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…

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My review of the first half of the Season can be found by clicking HERE.

X-Men’s animated series reaches what was clearly meant to be its conclusion with a four-part epic at the end of this season, the fact a fifth season was suddenly greenlit sadly only giving us a weaker actual finale, but that’s for next time (and I guess technically it’s now also not the actual finale?) Either way even the episodes leading up the final story were good as well, giving us an overall really strong Season. Let’s take a look, shall we?

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Moving on to Season 4 with X-Men and things calm down, with no epic four/five part Phoenix stuff and instead back to self-contained Earth-based episodes with a couple of double-bill stories thrown in… well, with the exception of the finale, but that’s in the next half! So let’s have a look at what the first 12 episodes brought to the table…

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(My review of the first half of Season 3 can be viewed by clicking HERE)

The next half of Season 3 adapts the Dark Phoenix Saga, and not just the Inner Circle stuff either, it once again includes the space-based stuff with the Shi’ar and even the “Blue Area of the Moon”, which always confused me, at least until I read more of the comics. It also has a couple of other stories either side of it, so let’s take a look (and hope I can fit the next two seasons in the next month as we finally have a date for X-Men 97!)

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Managed to get a lot more X-Men watched over the “festive period” so let’s get started with the first half of Season 3, which sees the most enjoyable adaptation of the Phoenix Saga in any medium (with the Dark Phoenix stuff following in the second half of the season for the record!) plus some fun stand-alone stories as well, including the return of Apocalypse (hooray!) and Mojo (ugh…) The season has a general greater focus on sci-fi than the Earth-based issues they’ve tackled in the previous two seasons (Magneto doesn’t appear at all this season!) which certainly gives it a different feel, so let’s take a look!

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The second season of the animated X-Men series has an over-arching plot across all 12 episodes though really it’s mainly short cut-away sequences that don’t go anywhere until we get to the two-part finale. It was an interesting choice but I don’t feel it worked well. Luckily though a lot of the actual episodes are really fun and feature some pretty deep cuts from Marvel lore mixed with interesting looks at our titular heroes… so let’s take a look!

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Like many people I loved the X-Men cartoon growing up in the early 90s and so like many people I’m very excited for the upcoming “X-Men 97” series, which is weirdly a fancy name for a sixth season of the original show. So I thought I’d see if I can review the five seasons leading up to the release of 97 though given we have no concrete date other than late 2023 I can’t say if I’ll make it or not, but either way I’ve enjoyed this enough that I’ll want to carry on regardless! I still remember the opening two-parter vividly, seven-or-eight-year-old me was blown away by the more serious tone the show went for (same reason I loved the Batman animated series) so let’s see if that holds up several decades later…

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