Brilliant Overall

Having seen most beloved comic and SciFi franchises butchered to death and beyond, I fully expected this to be embarrassingly bad. And it would have hurt. They fucked up Star Wars, but I only really love-love the original trilogy. They fucked up Star Trek, but I already have hundreds and hundreds of hours of quality Trek TV and films and books and comics, whatever. They fucked up the MCU but I never really thought it was as good as everyone else, and the Fox X-Men films got me well used to shitty sequels. But X-Men TAS is mine. It means a lot to me.

I still remember the first time I saw it. (Deadly Reunions, mid-episode, Rogue took Cyke’s powers and was blasting the hell out of everything and then the X-Men show up.) The colors and the powers and the pyrotechnics and the drama and the Important Themes were intoxicating and I bought my first Uncanny X-Men comic book straight away. I was hooked. That show got me into the X-Men, and it’s been like an old friend to me since I was 13. Through good times and bad times.

Cut to 2024: I fully expected 97 to be a retarded piece of shit. For multiple reasons. 1) Hollywood studios just can’t seem to tell good stories anymore: story and plot and character all take a backseat to The (Retarded) Message and a bunch of other tertiary concerns. 2) People forget this but when Fox had sole rights to X-Men films Marvel comics fucked the X-Men over, they even tried to replace them essentially with the Inhumans, and they did next to nothing for the X-Men as far as games and cartoons and merchandise; so I wasn’t convinced Marvel would do right by our Merry Mutants. 3) Early articles seemed to focus on the personal identity of the showrunner to the exclusion of everything else—cool, you’re a gay black guy who identified with the show, I can relate to that, but surely the show isn’t gonna be anything like the toxic Victim Pride bullshit of the 2020s?! These days when people talk about their sexuality you are primed to lower your expectations, and for that I mostly blame “queer” people and “allies” who have ruined homosexuality, who in fact have removed homosexuality from gay! 4) Morph was revealed as nonbinary or something equally obnoxious, and I think “nonbinary” is the most offensively stupid and desperate “identity” a boring loser can claim, but worse I object to changing the race or sexuality of any established character because “current year” and “representation.” 5) I fully expected Storm would be the only badass, she’s be a girl boss, while Cyclops would definitely be the show’s punching bag—black woman strong (only) because white man weak—Hollywood writers just don’t know how to write strong female characters, they only know how to write them as male characters with tits while making the actual male characters stupid.

Those were my expectations and they’re entirely fair. Someone who likes watered down corporate diarrhea like the Star Wars sequel trilogy, or claims to on Twitter, will disagree but let’s ignore those brainless idiots.

My expectations were set to bottom of the barrel but then I watched episode and saw Cyclops have an awesome badass scene, showing off both the awesome and terrible power of his optic blasts and his leadership skills. I half expected him to get killed straight after but they kept giving my Scott Summers some great material. And they gave Storm great material, too! And Jean, too. Every main character had memorable, stand up and cheer scenes. The show was full of emotional moments, too, that rang true for the characters. The white characters weren’t dumb or evil. The black characters weren’t vacuously superior just because the script said so. The characters were actually recognizable. There wasn’t any talking down to the audience. The show didn't ooze smugness.

Now, I didn’t always appreciate the breakneck speed—they blew through about 25 years worth of comics for 10 episodes. The animation is shaky. Magneto’s lips are gross. Sunspot’s meh. What the fuck did they do to Gambit and when will they bring him back? Quit with the cameos, for Christ’s sake, save those characters for proper stories (like what the hell is Asian Psylocke doing with the twins??) I have other little nitpicks but that’s par for the course.

I’m shocked how much I enjoyed this show. And I love the ending. (I never thought I’d see the Adventures of Cyclops and Phoenix animated, I’m pumped to see if we get Rachel Summers, where are Storm and Logan, please don’t make Wolvie noseless and feral, ancient Egypt, Bishop and Forge six months later!)

I don’t know how much the former show runner contributed. And I don’t know exactly what he did to be fired (it must have been bad that they fired a gay, black media darling.) I think it’s a shame because he did good work here, he’s clearly a fan. If he was responsible for getting Cyclops, Marvel Girl, Storm and Rogue back in their best costumes ever I’d shake his dirty Only Fans hand. Fingers crossed for season 2!