A Short Review of X-Men: The Animated Series (1992)
Taking a breather from work; the last week and a half has been a doozy. Grateful for the opportunity to take a pause.
A lot of people having been raving about X-Men '97; from all accounts it's a faithful sequel to the end of 1992's X-Men: The Animated Series. I haven't started watching it yet, because I'm not familiar with how the series ended. I definitely watched the show as a kid, but I don't think Fox ever showed the series in proper order and I probably lost interest in it near the end (as suggested by the name of the new show, it ended in 1997 when I would have been in grades 7-8, so I probably eventually got busy on Saturday mornings when it aired).
I'm only up to episode 9 of Season 2, but I didn't realize how serialized the show was. I know there were several two-parters but the show hit pretty hard in the first season with its version of Days of Future Past to take a jump into season 2. But everything in season 1 led up to everything at the end of the first season.
If that wasn't enough, everything was picked up again in season 2, including a call back to the apparent death of Morph from the first episode! And then we get a return of Bishop (from Days of Future Past) in another pair of time travel episodes, this time adding Cable to the mix.
Remembering these from a kid's point of view, the episodes were always disjointed. The multi-part episodes were the only ones that stood out as "these episodes flow together" type of shows. Everything else seemed standalone. And it's true, there are many standalone episodes; but they all connect to each other in some form. It strikes me that the show was very faithful to a comic book-style of story telling.
You don't need to follow every episode to understand what's going on, but you're rewarded to an interconnected story if you do.
There are of course downsides to the show - there's the shortcut of having the characters appear in their X-Men uniforms almost all of the time. There's a bit of a change to this in season 2, when the characters appear in "street clothes" a little more often. Nobody seems to be egregiously hurt in fights, even the main enemies. The enemies that do get destroyed are always robots.
Of course, it's a kid's show - killing characters or visibly hurting them isn't going to go over well. That wasn't what they were aiming for. It's just that watching as an adult you can see that there are truly no stakes.
And then the way they keep foiling Apocalypse's plans and he sort of just runs away for a little bit, well that gets a little silly after the first few times. He kind of just throws a tantrum and then buggers off only to come back later with some other new plan.
A quick note on the storylines of season 2 though: this season seems to be about developing the back stories of the characters. So far in the first 8 episodes we've had three episodes focusing on individual characters: Storm, Wolverine, and Gambit. I see in the episode list there's one about Rogue coming up (I vaguely remember this episode - IIRC it reveals information about her parentage and how she got some of her powers).
It's like the first season was all about action to get people hooked, and then they had some creative freedom to tell some slightly deeper stories in the second season. I'm interested to see what the rest of the show has in store.
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