Hogan Reviews

What can I say about X-Men ’97? “Wow” comes to mind, frankly. When it was announced I assumed it would just be a fun nostalgia cash-in, and that was fine (hell it got me to re-watch the whole original show and review it here on the site!) but what I got instead was the cast of the original show pushed forward into not just a show with modern visuals and flare but also one with a far more serious tone that wasn’t afraid to shy away from the more extreme look at the themes from the show / comics and throw in the odd bit of bloody violence or other more “not very 90s cartoon-y” bits, yet also made sure to still have some fun with the dialogue and kept the cheesy stories and costumes from the source material. It’s both a nostalgic sequel to a beloved show and a very modern adaptation of some great X-Men comic storylines. To say it overachieved would be an understatement! Let’s take a look.

As the title’s ’97 will tell you this is essentially a “Season 6” of the X-Men Animated Series, just again with modern animation and a tone that’s aimed at an older audience (but not in the sleezy gore and sex way, thankfully!) It’s been several months since Professor X had been announced dead (but actually taken to the Shi’ar homeworld instead) and Cyclops is worried about trying to lead the team in the Professor’s absence while also dealing with the fact that Jean is pregnant with his child and the want to raise that baby in a normal environment. For the first time ever in the series the team has actually undergone a change in line up, as alongside Cyclops and Jean are returning teammates Wolverine, Storm, Rogue, Gambit, Beast and Jubilee, plus Morph has actually rejoined the team after at least three seasons of saying “he didn’t feel ready yet”, and time traveller Bishop is a regular member after his time travelling device got damaged. Episode 1 also introduces us to Roberto de Costa, a rich kid mutant who has been hiding his abilities from everyone out of shame who ends up encountering the X-Men in a similar fashion that Jubilee did in the original opener. Her and Jubilee striking up a potentially romantic relationship in an under-current plot thread throughout the season that includes rich parents praising their son for “coming out” as a mutant only to insist he hide from everyone for publicity’s sake. Classic… horribleness.

The nostalgia before the storm, as the old phrase goes!

The first episode is the only that feels like what I assumed the whole show would be like, in that beyond Jean being pregnant it’s constructed like a classic episode complete with the X-Men teaming up to defeat a bunch of classic purple and pink sentinels. It ends though with Magneto arriving and revealing that Xavier left the X Mansion and the X Men to him in his will, making him the new head honcho. Episode 2 is where the former villain tries to prove he’s turned over a new leaf (or has been forced to turn over a new leaf) by eventually surrendering himself to the UN for trial, but at said trial the old FoH racists arrive and their leader fires a de-powering gun at him, only for Storm to take the blast instead. This led to a great scene where Magneto pulls the UN council into the sky with his powers and basically gives them a speech about how the old him would likely have killed them for this act of horror but he’s giving them a chance to set things right. They agree to Magneto’s plan to have the mutant utopia island of Genosha join the UN as a nation state while Jean gives birth to a son (despite the nearest Doctor refusing to operate on “their kind”) and Storm soon departs the team now she has no powers. Then in a classic comic book turn a knock at the door of the X mansion sees another Jean Grey arrive and collapse in exhaustion and upon further examination this Jean is the actual Jean and the woman whom Cyclops had just had a child with is a clone!

Episode 3 then condenses a reasonably long comic book arc into just over 30 minutes as the clone Jean goes evil and refers to herself as the “Goblin Queen”, Mr. Sinister (who made the clone) kidnaps her and Cyclops’ newborn son Nathan, and the rest of the X-Men are treated to some straight up horror as the Goblin Queen turns the X Mansion into a literal hellscape. The real Jean manages to save them and then the X Men (led by Magneto) attack Sinister’s HQ where the two Jeans manage to come to terms with each other and team up to defeat Sinister, but not before he exposes the baby to a techno-organic virus. With no cure in the present Bishop, whose time travel tech is now working, takes the baby to the future where it would have to stay (and you know, become Cable, just in case you somehow haven’t picked up on that fact through the years…) The former Goblin Queen takes the name Madelyne Pryor and goes off to live her own life while Jean laments that her and Madelyne’s memories have become muddled and neither of them know when Mr. Sinister made the switch. So yeah, that was quite the episode, though retrospectively nothing compared to some of the later ones! Episode 4 kicks off with a mini-episode where Jubilee and Roberto gets sucked into a 16-bit “Motendo” console that gives us a fun bit of retro gaming nostalgia, the return of Mojo and a kiss between the two late teens, but nothing much else.

“Man… it’s one of THOSE days I see.”

The second half of Episode 4 and Episode 6 show us how Storm gets her powers back, had a relationship with Forge, and defeated a psychic entity known as “the adversary”, plus how life on Shi’ar is treating Prof. X, which is well until he has a horrible vision of what happened on Earth disrupts everything. What’s that? What happened in Episode 5? Well, strap in! While Cyclops and Jean are trying to work out the “you cheated on me and had a child with someone else” “that someone else was a perfect clone of you, how was I supposed to know?” situation, you know classic relationship stuff, Magneto, Rogue and Gambit head to Genosha to take in the celebrations of their rise to official UN state and Magneto and Rogue are invited to help run the place. At this point it has to be said that we found out Magneto and Rogue had a romantic fling and they’re sort of back at it, much to Gambit’s sadness. After lots of fun celebrating (including the return of Nightcrawler!) Madelyne, who is part of Genosha, is visited by Cable, who she recognises as her son, but before he can warn her about something he’s flung back into the future and just like that an upgraded Master Mold appears over the island and unleashes a massive attack. The scenes that followed were death and destruction as countless mutants were cut down and the likes of Magneto go missing. In the end Gambit sacrifices his life to take out the Master Mold, leaving Rogue mentally broken. I can’t praise Episode 5 enough, the calm before the storm and the storm itself were extremely engaging, and Gambit’s death scene was perfect. I don’t think I blinked once during the whole last ten minutes.

A picture that doesn’t need a sentence underneath it (but I put one because otherwise it would look weird)

Sounds like should’ve been in the Spoiler Section, but nope, there’s more to come! Episode 7 has a lot of scenes of Rogue, well, going rogue as she tries to find the people responsible for Genosha, including a few scenes with the likes of Captain America and Thunderbolt Ross, which was fun. Eventually the X-Men, which now counts Nightcrawler among their ranks, calms Rogue down somewhat and they head to Madripoor to meet a terrified Trask, who claims Mr. Sinister was the one responsible for the new Master Mold, not him, and that someone more terrifying is waiting in the wings. Rogue isn’t interested though and drops him to his death from the top of a skyscraper with zero remorse, but this just leads to Trask turning into a human-sentinel hybrid that’s too much for the X-Men to handle, until Cable arrives and disables it. We then switch to see Magneto is captured by a man called Bastion, who is also behind the attack on Genosha and the new threat of the human-sentinels…

That leads to our three part finale, which I’ll talk about in the spoilers. Such a great series, the only real low point was the “Motendo” and Storm subplots, which weren’t as good as the rest but were hardly “bad”. I will say that of the returning cast Wolverine and Rogue’s voice actors have noticeably aged but within a week or two I was used to it and happy to hear them back (plus Wolverine sounding a bit gruff isn’t exactly wrong…), the rest were still perfect and for the record the new ones were great soundalikes too, so happy with the voice acting. Soundtrack is good as well, with a new version of the classic opening always bringing a smile to my face every Wednesday evening.

Overall Thoughts:

X-Men in action… those costumes always make me want to put on Marvel vs. Capcom 2…

As you could probably tell I loved X-Men ’97, it went far beyond a nostalgic rehash and instead became a great program in its own right, doing an amazing job of adapting some often crazy comic book storylines but keeping the themes of racism and tolerance often in the forefront and adding a more mature thread and even an slight increase in violence while keeping the 90s cartoon feel too. No idea how they pulled it off, but I’m now genuinely excited for Season 2 in a completely different way as to why I was excited for this season.

The first part of the finale has the X-Men find out more about Bastion, how he’s a mutant that has power over technology and his father was infected with part of Nimrod, the future Sentinel we saw a few times in the past (or technically the future, I guess) making him extremely powerful. Bastion eventually activates his “Prime Sentinels” and a whole bunch of people turn into them and attack mutants indiscriminately, including the X Mansions being destroyed and Cyclops, Jean and Cable having a family get together to fight them off (for the record, Cyclops finally finds out the truth about Cable being his son, which when you think how this was hinted at some 25-or so years ago in real time is kind of a long wait for a pay-off!) Magneto is freed and goes all supervillain mode again, donning his old outfit and unleashing a massive magnetic wave that shuts off all power across the globe, killing thousands but also shutting down all the Prime Sentinels. Prof. X returns from space and re-gathers his X-Men but to make things worse Magneto pulls Asteroid M out of the sea and says he’s going back to that plan and any mutant who wants to join him can, and Rogue and Roberto take him up on the offer.

The remaining X-Men split into two teams: one to take on Bastion and put a special collar on him that will cut his connection to all the Prime Sentinels, and one to head up to Asteroid M and force Magneto to turn the power back on otherwise humanity will start to kill each other en masse. Sadly the Bastion team is outsmarted when Mr. Sinister takes over Cable’s mind and has him turn on Jean, while the Asteroid M team have better luck though Xavier threatens to have to forcibly take over Magneto’s mind to get him to stop. In the back-and-forth Wolverine sneaks up behind the villain and shoves his claws through his back and out the front in a graphic moment, only outdone by Magneto’s pulling all the Adamantium out of Logan’s body in revenge (classic comic panel re-enactment!) This leaves Prof. X with no other choice but to shatter Magneto’s mind and take control of his body in order to unleash a counter-wave to restore power across the globe. I will quickly mention that in several of these scenes of global disaster we see the likes of Spider-Man, Iron Man, Daredevil and other characters from other 90s Marvel cartoons react, which is great fun! Also no Onslaught comes from this, despite matching its origin, which is a shame… Maybe next season?

Wolverine realises it isn’t Saturday morning in the 90s any more…

Anyway, as all seems lost Jean somehow reconnects with the Phoenix Force and not only ages Sinister to near-death but also puts the collar on Bastion and deals him a deadly blow, though he uses Cables techno-organic arm that he ripped off to upgrade himself and then heads to Asteroid M to drop it on Earth as revenge. There is then a fair few fight scenes of Bastion being taken down only to reform, but eventually he’s seemingly destroyed and Prof. X manages to reassemble Magneto’s mind in time for him to take control of Asteroid M and pull it away from Earth. As he does though the Asteroid vanishes in a flash of blue light and a good majority of the X-Men arrive in ancient Egypt to find a young pre-Apocalypse En Sabah Nur while Jean and Cyclops arrive in the distant future to find a young pre-Cable Nathan Summers under the care of a “Mother Askani”. Meanwhile back in current day Earth (well six months later Earth) Bishop arrives and tells Forge about the X-Men’s predicament while Apocalypse arrives in the ruins of Genosha and picks up one of Gambit’s playing cards, which if you know your X-Men comics means a heck of a lot! (as does the other cliffhangers, to be fair…)