Stay Tuned #60: X-Men - The Animated Series

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. The Uncanny TiX-Master.

Christmas is a week away, Ticketholders!

And ever since Disney dropped the first season of X-Men '97 last year, I've been wanting to revisit the original animated series (from 1992, not 1989), and the month of X-Mas seemed like the perfect time.

In an era when the speculation bubble was on the verge of bursting, half-hour episodic toy commercials were all the rage, Haim Saban had his grubby little fingers in every bowl of child-marketed eye candy you could ingest on a Saturday morning while pretending to do your homework, and Power Rangers composing legend Ron Wasserman could get away with turning Whitney Houston's "I'm Your Baby Tonight" into the most epic cartoon theme song ever (because he and Fox already fought off a plagarism suit from the estate of Hungarian composer György Vukán, establishing a precedent in their favor, I guess),

Marvel dared to be different (despite being one of those aforementioned Saban-fingered candy bowls).

Set in the same animated Universe as the concurrently airing Spider-Man cartoon and lesser-remembered series like The Fantastic Four (the origin of that infamous Malice episode), Iron Man (where composer William Kevin Anderson just did a Black Sabbath remix for the second season's theme song, because Iron Man), The Incredible Hulk (which is underrated and too short-lived), and Silver Surfer (which was prematurely canceled after an "all is lost" cliffhanger when the bubble finally did pop, alongside Spider-Man's "we're definitely going to find the real Mary Jane next season" ending), X-Men: The Animated Series is (pun intended) a Beast of a different color, marketed to the expected cereal-munching demographic, but written for a more sophisticated audience. Sure, the usual censorship efforts like using robot cannon fodder for minor enemies and laser weapons instead of guns that fire bullets, having characters mostly grapple or use their powers instead of punching, or contriving ways for characters to survive terminal velocity falls, are in place (which Spider-Man was infamous for as well), but there is a two-season serialized narrative at play from the beginning.

One of the main characters dies by the second episode (or do they‽). There's a love triangle, no less than two unrequited romance subplots, sexually suggestive dialogue from characters of either gender, racial prejudice and puberty allegories (the intended text and subtext of the X-Men from their comic book inception in the early 1960s), focus on psychological trauma and tragic backstories, use of the words "murder" and "kill" (alongside the usual implied loss by cut-off sentences and more common occurrences of "destroy," "eliminate," "stop permanently," and "exterminate"—the latter of which makes Apocalypse sound like a Dalek from Doctor Who, which is hilarious), actual bloodshed in a few episodes, and way too many engaging character dynamics to count or explain here. Even when episodes don't entirely have anything to do with one another, genuine effort is made (in the first two seasons, at least) to have them flow into each other naturally. As you watch, you can see the development of villain groups like Genosha and the Sentinels, and the Brotherhood Of Evil Mutants. Even minor (but ultimately of long-term importance) characters like Cable get seeds sown for later appearances.

However, there's a distinct agedness to the feel of the show (character models varying in consistency and quality between scenes or episodes, and the low-frame rate animation notwithstanding), such as the attention-deficit dialogue saturation (whether it be Cyclops' inspirational blandness, Gambit's incessant horndogging and Cajun-isms, Rogue being the Southern belle version of that, Beast quoting classical literature every time he breathes, Wolverine being all rage, creative death threats, Yosemite Sam pseudo-cursing, nicknames that make me want Josh Holloway to play him, and using "Bub" as a form of punctuation, Xavier and Jean saying psychic stuff, or Storm bellowing weather incantations, and that's not even counting the villains' dialogue) and Ninja Turtle-derived stock personalities (the old mentor, the boring leader, the angry one, the fun one, the nerd, the girl, the eager kid who screws up constantly, and Recurring Villain With Helmet). Then there's the required knowledge base that makes certain things either go completely over my head because I didn't read the comics, or feel like they're just randomly there for the shiggles of it. And whenever something like that does get explained, the line delivery has that

stiltedness to it, like the writers suddenly realized no one would understand a reference and the voice actors were brought in for a separate session to record it out of context. It feels like ADR in a medium that's technically all ADR, and it's as noticeable as a frog growing out of a wart on a condor's ass.

But like I said, as apparent as these flaws are, when X-Men is brilliant, it's multiple steps beyond what one would expect from a standard 90s cartoon, and manages to one-shot nail several storylines and characters that later live-action movies failed at multiple times. We're talking Age Of Apocalypse, Days Of Future Past, Wolverine's backstory, Lady Deathstrike, and of course, the big ones: the Phoenix Saga and Dark Phoenix.

And as much as I shit on the dialogue density up above, the lines themselves and the chemistry with which the cast deliver them are really fun, and between the Bubs, Wolverine gets the most peak of badass lines, so although he's no role model (trying to wedge himself between Jean and Cyclops, refusing to work with the rest of the team, giving into his anger...; not to mention that episode where his blood feud with Sabretooth in Alaska gets turned into a stock white savior narrative that treats the literal destruction of tradition and forced urbanization of an indigenous group as a happy ending), it's clear why he's the most popular and marketable character in the franchise. And when the series needs an emotional moment to breathe, it gives the time and tonally appropriate dialogue it's due without undercutting anything.

In the wake of the averted (for the next six episodes, anyway) "Days Of Future Past" disaster, Season 2 introduces the Friends Of Humanity (a Klan/Neo-Nazi/"White Panther"-esque anti-Mutant terrorist group comprised of the new President's disgruntled conservative ex-fanboys and led by a proto-media grifter who's related to Sabretooth, because poetic irony is a delicious dish best served with humble pie a la mode and topped with the horrified screams of suggested comeuppance), explores what the team would be like without Xavier leading them (disorganized, but better realized as individual characters, especially Wolverine, but Gambit, Beast, and Rogue get their banger episodes, too), tones down Jubilee as the Scrappy-Doo of the team, and brings another engaging serial narrative with the Savage Land arc, where mortal enemies Xavier and Magneto are forced to survive a Lost World-like biome without their powers. For the sake of having a season finale, though, that plot takes several episodes off for "Time Fugitives" (a two-parter where Cable—now confirmed to be Jean and Cyclops' time-travelling son, thanks to Mr. Sinister in "Til Death Do Us Part" doing genetics experiments on them with a hentacle—saves his future from a techno-organic virus that's meant to be an allegory for homosexuality and the AIDS epidemic, but reads just as well in a post-2020 world; it features cool interactions with Cable and Bishop and an iconic line from Apocalypse,

but is also an excuse to reuse a shameless amount of animation frames and voice lines, almost to where you only need to watch Part Two), Rogue's backstory with Mystique and Carol Danvers (a psychological tear-jerker with a touch—puns!—of horror that I still remember fondly thirty years later), the aforementioned Beast/FOH episode (a warm, "love is literally blind" story where Beast gets a girlfriend, a la The Thing and Alicia Masters, and Wolverine goes undercover as an FOH initiate to rescue her), and "Mojovision" (a timeless commentary on corporate television where Mojo—Michael Bay if he looked like a "well, ackshully" fanboy meme and had Freakazoid's personality—kidnaps the X-Men and puts them through The Running Man for interdimensional amusement until it's time to not do that because the runtime said so; Mojo is repulsive,

but this deserved to breathe more and be a two-parter). Speaking of two-parters, this leads into "Reunion," which is basically Mr. Sinister trying to capture the X-Men so he can All-For-One their powers with the help of not-Lord Of the Rings Sauron because he doesn't have enough genetic material to make Cable yet, and aside from Wolverine's side-story with Ka-Zar, it's an overstuffed, tedious mess of a thing. But it made me aware of a theme for the second season:

Whether the continuity-breaking episode where Storm has to save her godson from a villain they faced in an episode that hadn't aired yet (the Shadow King from "Xavier Remembers" in Season Three), Colossus rescuing his daughter from a dangerous Soviet fanatic, Wolverine being forcibly reunited with his old team of Canadian stereotypes, Gambit's screw-up brother dragging him into an ancient blood feud between Cajun D&D classes, Rogue and Mystique's drama, setting up and playing out Cable's lineage (and saving his own son from erasure in "Time Fugitives"), or even Creed, Jr. being brought low with the revelation of his bloodline, nearly every episode of Season Two is in some way about family. And there's nothing stronger.

Season Three's theme is maybe...memory? Loss? Randomness? It's hard to actually clock a theme because of the season's episodic nature and production complications (that I will attempt to address later), but Season Three is best remembered (puns!) for its adaptations of the Phoenix and Dark Phoenix storylines, while also being memorable for being almost twice the episode count of any other season. And its first two multi-parters don't have a "previously, on X-Men..." intro before the theme song, which is strange considering the first ends by promoting the second (which is the "Phoenix Saga"!), and how much Seasons One and Two felt like one, epic narrative. Even episodes that should reference previous episodes don't have a recap, and watching the season in production order rather than by their original airdates (including episodes that were pushed to later seasons because of animation errors—which still exist and are really bad and obvious, like in "Longshot," where Mojo is shown standing on top of other characters and background elements in a way that doesn't make sense and Longshot himself goes transparent and his animation cells have an epileptic seizure all over the screen when he gets blasted—and end up with a simpler, less dramatic, sometimes more fluid animation style as a result of being "fixed" by a different studio) only increases the episodic feeling of it. The writing and continuity suffer from this, as well, still bringing the character dynamics that made the series great, but randomly omitting important characters (like Storm) for budget reasons until it's time for a focus episode, returning Jubilee to her "I'm surprised when my powers do something" (girl, same), "I constantly screw up, and stop calling me a kid" mode from Season One because that never gets old and there definitely aren't more powerful, competent characters who deserve her screentime, like Gambit or Dazzler (plus the uncomfortable implications of the writers having her lie about her age and crush on slightly older men like Longshot and Iceman), and writing some baffling, noticeably incongruous dialogue (like Jubilee still sucking at the flight simulator even though she took Colossus to Russia in Season Two, and Wolverine saying Ka-Zar told him about Garrok offscreen during the "Reunion" two-parter even though dialogue later in "Savage Land, Strange Heart" says repeatedly that Garrok hadn't awakened until after the X-Men left; seriously, the only good parts of "Savage Land, Strange Heart" are Storm being in it and the kaiju battle between Sauron and Garrok at the end of Part Two).

Thankfully, this mess of continuity (that wouldn't have theoretically mattered to children in an era of scheduled television programming because Fox, Saban, and ToyBiz—now owned by Hasbro—like making two things: assumptions about their audience's intelligence, and money) is followed by the "Dark Phoenix Saga", though even that has its issues from the jump because unless you remember that one of the standalone episodes ended with Xavier locating Jean Grey's psychic signature and another has a throwaway line about him doing therapy with her on Muir Island, the first episode reads like, "Jean is back suddenly...somehow." I do like how a moment early in the "Phoenix Saga" informs the change in the Phoenix character here (Emma Frost sensing its arrival leads to the Hellfire Club—those multi-colored, masked goon[er]s from the Spider-Man arcade game, and their Victorian pirate/bondage enthusiast bosses, here renamed "The Inner Circle" for obvious censorship reasons, but retaining the Queens' designs from the comics because censorship makes sense, and Emma and Jean made me...feel things as a preteen in the 90s, just like Mystique, Black Cat, Catwoman, and Poison Ivy before them—trying to control the mind and newly discovered emotions of a galaxy-plus-level cosmic entity, with disastrous results for the Club, the X-Men, and multiple star systems), as well as Cyclops getting a few opportunities this season to almost be an interesting character with other romantic prospects (before he goes back to shouting Jean's name every other line like he's the lead in a parody of a 50s romantic drama because his personality has been and mostly always will be "love Jean Grey, be leader, glory to the mission"), Dazzler's new punk-inspired design (she only appears in this arc as a means of making Cyclops and the Hellfire Club cross paths, and later creates some jealousy drama with Phoenix, but she was an underappreciated creation of the 70s in the comics, and not only does her 90s version rock and have a sassy personality for a one-off character, she has similar powers to Jubilee and is more useful in a fight despite being captured shortly after),

and the hints that, had the series not met with diminishing returns and other economic realities (the bursting of the speculation bubble, for one) in later seasons, we might have seen encounters with Dr. Strange, Thor, Uatu the Watcher, and maybe even an X-Men perspective on the Kree/Skrull War and Secret Invasion. The resolution to the "Dark Phoenix Saga" is rather abrupt (though it does work if I think back on it, and the final scene really tugs at my heartstrings despite how magical and happy it treats things).

"The Phoenix Saga" also informs the next episode, which is an emotionally complicated focus episode for Cyclops (finding out his father is a deadbeat space pirate with a heart of gold worthy of being in a James Gunn film) with a good sci-fi twist on a dirty cop narrative and a few impressively animated dogfight sequences for the time.

Ticketmaster's Note: This shot from "Phoenix Saga: Part Two."

I understand that it's a difference of decades, but it still hit me in the feels seeing this, and I'm still bitter that this is on Disney+ but that one cut scene from the Spider-Man movie became lost media for awhile and some of Beast's literature choices get blurred out. Like I said, censorship is weird. Never forget.

Season Three's episode count ended with the next episode (a mostly throwaway alien invasion story with Rogue coming to grips—puns!—with her powers when an old flame contacts her, while Wolverine kicks ass aboard a living spaceship with incredible background design), as, while the next seven aired to close out Season Three because of delays with Season Four, Wikipedia counts them as the beginning episodes of Season Four. Personally, I consider the first listed episode of the fourth season (a serious exploration of Xavier's childhood with his abusive step-family that also has a bootleg Saban/Power Rangers cameo and a comedy subplot about a stereotypical nerd stealing Juggernaut's powers to literally pick up chicks) to be the last of Season Three, as "A Deal With the Devil" (an Omega Red revenge story with a "villain of the era tries to start World War III" plot and Wolverine and Storm—who has been rocking a sick new ponytail since the "Cyclops meets his dad" episode—as the focus) adopts a new end-credits preview structure that would (mostly) continue through the end of the original broadcast of the series (and spoil the endings to many important episodes).

Ticketmaster's Note (November 22, 2025): I've mostly been writing this as I watch, so my opinions and things I notice in the moment are often proven wrong shortly after, so I have been going back and editing in the new information as I receive it. As I write this note, I am halfway into Season Four, and have noticed several details that make this above statement about the episode credits format and its indication of broadcast order or season placement incorrect. First of all, episode title font and size (and animation style, in the case of the late Season Five episodes) are better indications of production and broadcast order than the episode preview credits (newer episodes' titles have a crisper, larger, more generic feel than the first two-ish seasons' titles, which were more in line with the opening credits font rather than being their own thing). Second, there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to which episodes are being previewed (like, it's almost never the very next episode in the lineup, not even in the midst of a multi-parter like "One Man's Worth"—which I will talk about later—where it's a preview of an older episode). Third, those of you who have been following me over the past year or so know that I usually take a...Corsair approach to my viewing and reading, if you know what I mean, and my opinions thus far are taken from a "Starjammed" download ripped from a Disney XD broadcast run. But as this is the Christmas season, I am in a relatively stable financial position, and curiosity made the better of me, I subscribed to Disney+ to finish out my viewing experience, and noticed that the credits for "One Man's Worth: Part One" were replaced with a more generic credits sequence (basically the intro music and animation with the credits off to the side to fill out the aspect ratio). Back to the review.

Speaking of "villain of the era tries to start World War War III," there's the "Sanctuary" two-parter that tackles the effect of political extremism on proposed utopian societies ("why we can't have nice things," basically), continues to demonstrate Xavier's effect on Magneto's philosophy without blunting the message, and has one of the series' major "character regenerates from nothing because comics" moments with Magneto. I also like "Courage" (Morph's return to the team for the first time since he "died" in the second episode and became a pawn of Sinister in Season Two, now getting a chance to face his Sentinel PTSD and show how cracked his shapeshifting can be, but also how he's too annoying to be a recurring character—and next to Jubilee, that's saying a lot—and how he's still not ready to be an effective asset to the team—again, but for different reasons that make him a good, self-aware character, next to Jubilee, that's saying a lot).

The third season (or "season," depending on your viewing source and research method) ends with a Cyclops-focused episode where he acts like a pushy jerk in a small, Mutants-only town (so, like Wolverine, except with less subtlety) and somehow convinces the masses to rebel against a greedy extremist who hates outsiders and has a henchman who nullifies Mutant powers. (so, like the "Sanctuary" two-parter and the Savage Land arc, except worse and with less subtlety and action), and the editing is garbage. If you couldn't tell, I don't like it. However, the crowd shot near the end gives me the perfect opportunity to call attention to this guy:

According to Google Lens, this is Mole, and aside from one line in his debut scene where he gets accosted by the Friends Of Humanity, he has no lines, and is seen in a ton of episodes as a background character getting stuff thrown at him for looking like the lovechild of Woody Allen and Steven Speilberg in an orangutan costume, because xenophobia is color-blind.

You know what I mean.

Justice for Mole!

Getting into Season Four also gets us back to the theme of family for a bit while also making clear that it was meant to air in October despite some of the Halloween-esque fare being listed with summer air dates. Yes, it's another mostly episodic season, plagued with the same randomization and rescheduling issues as Season Three, but in a smaller package and with Season Two's writing quality. Nightcrawler gets a cool, Gothic horror intro episode that has heart and dares to lean into its religious message (serving X-Men's larger message of acceptance and found family) despite being yet another "outsiders save/ruin Utopia" narrative.

The aforementioned "One Man's Worth" two-parter introduces the audience to a timeline where Beast is a cyborg, and Wolverine and Storm (now with a sick mohawk) are married and fighting side-by-side with Sinister and Old Man Magneto because Mastermold had Xavier blown up in the past (hence the title), and machines rule the world and exterminate Mutants with enslaved "Powered Humans" that are legally distinct, unvoiced facsimiles of the Avengers (most notably, a Giant-Man and Wasp knockoff duo). I forgot to mention this back in Season One, but every time travel event in this series is basically just Terminator 2, right down to the regenerating shapeshifter assassin robot (either Nimrod or Apocalypse, who looks mechanical enough that I'm counting it, and every horrible future can be traced back to him anyway), and together, they present the grim "reality" that no matter what the X-Men do (whether they remember being the X-Men or not), the world will be cleansed by fascist robots by 2055 (which is thirty years away in our reality, so hopefully I die before the age of 70). Yay? Anyway, it does a better job with the story than previous time travel plots in this series (using Part One as a "how did we get here?" setup and addressing the implications of an interracial couple traveling to the 1950s before making Part Two a "how are things different so we can go back and fix it?" resolution, rather than having two versions of the same event play out with minor changes as a budgetary measure).

The family theme continues with "Proteus" (the animators go ham in Part One of this story where a psychic, reality-warping teenager escapes from Muir Island in search of his xenophobic, abusive politician father who's basically Scottish Donald Trump if he could lie more convincingly; the second part sees a huge drop in animation quality and the ending murders its intended message, but having Wolverine deal with fear for the first time and be vulnerable was a strong choice—he's been emotionally vulnerable before, regarding Morph, Lady Deathstrike, and his own origins, but fear was a new dimension to explore, and I respect it), "Family Ties" (which attempts to tackle the many...weird retcons of the Maximoff twins after Quicksilver had a non-speaking appearance in "Cold Comfort" the previous season, and has some of that "just accept that these characters are here now or go read the comics because we can't afford to animate everything and you're a stupid baby who doesn't know any better" continuity to it—like Wolverine knowing who they are by name and talking like he has an established history with Wanda and Pietro that we never got to see), and "Bloodlines" (a culmination of "A Rogue's Tale," "Beauty & the Beast," and "Nightcrawler" with incredible action, brilliant foreshadowing, heartfelt melodrama, and a cathartic conclusion masterfully jammed into a single episode), before we get to another of my best remembered episodes: "Lotus & the Steel." Before I understood what a Spaghetti Western was, and before I even knew Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai existed, whenever I watched a movie or a TV episode or read a book with this kind of plot (Burn Notice: The Fall Of Sam Axe, The Dark Tower: Wolves Of the Calla, etc.), I would always go, "Oh; this is like that X-Men episode! I love that one! Cool!"

But when I started watching, I realized that Disney+ had the episode order wrong, and I had to watch the following episode ("Weapon X, Lies, and Videotape," which is basically the good version of X-Men Origins: Wolverine, because it has Wolverine and Sabretooth forced to work together, deals with their sleeper agent brainwashing in a simple, emotionally powerful way, brings back another love interest from his past, and ends with a fight against an unstoppable failsafe warrior that isn't Sacreligious Deadpool) first. There's also reference to a scene I don't remember seeing in any previous episodes (Wolverine having road rage and turning on Jubilee when she tries to calm him down), hinting at lost media or a scene from an episode that I haven't gotten to yet at this point. The basic idea is that, after Proteus deconstructed him into a literal quivering mess and the previous/next episode made him question the truth of his own past, existence, and purpose, Wolverine quits the X-Men (a plot point that was used with Cyclops in the episode following the Phoenix Saga last season, and with Wolverine following Morph's "death" before that) and retreats to Japan to find himself. Of course, the local fishing village owes tribute to a gang of armed, cavalier bandits (led by the Silver Samurai), and a young, boisterous villager convinces them to fight back against all odds, forcing Wolverine to put his quest for peace and purpose on hold so he can help the villagers build traps and train them in combat for the bandits' return. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Of course, some X-Men liberties are taken with Kurosawa's original story (like the final showdown between Wolverine and Silver Samurai that plays like a Mortal Kombat boss fight, and Wolverine being a stand-in for seven characters, which makes him feel inconsistent and puts him into a creepy,  baseless age-gap romance—he fought in World War II and she's pushing twenty if I'm being generous). But if you're going to riff on something, borrow from the best and make it fit an ongoing story if nothing else. At least it's not "Have Yourself A Morlock Little X-Mas."

From a legend of a narrative, the series goes right into one of the most heavy-handed, dramatic, derivative, lactose intolerant Christmas specials of its time (Calisto berating Storm for the writers not being able to come up with any good Morlock stories for the past three seasons, Wolverine learning the Christmas Spirit when Jubilee begs him to give a dying Morlock named Leech a blood transfusion—subtle—complete with him grumbling canonically baseless prejudicial statements about the Morlocks' character—they basically serve as a bottom-text Mutant allegory for homelessness, so everyone's favorite tactical Clint Eastwood rage monster with an adamantium-coated heart of gold is a classist prick who hates Christmas; you're welcome—the Morlocks having a legally distinct Cindy-Lou Who knockoff character and a blatant knockoff of Charlie Brown's Christmas tree, and Storm diatribing about family and cheer while she side-eye's the viewing audience into a state of holiday guilt—subtle). Meanwhile, Beast is making cranberry sauce like it's Heisenberg meth, and Jean (after not being in the series for almost an entire season because Storm can apparently "sense" when people "speak the truth" now) is trying to murder Gambit over turkey seasonings. Despite being perfect for this most wonderful time of the year, "Have Yourself A Morlock Little Christmas" can go Scrooge itself in the French Alps with a roasted pig and die of mistletoe poisoning. Hah Bumfug.

The fourth season ends on a high note with an "everyone is here, even characters you've never seen before outside of the comics" four-parter that was meant to be the series finale. Cable being Cyclops and Jean's son while also being thousands of years old doesn't make a lick of sense, even if you factor in time travel and Mutant eugenics, because he repeatedly refers to 3999 as "my time," everyone talking to or about Archangel like he's a Mutant they didn't know about before Season One also doesn't make sense because we see multiple flashbacks of the original comics team (with him clearly depicted and animated pre-transformation as part of the team), and Bishop getting sidelined as a last-minute plot device (or a chess piece, if you want to get all punny about it) and paired up with the Time Custodian (an insane, magical simian who speaks in rapid-fire riddles, pop culture references, and antiquated voice impressions because Aladdin was still fairly popular with a sequel and an animated series of its own having come out in '94, plus Freakazoid! just began airing in September '95 as well) is an annoying, convenient waste of time (puns! And the reveal at the end that the Time Custodian was really Immortus/Kang all along is another one of those things that pre-internet viewers who never read Marvel comics wouldn't understand). But Apocalypse using Cable's time computer and a collection of kidnapped Mutant psychics to erase reality and make his own from scratch was a genuinely effective plan and a credible endgame threat worthy of getting all of the heroes and villains involved on either side (and for reasons that make sense from a character perspective given the time travel aspect, even if it does eventually come down to another "heroes win partly because the villains betray each other over selfish desires" resolution aided by Bishop suddenly deciding to shoot stuff after being shown and told that he literally can't, except that it works this time because it has to and Wolverine broke the One MacGuffin Basket Of All Eggs immediately afterward). Also, Scott and Jean finally get a real wedding! And Wolverine's..."blessing." Yeah, after four seasons, he's still hung up on a woman he can't have, even though Storm, Lady Deathstrike, and Silver Fox exist. Why (aside from Hugh Jackman and a few action movie one-liners) do we like Wolverine again? Whatever the case, the "Beyond Good & Evil" four-parter generally made decent use of its runtime and characters, and I would have been perfectly happy if it had been the series finale because it feels like one.

But Season Five exists.

Why? Because Mr. Krabs—I mean, the Fox/Saban partnership—likes money. So another season was rushed into production and Saban "had to" (by which I mean he made a greedy business decision because this is the guy behind Power Rangers we're talking about here) go in-house with the animation and switch studios halfway through because of budget and the original studio's prior obligations. It shows, as I will get to talking about later. But first, I'd like to make note of some more neutral changes that took place with the final season.

If you watch the series on Disney+ (or by the "Starjammer Method"), you'll notice that, for previously mentioned reasons, some episodes from Seasons Three and Four have a different opening than the rest. However, on Google, those episodes ("Deal With the Devil," "Longshot," and "Bloodlines") are listed in original broadcast order as part of Season Five. The new intro features scenes from previous seasons (as opposed to each of the X-Men getting a stylized role-call sequence like before, serving both as a further cost-cutting measure and an "after four seasons, you should know who they are" statement of brand confidence) and a faster, louder, less dynamic arrangement of the original theme song that runs for roughly half the time. It and the accompanying visuals lack the feeling of epic conflict that I got from the first opening sequence.

However, "The Phalanx Covenant" is a solid beginning for Season Five, featuring some fluid animation for the time, body horror reminiscent of (but predating) Alien: Resurrection's third act, a more scientifically oriented Beast in the lead role (though his sudden conclusions sometimes feel like logical leaps to keep the plot moving, I do not miss his constant literary citations and his backpack of gadgets is cool, so Science Hank is preferable here), an intergalactic love story/reluctant ruler journey with an anti-conformity message that taught me what "assimilate" means long before the Borg became my favorite Star Trek villains, and a fun reason to get a present-day Forge (again, how are these people thousands of years old‽) and morally complex villains like Sinister and Magneto (now sporting a midlife crisis beard in the wake of "Sanctuary," "Family Ties," and his betrayal by Apocalypse, so...is this a "good timeline" version of the "One Man's Worth" future?) to cooperate against a world-ending biomechanical threat.

The high points keep coming (if you follow the streaming order and ignore "Longshot," though as I've mentioned before, "Deal With the Devil" and "Bloodlines" are incredible episodes) with "Storm Front," another two-parter. We haven't seen Storm get much focus aside from her early claustrophobia mentions, the underrepresented Morlock stuff, her nonsensical Shadow King episode, "Savage Land, Strange Heart," the aforementioned "One Man's Worth" (where she shared focus with Wolverine) and Season Four's weird use of her as an empathic stand-in for Jean Grey. As the title suggests, "Storm Front" is her time to shine, elaborating more on the scope of her weather powers (rather than simply summoning and manipulating "the elements," Storm has a psychic connection to nature, partly explaining her role in Season Four, I guess) and positioning her as a strong, capable romantic female lead. It does turn into another "the guy who wants to make his world subjectively better is a greedy, evil asshole, actually" story by the end, but the futuristic Greco-Roman aesthetic of the Polemachus planet is right up my alley, it's another story (like "Lotus & the Steel") that I remember fondly, and Storm getting the focus she deserves makes it all the better.

The "next" episode is a Jubilee & Beast adventure to South America ("The Fifth Horseman") that has a noticeably different, almost bootleg Disney animation style, as from then on (and in "Longshot"), the animation was done by PASI (Fantastic Four Season 2) rather than AKOM (Batman: The Animated Series, The Tick, and Animaniacs), who had animated most of the series up to that point. It's more fluid and expessive in some instances, but the characters sometimes have a distracting compositing halo around them, and the new style does not fit the series' tone as well as AKOM's work. As for the episode itself, "The Fifth Horseman" follows up on the fates of Magneto's fanatical underling Cortez (in the wake of "Sanctuary") and Apocalypse (attempting to return in a new body after being banished from Time at the end of "Beyond Good & Evil"). Beast is still in his Scientific Gary Stewart mode from the Phalanx episodes, having now branched out his interests from literature, organic chemistry, genetics, and biotechnology, into anthropology, archeology, and dead Meso-American languages (so for the purposes of this story, he can just identify and translate ancient Mayan into English now), and Apocalypse's new underlings attempt to capture Jubilee to be his new vessel because of her "great power" (I may die laughing before I finish the episode), only for one of the Hounds to be revealed as a Morlock (not to be confused with the escaped Phalanx royal who is named Morlock) who has a long history with Jubilee despite never having appeared in the two ever Morlock-centric episodes this series has had over its five-season run. Also (and this is one of those "hilarious in a bad way because no children and few parents would get either reference" situations), we see that Cortez has appropriated and exploited the Mayan cult as a prophet of their god (making him a reference to Spanish Conquistador Hernán Cortés), and hear that his voice actor is portraying him with an inconsistent Christopher Walken/Dennis Hopper/Marlon Brando impression that made me think of the Animaniacs' "Hearts Of Twilight" short and turned the character into a "see what I did there‽" nod to Apocalypse Now. Thanks, I hate it, tee-hee. At least he gets his comeuppance for playing with other people's lives and powers. And at least it isn't "Jubilee's Fairytale Theater."

In a season that should have sent X-Men out with a bang, we instead follow up the return of Apocalypse with a bottle episode where Jubilee gets trapped in a collapsing cave with the annoying Junior Planeteers Of the Magic School Bus, entertaining the grating pack of ankle-biters with her D&D self-insert fanfic until the real X-Men notice she's in danger and save everyone at the last minute. On its own, it's a fun Elseworlds story, but the kids and the scheduling context ruined it for me both as a preteen in the 90s and now as an adult.

However, I'm disappointed that I couldn't grasp how awesome "Old Soldiers" was back then. Yes, it's another episode that doesn't impact what vestiges of an overarching narrative the series has left, but Wolverine and Captain America punching their way through HYDRA (Nazi) forces to rescue a French scientist from Red Skull, bantering all the while, just put a smile on my face, and the framing device shed new light on how Logan's powers make him nigh immortal, shaping his blunt, solitary nature and...unhealthy attempts at connection. I know it isn't exactly "new" light if you've read the comics or seen the movies (even—and especially—X-Men Origins), but in the scope of a series that has led me to constantly complain about its offscreen continuity, I welcome an episode like this, whether it has a geek-out team up or not. "Hidden Agendas" is another standalone, "small-town Mutant prejudice, but the government are the villains" story, but with terrible animation and Rogue as the focus because the besieged Mutant is a Kentucky miner's son named Cannonball. Aside from Rogue's chosen alias having a fun but predictable payoff with Gambit, it's disposable. A bit less disposable is "Descent," a flashback episode where Xavier's ancestor traces a genetically modified Jack the Ripper through London in search of a mad scientist named Nathaniel Essex (who went to Dr. Jekyll lengths to cure his wife—Jean Grey's ancestor—of a terminal illness and turn himself into Mr. Sinister).

Which, out of nowhere (that's how it felt when I didn't know any better about the corporate nature of children's television), brings us to "Graduation Day." After five seasons of...effort?...the team's Sisyphean struggle for Mutant acceptance has proven crushingly stagnant, as an anti-Mutant spokesman (one of the creators of the Sentinels) puts Xavier in a mortally catatonic state. With Magneto having shaved (because his midlife crisis is over and his children don't matter anymore, I guess) and positioned himself as the face of an international race war, it's up to the Ber-Mutant Love Triangle (Cyclops, Wolverine, and Jean Grey) to convince him to electromagnetically supercharge Xavier's brain so he can contact Lelandra psychically and be saved by Shi'ar medicine. It's an ultimately hopeless outcome for society, but has a greater sense of finality than "Beyond Good & Evil," complete with a tear-jerking farewell sequence. I especially took notice of the cheesy but clever words Xavier had for Rogue (how she "touched the lives of everyone here," which is true because she has literally touched every member of the X-Men—which temporarily gives her their powers, emotions, and memories—except for Beast and Jubilee).

It was easy to get cynical as the series went on, becoming more episodic, rife with contradictions and unfounded lore statements, and cheap-looking than what the first two seasons (and the first nine episodes of Season Three) brought to the table. Not to mention the multitude of recycled plot structures, sometimes reprehensible characterization choices, and Jubilee. Just...Jubilee. But I suppose that's what happens when a show (particularly an animated show, and even more particularly, an animated show produced by Haim Saban throughout the 90s) starts off so strong and runs for so long: you start to see how certain aspects of it keep going strong (the overall writing quality and voice acting) while others melt and implode under the Juggernaut-like weight of success and economic realities (continuity and animation, among others). If I haven't spoiled too much and you'd like to check out the series for yourselves, you (mostly) won't be disappointed, and it's a solid primer for X-Men '97.

Speaking of X-Men '97, I originally intended to review it here with the original animated series, as it continues from the events of "Graduation Day." But one episode into the new series, I found so much to talk about that I decided to schedule this a week earlier and give '97 its own post next week. So Stay Tuned, and please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, leave a comment at the bottom of this post and any others you have opinions about, help out my ad revenue as you read so I can afford to have a merry little X-Mas, and follow me on BlueSky, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my astonishing content (including tomorrow's Winter Wonderland Omnibusted on Volume Two).

Uncanny TiX-Master,

Tuning Out.