People who follow me on Tumblr know I've been on a bit of an X-Men blitz recently. The upcoming release of X-Men Apocalypse (possibly the last in the franchise, along with the final Wolverine spin-off) has reawakened my love for these characters and their unique place in the superhero genre.
But I'll get to the films in due course. For the moment I want to head back to the small screen and my childhood to revisit the incarnation of the X-Men that I grew up with. X-Men: The Animated Series ran from 1992 to 1997 and is generally considered a valiant and influential (though since dated) attempt at capturing the spirit of the characters and the most famous story-arcs of the comic books.
A trip down memory lane was in order, but why stop there? From 2000–2003 another animated series called X-Men Evolution was aired to coincide with the successful release of the first feature film, and though this one belonged more to my little sister's generation (they were "her" X-Men in the same way the nineties cartoon was "mine") I remembered it fondly.
Then I found out that a third animated series called Wolverine and the X-Men was released sometime around 2009, one I had never seen (or at least never recalled seeing) and which was cancelled after only one season. And of course, there's ten Hollywood films and counting – the original trilogy, the prequel trilogy, the spin-off trilogy, and the cross-over.
The path seemed clear. I had to watch all of it. So I did.
And yet I'm not going to start this retrospective with any of the above projects. Instead I'm heading back to the very first appearance of the X-Men on screen. (Well almost – apparently a few had guest-roles in The Fantastic Four and Spiderman cartoons, but I have to draw the line somewhere). An animated television pilot called Pryde of the X-Men was originally broadcast in 1989 but never picked up for a full season.
That its title is a bad pun on the main character's last name pretty much sums up why.
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| X-Men: Eighties style. |
