Stream It or Skip It: ‘X-Men ‘97’ on Disney+ Is a Radical, Welcome Return for Marvel’s Mutants

Move over Iron Man, because the X-Men are back. Disney+’s X-Men ’97 picks up where the original ’90s animated series left off. Mutants are hated, the X-Men are feared, and humanity thinks that building giant purple robots is the answer to all their problems. While the ’90s X-Men cartoon wasn’t known for polished animation, it made a name for itself with its groundbreaking serialized storytelling. Now it’s 2024 and soap opera storytelling is the norm for animation. How will X-Men ’97 compete in a TV landscape that it largely helped inspire?

X-MEN ’97: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: The place: New York City. The year: nominally 1997. The vibe: hellish, as mutants (hey, it’s Callisto and Leech!) hide from the human militia known as the Friends of Humanity.

The Gist: Mariah Carey’s “Honey” is on the radio, In & Out is in theaters, Bill Clinton is in the White House — and the X-Men are on TV, baby! That’s the vibe going into X-Men ’97, quite possibly the most shameless nostalgia grab ever deployed by Disney, a mega-corp built on nostalgia. That’s the whole point, though! This is the first X-Men anything created by Marvel Studios, so if Marvel’s going to reintroduce the world to the X-Men following 20 years of Fox movies, why wouldn’t they return to the animated series that quite literally launched the X-Men into the upper echelon of pop culture way back in 1992? It’s nostalgia, sure, but it’s also a savvy move where brand recognition is concerned.

So yes — if you are a millennial who grew up loving the X-Men (or a Gen Xer who secretly got hooked because the storytelling was actually really good), this is the team you remember. Not only that, it’s the theme song you remember, the character designs you remember, and the soap opera / action dynamic you remember. But have no fear if you actually don’t remember how the original series ended, because X-Men ’97 lays out the status quo for you.

Actually the gist: Professor X was assassinated, which has inspired a wave of sympathy from humanity that’s made mutants low-key en vogue. Coincidentally, it feels like the kind of en vogue that homosexuals experienced in 1997 with In & Out in theaters and Ellen DeGeneres coming out on the cover of TIME magazine… and we all know how long that period of tolerance lasted. And with humanity throwing a tiny tidbit of acceptance towards mutants, the bigoted Friends of Humanity have responded by hoarding anti-mutant Sentinel tech and prepping for war. How will the X-Men respond to this escalation of events? By playing… basketball?!

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? X-Men: The Animated Series, obviously. It’s almost like Disney+ found the Season 6 premiere sitting in one of the Disney vaults and just now made it available to stream. But, on a more modern note, the incredibly fluid animation — particularly the next-level action sequences orchestrated by director Jake Castorena — remind me Avatar: The Last Airbender. And, this is a very lofty comparison, but HBO’s Watchmen is the only other superhero show that I can recall that tackled politics as head-on as X-Men ’97. For a Disney+ cartoon, this show goes hard.

Sex and Skin: None, although Rogue sure is thinking about it!

Parting Shot: In a moment spoiled in the show’s trailers, the X-Men — fresh off the basketball court — discover that Professor X willed the school to their archenemy Magneto.

Sleeper Star: It feels wild to give this to Cyclops (Ray Chase), maybe the most recognizable X-Man after Wolverine and Storm, but… it’s Cyclops. It’s like the creators went, “What if we made the boy scout who no one wanted to be on the playground and turned him into a kick ass hand-to-hand combatant and gave him the most show-stopping moments?” Challenge accepted and exceeded.

Memorable Dialogue: “To me, my X-Men.”

Our Take: From the jump, X-Men ’97 has been an almost egregious nostalgia grab. It’s in the concept, it’s in the designs, it’s in the show’s damn title. Despite all of the show’s retro trappings, X-Men ’97’s actual mood is basically “f— your nostalgia.” Aggressive language, but that’s the intensity that X-Men ’97 operates with from the first to the last second of the first episode. Nostalgia got you to tune in, and now the show’s doing the damn thing.

This is evident in the opening credits, which is a shot-for-shot recreation of the original opening but with modern animation and an ever-so-slightly updated rerecording of the theme. But X-Men ’97 isn’t the same old show. That’s why Morph (J.P. Karliak) and Bishop (Isaac Robinson-Smith) get credits along with the rest of the main cast, and they’ve been inserted into all the group shots. The show’s playing on your nostalgia, but it’s not adherent to it. It pushes further, aggressively so.

However radical X-Men felt in 1992 to elementary schoolers, X-Men ’97 feels proportionally radical to all of us full-grown adults. The politics hit harder, the soapiness hits harder, and the action will leave you gasping for breath. The first episode feels like an overture highlighting all the things that make the X-Men great, but none of it feels like fan service. It feels like character service. Whatever his faults, writer and series showrunner Beau De Mayo wrote a script that gets the X-Men more than any screenplay ever has.

All of those individual character moments add up to such a satisfying whole. This series is a reminder that, as much screentime as we’ve gotten with the Avengers in the intervening years, the Avengers never gave us family feels. X-Men ’97 immediately establishes what makes the X-Men different and why their story still matters, still stands apart, in a very crowded field of superheroes. They’re a family, and the first episode digs into the interpersonal dynamics and action sequences with equal gusto. One minute Gambit is cookin’ up beignets in the kitchen and listening to Cyclops gripe about a mission, the next he’s riding Wolverine like a skateboard into battle against the Sentinels.

And this is another example of how X-Men ’97 uses nostalgia as a baseline for its storytelling, a foundation to build something brand new upon. The X-Men had domestic squabbles in the ’90s series, but ’97 elevates and complicates these squabbles. Cyclops and Jean Grey are expecting a child, which Wolverine rightly assumes will lead to them leaving the team — to Jean leaving the team. Meanwhile Cyclops is lashing out at the slightly more chill X-Men because they are slacking off. How can Cyclops leave the X-Men if some of them are more concerned about deep-fried pastries than Sentinels?! And complicating matters further is Magneto, a mutant terrorist who just got handed the keys to the mansion. There’s a lot going on — and it’s all so thoroughly, incredibly, messily X-Men.

In 1992, X-Men: The Animated Series pushed against the limitations imposed upon children’s animation and constantly hit walls, either prudish censors who wouldn’t let the word “kill” air on TV or an animation studio that couldn’t keep up with a frenetic network TV pace. X-Men ’97 works because it feels like the exact same TV show, but with its inhibitor collar turned off. This is X-Men finally cutting loose.

Our Call: STREAM IT. X-Men ’97 actually is exactly what you remember X-Men ’92 being.