It’s as if Friends resumed in 2024 for an eleventh season, with Ross and Rachel still in their thirties. What nature does not allow, especially since Matthew Perry, who played Chandler, died in 2023, animation techniques allow it. X-Men’97 illustrates it in such a breathtaking way that it would easily be awarded the gold medal for animated series for the current year.
Among comic book fans, the cartoon X-Men: The Animated Series (TAS)broadcast from 1992 to 1997 on Fox Kids, the Murdoch group’s youth channel, on Canal + then on France 2 in our region, is a kind of myth, a subject of inexhaustible enthusiasm for thirty years, only rivaled by the cartoon Batman, released the same year on the same channel. For the first time, children are offered an animated series with a complex storyline, faithful to the comic book, the characters are subtly portrayed and the graphics, borrowed from the instantly recognizable pencil stroke of Jim Lee, a young Marvel prodigy, 28 years old at the time, sublime. And that opening credits! Electric guitar, high-pitched synthesizers and electronic violin… The theme created by Ron Wasserman, also the author of the opening credits for Power Rangershas marked generations of fans to the point that, twenty years later, the actor Oscar Isaac tried to sing it in an interview.
Many other adaptations of X-Men have been attempted since then, childish graphics of X-Men: Evolution to a manga attempt, in 2011. Never the breath of X-Men: TAS was even approached. In 2019, Larry Houston, director of the 1990s episodes of the series, and his team decided to make a sequel. The Disney + platform was approached. The chosen screenwriter, Beau DeMayo, then proposed… to pick up the cartoon where it left off, in 1997. The idea was to play on the nostalgic side of the fans, with Wolverine’s yellow costume – still called Serval in the French version, thirty years earlier – functioning like a Proust madeleine. The original credits and its catchy chorus are reproduced identically.
Reflection on intolerance
In the manner of Stranger Things, Netflix’s blockbuster, surfing on the nostalgia of the 1980s – in season 3, Dustin and Suzie cover the song from the film The Neverending Storyreleased in 1984 –, X-Men’97 assumes vintage references, to begin by the tube Happy Nationfrom Ace of Base, released in 1992, celebrated at this season’s pivotal moment. In this pre-Internet world, TVs are three feet deep, consoles offer Super Nintendo-style 2D graphics, and smartphones don’t exist. Artistically, the strengths of the first version are heightened: deep character interactions, complex antagonisms, and a reflection on intolerance—the X-Men being, as individuals with special powers, subject to much discrimination.
In light of this absolute success, already renewed for a second season, it seems obvious that X-Men’97 will be just the first of the series offering a nostalgic dive into the 1990s. With, also, a pinch of the 1970s, the most punctilious will have noted: in the last episode of the season, the X-Men change costumes and opt for… those they wore in 1976, at the time of the decisive relaunch of the comic book.
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