Tagline: *SNIKT!*
Curiosity: I’ve been re-evaluating items from my childhood. X-Files doesn’t hold up so well now that I know there was no real ending in sight, but The Simpsons is much funnier now that I’m old enough to get all the jokes.
Plot: Professor Charles Xavier (Cedric Smith) runs a school… FOR MUTANTS! KIDS WITH SUPERPOWERS YEE-HAW! There are many obstacles against his best students, the X-Men. Humanity at large is pretty freaked out about mutants. Magneto (David Hemblen), another mutant with the power of magnetism, thinks that mutants should just kick the shit out of er’rybody, but the psychic Xavier thinks that’s kind of a dick move.
Also the characters represent any oppressed minority ever.
Except for furries. That shit’s gross.
Thoughts: Up until now, I’ve been a pretty good judge of which of my previous passions have held up and which have aged horribly (HORRIBLY!). But I’m not completely sure if I love X-Men because I was “the right age” for its original run, or if it’s just still a solid superhero cartoon.
There are numerous faults with the series. Compared to Bruce Timm’s run with DC’s animated shows (Batman, Superman, Justice League), X-Men looks terrible. The animation is choppy, cells are frequently colored incorrectly, and voices don’t always synch up with mouth movements. The first season ignored characters’ histories in the comics in favor of something more streamlined for Saturday morning shows, which only hampered the show later on. Cable (Lawrence Bayne), for example, started off in the show as a Rambo-esque cowboy, not a clone baby with psychic powers and an arm infected by a techno-organic virus from the future. Easier to explain initially, but the writers quickly retconned the new origin once they tried using him in future stories. The stories got more ambitious later on, to a fault (The “Phoenix” and “Dark Phoenix” sagas add up to nine freaking episodes… 11 if you count the two-part “Out of the Past” episodes which set up the “Phoenix Saga”). The final season is kind of a wash.
But there is so much good stuff crammed in. Exiles fans get the creation of Morph, a character killed in the pilot who proved so popular that the writers brought him back for a story arc that spanned the entire second season. The equality message is pretty strong, which is good for kids. And the characters are so dang awesome. Wolverine (Cal Dodd) gets all the love, and rightly so – dude kicks a lot of butt. Cyclops (Norm Spencer) gets in some pretty choice shots too, like when he takes out Mr. Sinister (Christopher Britton) in the second season finale. Taken as a whole, the series simplifies some of the comic book’s greatest storylines (“Days of Future Past,” “Dark Phoenix Saga,” “The Phalanx Covenant”) and allows a lot of popular characters (Nighcrawler, Cable, Colossus, etc.) to get their due. Ultimately, it was one of the greatest sci-fi shows of the ’90s, and I’m pretty stoked to finally own the series on DVD.
Reflection: HOW SWEET IS THIS THEME SONG?
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