“We Are The Future:” Remembering When ‘X-Men’ Was the Biggest Movie Event of My Childhood
When I was very young, I received a pair of video tapes that changed my life. Granted, I didn’t have much life to speak of at that point, but the change came on hard and from the most unexpected place: Pizza Hut. Dubbed X-Men vol. 1 and 2, the tapes collectively contained the first four episodes of X-Men: The Animated Series, hosted by Stan Lee and a panel of superstar comic creators of the day. I had a lot of great loves as a kid. Batman, monsters, Star Wars, you name it. But I didn’t fall into anything harder, faster or more deeply than I fell into X-Men. I watched the cartoon religiously, the comics were some of the first comics that I ever read, and I obsessed over collecting the toys. I wanted every character, so that I could not only recreate my favorite scenes, but tell my own X-Men stories. I loved every member of that team, even the ones that barely if ever made an appearance on the cartoon I dug so much. I loved the whole world and the concept. It was one of the deepest and longest-standing loves of my entire childhood.
I had so many — and I can admit as an adult, probably too many — X-Men toys. I didn’t just have the characters, I had the vehicles, I had the play sets. Mutants were my life blood throughout the 1990s, and I was far from the only ones. After all, X-Men was the biggest comic and one of the most successful cartoons of the era. Kids couldn’t escape it. We had X-Men SpaghettiOs, X-Men fruit snacks, you name it. X-Men for Sega Genesis was one of the most frustrating games of my youth, but God I loved every second of it. I made friends based on mutual love of the X-Men because every kid was into it. But even they could tell that I loved it just a little bit harder. Everyone else loved the powers and the wish fulfillment of being able to do anything, like fly or turn into ice or pop steel knives from between your knuckles. I loved all of those things, without a doubt, but from the moment I fell into that world I absolutely ate up the soap opera of it. That’s exactly what it was, too. Every character was at the center or corner of some elaborate love triangle. Even the rough-and-tumble Wolverine was defined by angst. And while these relationships grew and evolved, they never completely changed. You would always knew where you stood with Gambit and Rogue.
Growing up in the ’90s, X-Men were unavoidable. They had everything. Except, of course, a movie. And that would have been semi-acceptable except that everything else I loved seemed to be getting one. As a Batman fan, I’d been in Heaven being raised on huge blockbusters like Batman Returns, Batman Forever and Batman and Robin. Even Star Wars felt like it was back and bigger than ever. I happened to be a kid growing up with the special editions, which was fine to me when I was little because it meant I got to see some of my favorite classic movies in theaters. Then The Phantom Menace came along and, as a kid, I loved it. But some of the things I was most passionate about were not getting the same treatment and I definitely noticed.
It seems ridiculous now to even think of a time when Marvel didn’t own theaters, when those characters weren’t household names and there wasn’t so much as one franchise putting out a new movie every few years, let alone a dozen. I was grateful for any live-action Marvel I could get my hands on, because it all felt so rare. I grew up on re-runs of The Incredible Hulk and the live-action 1977 Amazing Spider-Man and all of it captured my imagination, even though it was clearly so much cheaper than the other superhero flicks I loved. Batman and Superman really had money behind them. The 1990 Captain America film did not, but I still rented it frequently. DC owned the superhero marketplace when I was growing up, in a time when Marvel’s one and only theatrical feature had been Howard the Duck.
In 1996 my mom happened to see a TV Guide ad that almost made my heart stop, promoting the upcoming TV movie Generation X. I lost my young mind. It was everything I wanted. Sure it was made for TV and based on a spinoff comic I was only dimly aware of, but this was an honest to goodness X-Men movie. I’ll never forget taping that movie off of TV during Mardi Gras, with Jake and Elwood impersonators at the House of Blues telling us all to stay tuned to the big premiere. Watching that countdown to an actual live-action X-Men thing was almost incomprehensible to seven year old me. And even though the telemovie itself was incredibly low budget, I loved it. I’m so glad I got to see it that way, the one time it was ever made out to be any kind of big deal, because it’s certainly never been treated as such since. I’m not even sure it ever re-aired and it has definitely never had any kind of official home video release.
Even though I loved Generation X and watched that tape endlessly, I knew it wasn’t an actual X-Men movie. The only characters in it that I knew from the cartoons or the comics were Jubilee, Banshee and Emma Frost. But I held it so close to my heart because I didn’t think an actual, real X-Men film was something that would ever possibly happen. Even though it was the biggest comic book in the world, throughout most of my childhood the notion of a big screen adaptation seemed absolutely impossible.
Which made its official announcement that much more surreal. I was in fifth grade when I heard the news that X-Men was finally happening. I distinctly remember opening up a Wizard Magazine and seeing the very first casting notices, including a mockup of Rebecca Romijn as Mystique that looked much closer to her comic book counterpart (skull on the forehead and everything) than what we would eventually see in the film. I couldn’t believe it and, at first, almost didn’t. I’d waited for exactly this for so long that hearing about it finally happening felt fake somehow. Like it was too good to be true.
As it got closer and closer to happening, though, it became harder to deny. I remember being at the mall and stopping dead in my tracks as I walked by Suncoast Video and saw a two magazine covers staring back at me, one featuring the X-Men and one featuring the Brotherhood of Mutants. They looked very different from the characters I’d grown up with, but it didn’t phase me at all. If anything, I expected it, as a youth spent growing up with Batman movies had prepared me for it. I was just floored by the things I did recognize. Claws, bizarre hairstyles, visors, blue skin, Magneto’s shiny helmet, it was all there. And it was also my first glimpse into the roster of characters that would actually be featured in the film. That filled me with more excitement than anything, not even buying the magazine, but walking out of the mall that day and knowing that Sabretooth and Cyclops and Magneto and Storm were all going to be on the big screen that summer.
While I didn’t get my hands on that magazine, I did get my hands on just about anything else pertaining to the movie that I could find as it drew closer and closer to release. I picked up an issue of Sci-Fi Magazine, the Sci-Fi Channel’s own publication, with Wolverine on the cover. It not only gave me a great behind-the-scenes glimpse into the film of my dreams, it was also the thing that gave me the TV listings I needed to finally see Subspecies. I bought the Cracked parody issue devoted entirely to riffing the movie and the X-Men in general. Looking back, man, it was wild to see how magazines would poke fun at the comic book movie climate before the release of the thing that effectively kicked it off. Toys ‘R Us set up a whole display for the movie and the first time I saw it felt like an out of body experience. Here was a whole new line of toys to collect, even though I was much older and bordering on entering middle school.
Everything with the X-Men: The Movie banner on it was something I needed. The poster, which was nothing but a giant silver X, was the first real movie poster I ever had on my wall. I remember walking out of that Toys ‘R Us with Mystique and Toad, of all figures, because they looked the most different from the characters I had always known and I was so taken by the reimagined designs. Even better, every purchase of a toy related to the movie was accompanied by a free copy of the comic book adaptation, which I devoured instantly because I just could not wait to see that film. I remember sitting at the computer and waiting nearly an hour for the trailer to load. X-Men had a terrible tagline that managed to betray the entire concept because 20th Century Fox had absolutely no idea how to market it, as they were so confident that it would be a colossal flop. “Trust a few, fear the rest,” was literally what they used to sell a movie about people who are different and fighting to prove their humanity.
While my dad had condoned most of my movie loves, even if he didn’t always realize it, he had always hated the X-Men. He saw the toys and the cartoons and always rolled his eyes or muttered under his breath. He would always watch me watch the show and say, “You know that’s not what a mutant is. Mutants don’t look like that,” and he’d always accompany that with some depressing fact of someone he had grown up with that had some kind of physical disability or birth defect and how hard life had been for them. It never failed to bum me out. As luck would have it, he was the one who actually took me to see the movie when it finally opened.
To both of our shock and surprise, he loved it. I was blown away by seeing all of these characters I loved so deeply being represented on the screen and he, I think, liked the digestible, semi-grounded and serious take on that concept and its overall world. We were both happy. I think he even took me back to see it a second time, much to his own surprise, because he wanted to see it again almost as much as I did. As much as he moaned about comic book movies, it was not the last one that he loved like that, either.
While I had always been deep into X-Men, actually seeing the movie put me over the edge. I was out of control. I already had just about every plastic X-Man known to man, but I collected the entire line of toys based on the movie (even though, again, I was almost in middle school) because it felt different. It was like those figures gave me an opportunity to take one of my favorite fictional universes and start rebuilding it from scratch, making new stories and retelling old ones. The very first thing I did when I got my hands on all of the figures was to film my own X-Men 2 with action figures, one that introduced Nightcrawler and saw the gang team up with Magneto against a larger threat. That threat was Apocalypse, though, so I wouldn’t exactly rush to say X2 owes me money.
Once it hit video, my friend’s dad took us to Walmart to pick it up on the day it opened. It was the first movie I had ever done that for. I started watching it over and over again, even counting and boasting about the number of times I had seen it. I stopped keeping track around 17, when it had only been out for a few months. Eventually, my obsession with it bled over into reality. Or, my reality at least.
I started trying to unlock my own mutant powers. After all, I was on the cusp of puberty, when I knew from my knowledge of the comics and the film that they were supposed to activate. I knew I must have some latent super-ability, but had no idea what, so I tested myself for everything. I even broke my uncle’s screen door because I refused to take off my sunglasses to keep my deadly eye beams under control. Even if those eye beams hadn’t manifested yet, I was sure they were coming.
When trying to unleash my own mutant powers did not work, I started playing to my actual strengths and began to write stories about me and all of my classmates becoming mutants and being sent to train under the X-Men at the Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters. Exactly the kind of story a sad sack of a twelve year old like me would write. While everyone almost certainly did think I was a huge nerd for writing this stuff, they didn’t treat me like one. Even at the time, that surprised me. I was in sixth grade at that point and thought for sure I’d be crucified when everyone saw my wish fulfillment X-Men stories. But I guess there’s a bit of that wish fulfillment in every kid. Everyone wanted to know what their power was, how well they trained, what villains they got to fight, and so they all ate every one of those stories up. It was embarrassing, to be sure, given that I hadn’t intended for them to be read so they naturally ended with me and my crush getting together.
But I almost didn’t care because for one, brief little moment in time, everyone got invested in the thing I was invested in. And middle school definitely never felt that way again. At this point, blockbuster comic book movies are a dime a dozen. Barely a month goes by without one. Because of that, it’s hard to describe just how X-Men: The Movie felt at the time. It was an event like I’d never experienced before, where one of the biggest fanboy passions of my childhood became one of the biggest movies I had ever experienced. It was a level of hype I’d never known could exist and a summer I’ll never forget.
