I know, I know. This review for X-Men’97 is appearing just in time for you to binge your way through the final episode of the season. But, it has been hard to review a series where you are in love with every episode and can only use the words “wow”, “amazing” and “how is this so fucking good!?” over and over again.
Title: X-Men’97
Production Company: Marvel Studios Animation & Studio Mir
Distributed by: Disney+
Directed by: Jake Castorena
Produced by: Danielle Costa & Sean Gantka
Written by: Beau DeMayo
Starring: Ray Chase, Jennifer Hale, Alison Sealy-Smith, Cal Dodd, J. P. Karliak, Lenore Zann, George Buza, A. J. LoCascio, Holly Chou, Isaac Robinson-Smith, Matthew Waterson, & Adrian Hough
Based on: X-Men by Stan Lee & Jack Kirby
Release dates: March 21, 2024
Running time: 28 minutes per episode
Episodes: 10
A Few Stories With All The Feels…
Story Summary – SPOILERS
Story Review – Some Vague Spoilers
My god! Talk about a rollercoaster of emotions… X-Men’97 really knows how to throw your emotions against a wall and beat the living shit out of them… In a good way of course.
“Remember It” will go down as one of THE BEST episodes of X-Men: The Animated Series, let alone X-Men’97. From the pacing, the look of Genosha, reuniting with past X-Men team members, the small musical moment, the whole Ballroom scene, and then the shitshow that wraps the episode up. It’s insane how good this episode was.
I don’t want to go into anything for this episode because anything would spoil how awesome this episode is… And that ending… Pure fucking cinema!
“Life/Death” wraps up with Storm’s powers returning and a change in costume. The relationship with Forge still comes in as forced, but it works out in the end and is never referenced directly for the rest of the series… Thankfully. The psychological link between a mutant and its powers is a really interesting one to think about and deserves more discussion in both the cartoon sense as well as the real-world implications of such psychology.
Finally, “Bright Eyes” is the prelude that we didn’t know we wanted. Rogue going crazy with grief (well into the “Anger” stage) and attacking anything to do with Sentinels shows us some of the best fight animations outside of something like Invincible (Yes, we’ll cover that show at some point, maybe before Season 3 arrives). We also get the first 90s-era visit to Madripoor, a classic location in the X-Men universe… Then we get an ending that begins events that will tie into the finale with villains popping up as well as the return of a future X-Man character that we all wanted to see.
Overall, these three episodes show that the writers understood the assignment. We get to not only see the emotions of the characters through the animation, but relate to what they are going through as you could easily connect things like the Genosha attack to current wars overseas, the loss of a loved one, and the hopelessness of facing a future that might not come to pass. X-Men’97 continues to prove that their writing team is one of the best around at the moment.
Characters
X-Men’97 continues to bring back and replace characters for a variety of reasons. X-Men: The Animated Series’ main cast has mostly retired from the voice acting industry, or has passed on. But the recasting has been amazing, with the new voices doing their best to either replicate their former actors or do something new that you would be mistaken for thinking about how this might have been the voices from the past.
There are some other characters who were given voices for the first time as well, which is awesome as they were once background characters who have either got more notoriety through other shows that have come along after 1997 or maybe a movie or two.
X-Men’97: What Worked
Yeah, I could gush about these three episodes all day long, but because it would include spoilers, I’m going to say the same thing I said above.
X-Men’97 took my emotions, and those of everyone watching, and decided that we need to send Disney a collective therapy bill for the emotional damage inflicted with the ending of “Remember It”. That final scene has not left my mind and it’s been over 5 weeks since it happened. From the wording, the emotion, the animation, and the blackout… Perfection.
The other two episodes do what they need to do in order to accomplish their ends. “Life/death” gave Storm her powers back, and as you can see in the screenshot above, Storm got a new (still classic) costume and a moment to strut her thing on the catwalk. Yes, that image is a 3 second still shot that screamed “SLAY QUEEN!” in that short time.
“Bright Eyes” shows Rogue in a very serious light, with all her emotional damage on display. I’ve always said that grief is something that everyone will go through and no single person is going to handle it the same way. Rogue, in her anger, uses her powers in the only way someone with that amount of power would: Destructively.
The second half of “Bright Eyes” does a good job of setting up the villains in a spot where they can do some damage… But how this turns out will be what the next review is going to be all about.
X-Men’97: What didn’t work
If there is one thing that perplexes me it is the placement of the stories. Going from Life/Death Part 1 being half of a very bad episode did not give the story enough time to breathe for itself, so when you place the second half after one of the most emotional episodes in the series, it is hard to cheer for Storm getting her powers back after what we saw on Genosha; if life/death was a single episode or a two-parter after “Remember It”, then it might hold more weight.
I know we need to get the villains in place for the three-part finale of X-Men’97, but doing it just before you go into those episodes once again shows that 10 episodes were not enough to build up the threats and give them a chance to be seen as the villains, especially given the knowledge of episodes 8 & 9 since things don’t work out as people would expect them to.
Closing
With three episodes left, X-Men’97 is going to have one hell of a finale. Each week you know when the episode comes out as X will light up with the #Xmen97 tag and people will be going crazy about what happened in each episode, complimenting everything that was written and animated. Disney has one hell of a hit on its hands… Now we wait to see if X-Men’97 sticks the landing in order to get a second season… And Spider-Man ’98… Please?
Summary
X-Men’97 continues to show that there is hope for a TV show revival to be just as good, if not better, than the original. The writers understand the property they were entrusted with and are doing justice to the writing of the 1992 original series. While the issue of 10 episodes means things get rushed at points, this series continues to go from strength to strength
