How ‘X-Men: The Animated Series’ Taught Me the Foundations of Storytelling as a Child
I fell in love with the X-Men at a very, very young age and obviously didn’t understand the nuances of their story when I was five. I remember being so excited to get my hands on the Pizza Hut collector’s videos of the first two two-part episodes — “Night of the Sentinels” and “Enter Magneto”/”Deadly Reunions” — and watched those tapes so much that I practically wore them out. Right from the beginning, I was introduced to complicated characters, people whose issues were clearly defined and laid out the moment they were introduced without drawing attention to them. These weren’t just action figures waiting to happen, even though I collected those religiously. These were well-defined human beings with problems and struggles, who were overcoming those struggles every time they so much as interacted with the people around them.
There was one thing that resonated with me from the earliest age, though, and it’s probably the most important thing, the very thing that defines the X-Men: the people in the show didn’t think the X-Men were remotely as cool as I did. The team saved the world and had awesome powers, but everywhere they went, they were shouted at. They were hated. I didn’t pick up on most things when I was five, but I knew that was wrong, even if I couldn’t remotely explain why. X-Men is and has always been a story about tolerance and the animated series embraced that to its core. It’s a show about tolerance and the fact that it got away with being such is a testament to not only the strength of the series and its writing, but the sheer will on the part of its creators to do something that would not just appease kids but honor the material in a genuinely profound way. The series never pulled its punches with bigots, even though it was aimed at kids, even going as far as introducing the Friends of Humanity, a militant anti-mutant hategroup, who are planning to basically lynch Jubilee on a stage at one of their rallies. When asked what she did to deserve it, they simply say, “You were born.” It doesn’t get much more direct than that, and I love that a cartoon tackled that in the early ’90s with the total understanding that not every situation requires nuance, and that sometimes hate cannot be reasoned with.
Of course the show is still super ’90s, full of all the extreme Rob Liefeld imagery that defined the decade, and the voice actors certainly just go for it at every single turn. But it is also truly revolutionary storytelling for a kids superhero cartoon, especially for the time.
Every character is on the team for a reason. Each character brings something different to the table that no one else brings. Which also means that each of them affect the way every story is told, in terms of the plot, sure, but even just down to the rhythm of every scene. First and foremost, there’s the “guy in the chair,” Professor X. He’s never a part of the action, but it’s his vision that drives the show. The Professor promotes a message of peace. He sees a world in chaos and disarray and also sees an alternative. A world where human and mutant relations stem from a place of tolerance and love, not hatred. It’s a hell of a long way off, and he knows this. But it’s worth fighting for.
Cyclops is the stalwart leader who’s sense of control keeps him from blasting a hole in everyone he sees (literally), while Jean is the soul of the team, Storm is by all accounts the actual leader, Wolverine’s the rough-and-tumble guy who thinks he’s the muscle, Rogue is the actual muscle, and Beast is the brains of the operation. It’s a large ensemble but even in a half-hour format, each character gets something to do. The only two characters that people could look at and wonder exactly what their role is are Jubilee and Gambit.
Jubilee sees the most complaints, as the younger teenage characters always do. She’s sort of the kid sister of the X-Men. She’s rarely involved in missions, her powers aren’t nearly as useful as most of the others. But as kids being introduced to this series, Jubilee is our entry point. She’s just like us, a kid just stepping into this world for the first time. That’s made most apparent in the pilot, when Jubilee learns she’s a mutant, becomes a target for the Sentinels, and is taken in by the X-Men. She’s the fresh eye we use to view this strange but incredibly relevant world.
Gambit, meanwhile, looks at first glance like he serves exactly the same purpose as Wolverine. He’s brash, he has issues with authority, he does his own thing. The key difference between the two is that Gambit thinks he’s the bad boy of the group while Wolverine actually is and that makes for a great dynamic. Gambit’s also much more of a ladies’ man whereas Wolverine tends to get a bit too attached for that. At the start of the show, Gambit will flirt with just about any girl he sees, falling legitimately in love with Rogue over time. Character development is key. The other thing that makes Gambit stand out as a character is that for all of Wolverine’s unpleasant nature, he always has the team’s trust in a way that Gambit never does. There are a couple of great episodes that deal with the fact that they always at least half-expect Gambit to betray them.
The balance of characters the show achieves cannot be overstated, because there are so many of them to choose from. By the 1990s, dozens upon dozens of X-Men had made their debut in the comics. Picking the right ensemble had to have been a monumental task and the creators deserve so much credit for picking just the right ones to allow for an always-engaging dynamic across the show’s five season run.
Ultimately, it’s the storytelling that makes X-Men: The Animated Series so seminal. Everything started on the page, with classic, iconic storylines being faithfully adapted. When those stories didn’t actually involve the cast of the cartoon, they were written to include those characters seamlessly. The stories were relevant, weren’t afraid to take their time to arrive at a conclusion and were, most importantly, risky. This is a show that kills an X-Man in the pilot. Morph may have been designed for the show and designed to be a little annoying, but he’s still a member of the group from the start. He wasn’t even initially planned to return, but his loss was handled so well that viewers wound up mourning him even when they weren’t necessarily supposed to.
I’m pretty sure that X-Men: The Animated Series was the first show I ever watched with an ongoing arc over the course of a season. It was definitely the first cartoon I saw to ever attempt that. In each early superhero cartoon I watched from before X-Men’s debut, every story was just a single, self contained thing and there was no connective tissue between episodes. That was not the case with this show at all.
Stories would take their time, characters would grow, change, die, even tragically turn to the dark side. It took me years to realize that everything I loved about Buffy the Vampire Slayer were things I had already been seeing on the screen since I had been old enough to read. Each season had a big bad, from the Sentinels in the first to Mr. Sinister in the second followed most famously by the Phoenix Saga in the third. Beast spent that entire first season of the show in prison after being arrested following the break-in at the Mutant Control Agency that occurred in the pilot episode, and he was one of our leads. Characters would periodically check in on him as he awaited his day in court. That showed astonishing continuity for a superhero cartoon right out of the gate.
In general, the writing of X-Men was much more adult than I think it’s given credit for even now. One of the best examples of this occurs right in the pilot episode, it is something I think about whenever I think of this show. Exposition is, in general, a writer’s worst enemy. As natural as you want the dialogue in any scene to feel, as much as you try to adhere to the age-old rule of “show, don’t tell,” eventually there is simply stuff you have to tell the audience. X-Men was a Saturday morning cartoon, and in the pilot, “Night of the Sentinels,” it needed to explain things about being a mutant, what each of the team’s powers were and how they worked. It absolutely could have gotten away with having the characters go around in a circle and just have Rogue say “my power is to absorb the energy of anyone I touch.” But that’s not what this show did. What this show did, for a children’s cartoon, in 1992, is frankly stunning.
It expressed this exposition through the characters sharing their coming out stories. The scene involves the team walking through the woods as they sneak up on the Mutant Control Agency HQ, so they need to be talking about something. The way they start talking about this feels entirely natural. Rogue explains that she kissed a boy when she was thirteen and he wound up in a coma for three days, and that was how she discovered her power, and her parents reacted horribly, causing the others to express similar sentiments. This is a moment of bonding for the group that is crucial as we are getting to know them. And yet this expresses every bit of exposition about certain characters and their powers that weren’t showcased during the fight with the Sentinel earlier in the episode. All of the necessary exposition comes across, wrapped up inside of a character moment that feels essential. It is a fabulous scene. There are shows made for adults that do not dress up the exposition even half this well.
The series also explored every corner of the X-Men universe, outside of its core cast. Even when not every member could be included on the team at once, iconic characters would make guest appearances in ways that would never feel forced. Need a big guy to be blamed on sight for destruction that’s actually being caused by Juggernaut? Time to introduce Colossus. Wolverine’s having a crisis of faith? Bring in the X-Men’s resident Catholic, Nightcrawler. Time travelers like Bishop and Cable were even used to kick start Professor X’s own crisis of faith, both hailing from tangible futures in which his dream of mutant/human prosperity simply never comes to pass.
This was also a show where characters could grow and change. For one thing, there was the entire Phoenix and then Dark Phoenix Sagas that put Jean through the ringer. Magneto is introduced as a villain, and appears in such a manner again over time, but he and Charles spend the bulk of the second season trapped in the Savage Land together and depending on one another to survive.
Morph was introduced as a main member of the team, then was killed off, only to return evil, having been brainwashed by Mister Sinister into believing that his friends had abandoned him, and then fought against that programming to push himself back toward the light after realizing he’d been used as a pawn. Heroes and enemies would often team up, with Wolverine having to work with Sabretooth, the X-Men teaming up with Magneto, and even having the gang teaming up with Mr. Sinister later in the show. Because these weren’t simply “Uncanny X-Men” and “Evil Mutants” to sell toys, these were legitimate, fully-fledged characters first and foremost.
Yes, there are still plenty of things that are silly and are not what we would see today. Some of that is unavoidable. Characters have to say “destroy” instead of “kill” because they are battling the extremely strict censorship standards of the time. Plenty of dialogue is absolutely corny. Jean faints a whole lot and has her name shouted possibly even more often than that. It’s a soap opera made for children, but given that, it’s amazing that it’s able to get away with as much as it does on the same network where Spider-Man wasn’t even allowed to throw a punch. Compare that with the very first episode of this show having to tell the audience, and the team, that Morph is dead.
X-Men is stylized storytelling, but a perfect introduction to storytelling nonetheless. It may not have the same Emmy clout or prestige as Batman, but X-Men was a revolutionary cartoon and marked a seminal period in the franchise’s history. Even recent shows like The Gifted still made callbacks to it. This was the series that reintroduced and, ultimately, kind of saved a major titan of Marvel comics. And obviously, there’s also the fact that it’s coming back. After 27 years these stories are being dusted off for X-Men ’97, picking up right where the original show left off, which is a sentence I truly never believed I would ever type.
Every superhero story teaches us to do the right thing in the face of adversity. But for the X-Men, the odds are always twice as overwhelming. X-Men is about doing the right thing when everyone tells you that you’re wrong for doing it. It’s not about finding what others tell you is the right thing to do, but doing what you know is right in your heart, even when others disagree. That is a lesson that’s both timeless and timely. It will never not be relevant.
