Marvel’s Latest Hit Is Way Better Than It Needed to Be

The question “Who is this new X-Men ’97 cartoon for?” is answered mere minutes into its first episode, when, after winning a pitched battle against some thugs who are trying to detain a young superpowered mutant named Roberto DaCosta, our X-Men return home to find Remy LeBeau (code name: Gambit) merrily frying beignets in the kitchen, sporting a sleeveless pink crop top. The show shares an animation style, several voice actors, and a DuckTales-tier earworm of a theme song with the beloved Saturday morning cartoon from 1992, and if you were worried that Marvel might try to update the series conceptually, you can rest easy.

This is a nostalgia trip to the year memorialized in the show’s title—not the year the Fox Kids X-Men animated series began, as you might expect, but the year it ended, where this revival resumes in the exact same spot the original show left off. Assuming that the series was still pretty kid-friendly, I put the first two episodes on the iPad when my 7-year-old son and I were on an airplane last week. He watched it in a corner of the screen while he played Monument Valley 2, which is a reasonably good review.

The X-Men are different from other superhuman crews. They’re not jingoistic superpatriots, gods, or merciless crime fighters. Though the team shares superficial characteristics—amazing powers, bright costumes—with the Justice League of America and the Avengers, its story is only nominally about the adventures of superheroes. The team includes Rogue, a mutant who can absorb and redirect any other character’s powers; Bishop, who can redirect energy after absorbing it; and Gambit, who, when attacked, can absorb and then—look, it’s not that important. The point is that the characters all hang out together, joke around, tease one another, have crushes, bicker, make up, get married, and even occasionally die.

At its beginning in 1963, Uncanny X-Men was probably the least of Jack Kirby’s flagship creations for Stan Lee’s Marvel Comics. Kirby penciled only the first 11 issues, and the series was insignificant enough by 1970 that Marvel ran just reprints for the next five years. Then, in issue No. 94, a writer named Chris Claremont took over the series and, with artist Dave Cockrum, reworked the entire idea—about a school for heroes who fought monsters and spies and were hated for their superiority—into something much more interesting. Claremont was interested in bigotry: who indulges it, whom it harms and how. He also enjoyed giving his characters rivalries and unrequited loves, and readers loved him. He wrote the main series and several of its related books until 1992 and remains a kind of writer emeritus, dropping in regularly to pen special issues.

The Fox Kids show did a frankly amazing job of adapting those initial, colossal Claremont stories for television, rendering the increasingly terrible movies all the more depressing. It streamlined stuff that didn’t make sense or had aged badly, and it kept the soap opera theatrics and the hard-edged moralizing.

Though decades have passed, the new series, depressingly, still doesn’t need to reach far to find the kinds of parallels with real-world bigotry that made the classic version of the X-Men so popular, especially among nonwhite and LGBTQ+ comics fans. The evil Henry Gyrich, who in the original series finale wounds Professor X so badly he has to leave Earth, has a monologue in X-Men ’97 that would be right at home in J.D. Vance’s social media feeds. “Under all that fashionable sympathy, normal people know the more room we make for your kind, the less we leave for ours,” Gyrich tells Cyclops. “So we might wear tolerance on our sleeves, but we know the naked truth: Tolerance is extinction.” At one point a doctor refuses to deliver a mutant baby. I’ll be a little surprised if at least one of the show’s villains isn’t whining about birthrates by the end of the season.

The first X-Men ’97 episodes are as fun as I remember the old X-Men show being, which is to say quite a bit better than it actually was. The animation is slicker but not obtrusively so. The dialogue has the same slightly hammy taste as the original series’ but knows when to tone it down. And the writers, led by creator Beau DeMayo—who, in a still unexplained development, parted ways with the series days before its premiere—are simultaneously adapting a bunch of beloved stories, notably Lifedeath and The Trial of Magneto. It’s not a show for grown-ups, but it’s a show that a very specific generation of grown-ups will want to watch with their kids. Disney loves to make series and movies that function as franchise on-ramps for impressionable young consumers. It’s a practice I tend to be pretty paranoid about—I don’t like the feeling that the people who made my kid’s cartoons have designs on his entire identity—and here it seems to be working: The show already had the most watched debut of any full-length Disney animated series since 2021’s What If …? But indoctrination is unavoidable, whether it’s by putting on PAW Patrol or reading The Chronicles of Narnia before bedtime. There’s a basic decency about this series and the silly, overwritten comics that gave birth to it, and that feels worth passing on to the next generation, even if the show is also calculated to sell some Wolverine underpants along the way.