie Kellner to greenlight an X-Men animated series, and the first episode, 'Night of the Sentinels' was aired on October 31, 1992 on the primetime 7 p.m. time slot. However, due to the huge budget, the rest of the series wouldn't air until January 1993. On board for the show was Haim Saban of Saban Entertainment and production company Graz.
The delayed air time would be one of many issues to come, including a budget-cutting producer, threats from the creative company over a merchandise dispute, and problems with casting.
Eric Lewald, showrunner: Our first casting session was awful. It was just worthless. It was like Scooby Doo X-Men. We sent up sides [sample scripts actors used to audition with] and sent up the casting director and voice director and they picked a bunch of people and sent them down and they had three or four [actors picked out] for everybody. They were really, really wrong. We tried to convey to them what was different about X-Men, and they didn't hear it. They thought, "They want to do something goofy and childish." They didn’t get it. So we had to send a bunch of people up and completely redo it [the casting] from scratch.
The series persevered and we were able to see five seasons of this fantastic cartoon every week. The seventy-sixth episode would see it's conclusion in 1997. The release of the X-Men movie would have the animated series have re-runs of the show, and later spawn seven more X-Men films. Eleven, including The Wolverine, Deadpool 1 & 2 and Logan. Upcoming films including those currently in production are Dark Phoenix, Gambit, The New Mutants, and many, many more which are yet to be titled or even started filming.
X-Men: The Animated Series themeI'm sure that I'm not the only person to think that cartoon stories and art aren't the same like they used to be in the 1980's to 1990's, so let's keep hoping that a new series will come out that is just as impactful and commercially viable as this series has been.
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I was a huge X-Men fan back in the day. In high school those are the comics I read. And all their spin offs like X-Force, New Mutants, Cable, Deadpool, Wolverine and etc. I actually want to pick up the reissues from issue 92 and on. The 2nd line up was my favourite. Then later on when the X-Men were playing dead for a while, that was a good line up too.
Now a days I'm kind of sick of X-Men due to their films. It focused too much on Wolverine, however I did enjoy Huge Jackman as Wolverine. In fact Wolverine was every where for a while, appearing in everyone's comic every second issue...
Fav X-Men would be Beast!
Yeah I started reading comics in the early-mid 90s, but I had my brother's back issues from the 80s, like Secret Wars II. I think some of the X-Men movies were alright, especially the recent ones. Apocalypse story line was kind of whack, but I guess that's what they could fit in with the 2 hour time frame they had. I forgot to mention the Legion series as well. That's a great series if you haven't checked it out yet!
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I forgot about Legion, I need to watch that. At first I thought the X-Men movies were good. In fact I found most of my friends and other people in conversation were forgiving of the first movies short comings. Like small budget and stuff like that. Its just as they went on it became more about Wolverine and less about the rest of the X-Men. And I hated how they screwed up the timelines. And then the actors were my next issue. I thought they were boring, so many it was actually the script they had to work with, but I didn't like how the characters were treated. Then how they looked, they screwed up Deadpool on his first outing!
Secret Wars 2 was great. I would love to see Marvel bring that to the screen!