Marvel Studios is working on a revival of X-Men: The Animated Series, dubbed X-Men ’97, to pick up where the original show left off. The original series ran for 76 episodes across five seasons on the Fox Kids Network, and still holds up today as one of the greatest pieces of X-Men media ever produced. Where the live-action movies struggled to characterize essential mutants like Cyclops and Beast and Gambit, X-Men: The Animated Series had a pitch-perfect take on each iconic superhero. Beau DeMayo, a writer from Moon Knight, The Witcher, and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, is spearheading the reboot.

From Cal Dodd as Wolverine to Lenore Zann as Rogue, a bunch of voice actors from the original series are reprising their roles in X-Men ’97. X-Men ’97’s 10-episode first season is scheduled to premiere on Disney+ sometime in late 2023, with a second season already in development. X-Men ’97 needs to recapture the original series’ vibrant, colorful animation style and its spot-on interpretation of every beloved mutant. But it also needs to embrace the sincere tone and serialized storytelling of the original classic.

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The X-Men Animated Series Was The Right Amount Of Corny

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With a deep love for the characters, X-Men: The Animated Series was just the right amount of corny. It had plenty of quippy banter and explosive superhero action, but it didn’t shy away from soapy melodrama. Marvel Studios tends to avoid anything that could be described as corny with constant self-deprecation. What made Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman movie stand out is that Jenkins banished the word “cheesy” from her vocabulary and told Diana Prince’s journey with passion and honesty. Much like its predecessor, X-Men ’97 needs to skew more towards the tone of Jenkins’ Wonder Woman films than the average MCU movie.

Sincerity is the key to X-Men ’97’s success. The reason the original series still holds up today is that it took the characters and their story arcs seriously. The mutants might have superpowers and wear brightly colored costumes, but they’re still human beings. X-Men: The Animated Series treated them as human beings. When a character was in life-threatening danger, they didn’t undercut the situation with a joke; they feared for their lives – and the audience did, too. The rebooted X-Men cartoon can’t fall into the trap of using too-cool-for-school MCU humor to avoid being truly earnest. There can be plenty of humor, but there also needs to be scenes that have no humor and plumb the depths of these troubled mutants. The X-Men are some of the most three-dimensional Marvel characters, and a serialized TV series is the perfect vehicle to explore what makes them tick.

DeMayo is committed to honoring the original X-Men cartoon while bringing its stories and characters into a modern world. According to CinemaBlend, DeMayo described his vision of X-Men ’97 as a “big soap opera,” which is part of why Marvel ended up giving him the job. It shows that he has a deep understanding of what made the original show work so well. It was an emotional rollercoaster with a huge cast of characters all wrapped up in long-running storylines, from romances to rivalries. Since DeMayo gets that, X-Men ’97 is in very safe hands.

The Original Series Explored Big, Complicated Storylines

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Most MCU TV shows feel more like stretched-out movies than TV shows. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier could’ve been condensed into a movie; Hawkeye could’ve been condensed into a movie; Moon Knight could’ve been condensed into a movie. Ms. Marvel and She-Hulk: Attorney at Law both started out with their roots in classic TV genres – Ms. Marvel was a teen drama with a superhero twist and She-Hulk was a legal procedural sitcom with a superhero twist – but even they ended up falling into the third-act trappings of a movie narrative. But X-Men: The Animated Series wasn’t a TV show trying to be a movie; it was designed very specifically as a TV show. It used the serialized format to spread out its narrative arcs and give each story beat room to breathe.

From “Days of Future Past” to “Age of Apocalypse” to “The Dark Phoenix Saga,” X-Men: The Animated Series tackled the biggest storylines from the X-Men comics in astounding multi-part episodes that captured the complexity of the narratives and the many different perspectives of the sprawling ensemble. X-Men ’97 shouldn’t squander its opportunity to do the same. The fact that season 2 is already in development is a good sign. It’s being planned as an open-ended superhero saga juggling a lot of different storylines with a lot of potential for future development. Hopefully, it can recapture the magic of the original series. The strengths of X-Men: The Animated Series are unique to television; they can’t be accomplished in the three-act feature film format. X-Men ’97 presents Marvel Studios with the opportunity to embrace the art form of television and tell longer stories with a broader scope.

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