New leadership, loss of powers, pregnant clones – and that’s just the opening Gambit in the two-part opener. Don’t feel Grey – it’s Summer at the X-Mansion! X-Men ’97 is a magNEATo show. The whimsy will fill you with JUBILation. Go Rogue and see if it Beasts your Xpectations.
X-Men ’97
Format: Series (10 eps, 6 currently released)
Streaming Service: Disney+
Genre: animated superhero action show
Length: 30-35 minutes
Release: Weekly episodes, beginning March 2024, 2024
Logline: The mutant X-Men face threats from a world that fears them, following the death of their pacifist leader, Professor X.
Key Creatives: Based on the Marvel comics and the X-Men: The Animated Series, this iteration was adapted by Beau DeMayo, who previously wrote for live-action Marvel show Moon Knight.
Stars: Some of the voice cast from the original run are back, which is fun!
What to Know: The action picks up a year after the finale of X-Men: The Animated Series – though you don’t have to have seen it to jump into the new season.
Thoughts: While I love Marvel and really appreciate the live-action X-Men movies (some more than others), I historically have had a harder time buying into animated series and I wasn’t familiar with X-Men: The Animated Series. I wasn’t prepared to like X-Men ’97, but the show has more depth, more light, and more romance than I anticipated! The plot is speeding by – so much happens in the course of an episode, or even half an episode – yet I’m invested in a lot of the characters. Suddenly Rogue is in a devastating love triangle. Suddenly Cyclops has a personality. Suddenly I’m attracted to an animated character with a Cajun accent and a crop top. The animation is lifted from the ’90s run, but I’m not bothered by intentionally choppier animation. The action doesn’t blow me away either, but this show works better than it ought to – the events in eps 5 and 6 already felt finale-worthy, but Beau has promised there is more to come. To me, my X-Men!
Note: Beau was fired for undisclosed reasons before the premiere of the show but after his writing duties for s2 were largely completed. Beau is an openly gay black man, whose lived experience of being othered shines through the writing.
Arielle RePort 
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