1x01 To Me, My X-Men

[7.5/10] The big question for any legacy sequel/revival is simple -- does it feel enough like the original? And the answer for X-Men ‘97” is...sort of!

The animation is weird, man. Sometimes, it’s tremendous. The sequence where our heroes plummet from the sky amid a Sentinel attack, replete with last minute rescues and an eye-blast landing from Cyclops, is kinetic and thrilling as all hell. The throwdown with Master Mold and his coterie of malevolent automatons gets the blood pumping with all sorts of cool X-Men powers on display. And there are plenty of “This makes no sense, but it’s made of awesome, so it gets a pass” moments like Beast controlling one of the bots from the inside. In terms of raw octane, the animators get it done.

But hoo boy, the character animation is all over the place. Sometimes the X-Men have an expressiveness that outstrips the original show, and sometimes they feel like bizarre stiff corpses who are being electrified at random intervals. Jubilee and Sunspot’s dance is particularly jarring with the strangeness of their movements. Quiet scenes often veer into the uncanny with a strange combination of the under-animated and over-animated parts of the show that can either wow you or repel you from moment to moment.

The truth is that the powers that be were always going to have to update the animation, if only to go to a widescreen format. And despite sporting some iconic designs (which have been suitably updated), the original X-Men animated series wasn’t necessarily the peak of animation either. But this is certainly different, and not always in a good way.

The same goes for the voices and the pacing. Many of the original voice actors have passed on. The ones who remain have obviously aged in the (gulp) three decades since X-Men originally ran. Their replacements vary in quality. Ray Chase does a remarkable job replicating the original Cyclops. Jennifer Hale is an outstanding voice actress, but doesn’t necessarily sound much like her predecessor. Cal Dodd, Lenore Zann, and George Buza are all a bit off as Wolverine, Rogue, and Beast respectively, which makes sense given changes in voices and performance styles in the last thirty years. But Alison Sealy-Smith’s Storm hasn’t missed a beat.

Meanwhile JP Karliak’s Morph and A.J. LoCascio’s Gambit are able replacements for the originals, despite other new voices not quite hitting the mark. And despite playing a character who's new to the series, the actor who plays Sunspot is flat and unconvincing to the point that you wonder how the performance made it in a professional production. But the voice acting in the original show wasn’t always sterling, so hopefully things improve from here.

Likewise, “To Me, My X-Men” occasionally feels like a bunch of scenes slapped together rather than a cohesive story that builds and ties everything together. Again, that was sometimes an issue with the original show, so I can't fault its 97 equivalent too much for that. But the pacing is different, both in individual scenes and the episode as a whole. It’s hard to pin down, but there’s a certain anime vibe to the presentation, a different style and approach, that stands out relative to the 90s predecessor.

And yet, despite my gripes about the craft and the presentation, I appreciate the threads that “To Me, My X-Men” picks up. One of the long-running threads of the prior series was Scott Summers wrestling with what it means to be the X-Men, and even how it would feel to do the job in Xavier’s absence. Picking that back up, having him torn between walking in Professor X’s shoes versus leaving the X-Mansion to raise his child(!) with Jean, is a strong emotional throughline for the episode that connects with past events well.

Well, more or less. Look, it’s been more than a quarter century for most viewers. The creative team understandably wants to catch viewers up. So there’s a certain sense of “Hey, here’s everybody’s deal!” to the episode. Wolverine’s still sweet on Jean and snippy with Scott. Rogue’s still plagued by her inability to make contact with others, but has a certain amiable concordance with Gambit despite that. Beast still dispenses literary quotations with ease, and Jubilee still laments not getting to the fly the jet. If you haven't done a rewatch, or lived on the memes, there’s plenty here to introduce the characters and their dynamic.

I especially appreciate the re-addition of Morph, who was one of my favorite characters from the original series, and who adds to the team dynamic in the current one. His shapeshifting powers are a nice way to invoke everyone from Archangel to Blob to Professor X himself without having to actually include those characters. And his shit-stirring personality remains intact. Likewise, Bishop doesn’t do much beyond join the fray, but it’s nice to have such a frequent collaborator be a part of the regular team as well.

Granted, there’s a lot of exposition here. You kind of expect that, given the gap in time between seasons, so to speak. And it’s nice for the show to pick things up with Gyrich and Trask and the Friends of Humanity and the Sentinels, even if it involves a lot of “As you know”-type dialogue to get lapsed viewers back up to speed. You can pretty readily see the seams of this being a relaunch, with all the table-setting and throat clearing that entails.

All of that said, I appreciate the ways “To Me, My X-men” parallels the first episode of the 1992 series with some suitable twists and new wrinkles. We return to a conflict between the X-Men and the sentinels. They face down the same villains. They solve the same sort of mystery. They face the same sort of prejudices they did before.

Only this time, Cyclops is in charge and having to figure out how to balance principle and practicality. This time, they’re already a family that must be held together, rather than recalcitrant individuals who need to come together. And most movingly, now it’s Jubilee who’s helping to take in a lost soul struggling with their powers, speaking to what the X-Men did for her and her self-esteem when they took her in amid the prior series’ premiere. That's a nice way to mark how far Jubilee has come (in a better fashion than the original show’s Xmas special), and to start things anew in the same spirit, with her as an ambassador for what Xavier’s School for the Gifted can do for someone.

X-Men ‘97 seems to carry on that spirit. I can't pretend it gets everything right. Some of the changes are jarring, or downright strange. But this feels enough like the X-Men I knew and loved growing up. It pushes the right nostalgia buttons, while taking a few risks to move things forward and recognize the changes that have taken place, in television and society, in the last thirty years. Given the strife and prejudice of the day, the X-Men are more salient than ever, and being more than a mere tribute, X-Men ‘97 seems to recognize that. The angles aren’t always clean and the seams sometimes show, but in its opening hour at least, “To Me, My X-Men” is a quality retrofit, ready for new purpose.

I've only just recently watched the original series (in fact I just finished the last two episodes last night), so that's very fresh in my mind and this first episode is a pretty good continuation. The story feels true to the major themes that the original series dealt with, as well as continuing pretty much exactly where they left off.

Plus the fight/action scenes were just incredible, particularly Cyclops in the FOH warehouse, Cyclops using his powers to slow his descent, Storm single-handedly taking down an entire group of Sentinels and the creative use of Gambit, Wolverine and Morph to tag team takedown Master Mold, all genuinely exciting stuff.

Speaking of Morph, it's quite ridiculous for people to get riled up about the character being non-binary now. It's not even directly, if at all, mentioned in this episode and it makes sense for a character who can look like anyone to not conform to a gender binary, especially a character who has dealt with the struggle of understanding where they fit in throughout the original series and isn't that what the X-Men have always been about anyway?

The only thing that really stood out to me in terms of flaws was some of the returning voice cast are showing their age, in particular Rogue and Wolverine. Not a whole lot they can do about that, but when the rest of the cast are doing such a good job, it's easier for something to stand out that might otherwise slip by largely unnoticed.

All in all I enjoyed this episode, and if it's a sign of what's to come I think this series could easily stand alongside the best of the original series.