It should have been what Magneto refers to as a “nostalgic parlor trick” – reviving the X-Men cartoon that aired on Saturday mornings throughout much of the 90s for the Disney+ streaming service. Isn’t this what all streaming services do? They comb through their back catalog to see what IP can be exploited, promising both nostalgia and, of course, a fresh new spin on whatever thing you’ve already seen before. So while it was a given that a certain number of X-Men fans would be on board for X-Men ’97, which just completed its 10-episode first season with a second already on the way, it’s still a bit surprising that a revival of an ambitious, sometimes-clunky 90s-kid object of obsession would become one of the year’s most beloved TV shows.
Some of it may be hunger for any kind of ongoing X-Men series outside of the comics, which remain, as ever, a relatively niche interest. (For every restart at issue no 1, there’s several volumes of backstory that must be summarized to even begin to understand what the hell is going on.) After the Fox network aired the X-Men cartoon, the live-action movie studio adapted the characters into the first major superhero movies of the new millennium, helping to kickstart a major cultural trend. The Fox X-Men movies ran for an impressive 20 years, but Disney’s purchase of the studio coincided with a couple of box office flops in the form of Dark Phoenix and the much-delayed, pandemic-released The New Mutants. A curtain call of sorts is coming this summer with Deadpool & Wolverine, but that movie will also integrate the wisecracking Ryan Reynolds mercenary (who spun off from the X-Men movies) into the broader MCU. As such, it’s been four years since there was an X-Men movie in theaters – and longer since the last one that really connected with audiences, 2017’s Logan.
