Hogan Reviews

With one day to spare it’s time to end our look at the original run of X-Men: The Animated Series before its sequel series, X-Men 97, airs its first two episodes. Sadly while Season 4 ended the show on a high note this all-of-a-sudden fifth season craps the bed, especially when we reach Episode 5 and the animation and sound quality take a nosedive. Oh well, let’s take a look anyway…

The season opens with a two-parter called “The Phalanx Covenant” that sees an alien race arrive on Earth and begin assimilating not just technology but people as well. Most of the X-Men are caught but Beast escapes and befriends a good Phalanx called Warlock, then teams up with Forge and Mr. Sinister of all people to fight back. It’s a fun story that has appearances from X-Factor and the Muir Island characters before folding Magneto in with Beast, Forge and Sinister for a real unique team up. They manage to take out the Phalanx with a computer virus but Warlock escapes deletion and leaves with his wife, or “lifemate” to close the story out. Episodes 3 and 4 is our final two-parter, dubbed “Storm Front” and sadly is a rather dull story where Storm meets an alien called Arkon who takes her to his planet to save it from deadly storms, which she does, and the two are so happy they agree to marry. The X-Men arrive though and soon find out that Arkon is a despot who has enslaved people from a nearby planet and soon our heroes arrange a revolution and eventually take him down with the help of Storm, who turns on her would-be husband as soon as his ways become apparent. It’s one of those stories that could’ve been done better, or at least done in one episode…

I swear nearly every time I caught an X-Men repeat on Fox Kids in the 2000s it was this bloody two-parter…

This is where things take that colossal nosedive I talked about as they switch animation studios to a much, much worse one full of really choppy animation, crap and off-looking characters and for some reason the audio sounds more muffled and off as well. It’s really noticeable, even more so when you watch it right after Episode 4! Anyway, the fifth episode, fittingly titled “The Fifth Horseman”, reveals that Apocalypse is stuck in the Astral Plane after the events of Season 4’s finale and he’s looking for a new body to possess so the returning Fabian Cortez is tasked with finding one by using his “hounds”, or generic mutants he’s increased the power of with his own power. It was nice seeing Cortez’ rescue by Apocalypse plot thread brought back, given I expected him to appear in the Season 4 finale but he didn’t. Coincidentally Jubilee and Beast are out for a drive in South America and so they end up captured and Jubilee is chosen as the sacrifice. The odd thing is that Cortez increases Beast’s power until he turns into a raging, well, beast and hurts his men before running off and he does this for literally NO reason. It was so confusing! Anyway Beast regains his sanity enough to stop Cortez while Caliban, one of the Hounds who knew Jubilee from before his transformation, helps her escape. Fabian is trapped under rubble and Apocalypse appears and decides to take his body instead, regaining a physical form.

Episode 6 is “Jubilee’s Fairytale Theatre” and sees her tells a fairytale to some school kids using X-Men characters as stand-ins and its frankly not very good, which when combined with the animation quality is a real bad thing. Episode 7 “Old Soldiers” sees Wolverine visit the grave of a World War II soldier which leads to a full-on WWII flashback where Wolverine teams with Captain America to take down Red Skull, including Andre Cocteau, the man whose grave Wolverine was visiting, turning out to be on Skull’s side. In the present however Wolverine finds out that he was a spy pretending to work alongside Skull to gather intelligence so he scratches “hero” on his grave out of respect. Damn, someone could’ve told him that in the intervening decades, surely? Well, either way, it was a really fun side-story, poor animation aside. Episode 8 “Hidden Agendas” sees a young mutant dubbed “Cannonball” become a local celebrity when he saves his parents during a cave in using his powers and he ends up in the sights of both the government and Professor X. He turns both down as he wants to live a normal life but the government wish to use him as a guineapig to test a new mind-control chip so they switch tactics and try to capture him instead, only to be repelled by the X-Men. It’s… fine.

It took five seasons but we finally got a full appearance from an Avenger! Shame it looked like crap…

Episode 9 “Descent” was actually a really good bit of backstory for Mr. Sinister, again a shame it was let down by the animation team. We see back in 1800s London Nathaniel Essex and James Xavier (Prof. X’s relative) are respected scientists but Essex ends up using a serum based off of emerging Mutants to turn himself into one, but he is then chased away. Several years later James is helping Scotland Yard to track Jack the Ripper and soon finds out he is an artificial creation of his former colleague, now calling himself “Mr. Sinister”, but the latter flees to America before his old friend is able to capture him. I’ll save the finale for the Spoiler Section, but its safe to say it’s no “Beyond Good and Evil” and frankly this run of final six episodes was a real downer thanks to the lower-grade production quality. Annoyingly some of the episodes are still well written and deserve better than that! Oh well, at least this technically isn’t the end any more…

Overall Thoughts:

A yet to become sinister Sinister.

X-Men: The Animated Series’ final Season goes out with a whimper rather than a bang thanks to a titanic drop in production quality that drags the stories way down, and the finale is similarly disappointing compared to the original ending we got in Season 4. Let’s hope X-Men 97 brings the series up to a higher level for its “new ending”, though frankly it would be hard to do worse…

Episode 10 “Graduation Day” has Professor X attacked at a press conference outing him as a Mutant himself and severely injuring his mind in the process. Despite the best efforts of Beast and Moira MacTaggert it looks like X isn’t going to make it with Earth tech, and he’s too weak to contact the Shi’ar. Meanwhile the attack gives Magneto the perfect chance to rally his men on Genosha and finally attack the US government head-on but when the X-Men show up they reveal Prof. X is dying and after Magneto’s powers combine and increase Jean’s mental powers they ask he come back and save his old friends’ life.

Cyclops and Prof. X laugh at how poorly drawn they are. Oh and the latter’s dying, that’s less funny though.

Furious that his perfect chance is going to slip out of his hands he still agrees and soon powers up Xavier’s mind enough that he calls for Lilandra of the Shi’ar, who soon arrives. The X-Men get some parting words from their mentor as he is taken away to be healed by Shi’ar technology, leaving the X-Men leaderless for the first time.