X-Men

[Thad]

Watching the X-Men cartoon got me into reading X-Men comics which in the 90s were just full of people dying

I'd say that really started in the '80s.

I mean, the first time Xavier died was back in the '70s (EDIT: actually it was the late '60s), but characters dying all the damn time was an '80s thing.

I remember a conversation with my uncle -- late '90s, early aughts -- where I said "Claremont's back on X-Men" and he said "Oh boy. Who's dead so far?" and I was like "Cyclops."

The Krakoa Era actually did something interesting with that by giving them a plot device that lets them resurrect dead mutants, which let them bring back every mutant who's ever died (Charlie Jane Anders wrote a pretty good text piece narrated by one of the Morlocks who just woke up after the last thing they remember was being murdered in the Massacre) and made every mutant more-or-less immortal. I think that's over now and we're on to whatever the new status quo is (not 100% on that, I don't read the core X-books and only catch up on whatever the hell's going on in them sporadically through references in other stuff like Deadpool, or the aforementioned New Mutants miniseries by CJA and Enid Balam), but it's a neat enough idea; death hasn't had any stakes in superhero comics in decades, if ever, so why not pull hard in the opposite direction and explore what that means?

[Thad]

Rachel Summers has never had so much as a mention

Quick correction on rereading the thread: she has a cameo in "Beyond Good and Evil" as one of the telepaths Apocalypse is using to power his machine. But she doesn't speak and isn't acknowledged in dialogue.

[Thad]

Fucking Cox outage hit right when Magneto showed up (posting this using my phone as a hotspot), but impressions on the opening minutes:

* I really feel like they should have started it off with "Previously, on X-Men".

* Very nice re-creation of the opening titles. Though I admit I'm actually a little disappointed that they fixed the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants lineup and took out Thunderbird and Random Pinkheaded Guy.

* I guess we've finally reached the point where you can open a Disney cartoon on a shot of the Twin Towers. We've come a long way since airbrushing them out of the first Spider-Man movie.

* I love that we're immediately into logical inconsistencies, with the FoH guy talking about how they're getting $10,000 for giving up Sunspot, and then Sunspot's like "I'm rich, I can pay you" and then he's all "You think this is about money?" In the span of like two sentences.

* I was a little worried when Cyclops was actually kind of badass and competent for a second there, but fortunately he turns back into a whiny scold immediately in the next scene.

* In fact most everybody feels right, even if the voices are a little off (and I'm not just talking about Cyclops being recast; they're all out of practice and I'd say everybody but Storm sounds at least a little different). Storm enters on one of her hifalutin speeches, Beast demonstrates an affinity toward verbiage so strenuously baroque as to border on the rococo, and Gambit straight-up did not show up to fight bad guys because he was too busy frying beignets.

Yep. They're back, baby.

[Mongrel]

Gambit straight-up did not show up to fight bad guys because he was too busy frying beignets.

Yep. They're back, baby.

That is pretty OG.

[Thad]

Yeah, I don't know if this show even has a writers' room but I like to picture a bunch of people sitting around a table pitching the Gambitest possible thing for Gambit to be doing when he first appears and someone throws that out and everybody else laughs and claps.

My Internet came back (after five fucking hours) and I finished the episode and it was good! There really is a loving attention to detail there. Cameos, Kirby dots, and they even bring back the basketball outfits.

Some thoughts on voices:

Jennifer Hale is Jean Grey, which is interesting, because Catherine Disher is on the show as Valerie Cooper. I'm kinda curious how that came about. (If I had to speculate wildly: availability? Hale is the busier actor of the two but she's certainly got a home studio; Disher is primarily an on-camera actor, so it's quite possible she doesn't have a home studio and has to record in-person, and had time to record for a minor character but not a major one.) Hale has played Jean before, including in Wolverine and the X-Men, which for my money is the actual best X-Men cartoon and if you haven't seen it you should.

Xavier gets one line of dialogue and he isn't Cedric Smith. Smith is still around but he's 80 years old and his most recent IMDb credit is from 2018, so my guess is he's retired and declined.

(Fun fact: Disher and Smith were married when they made TOS (they've since divorced). Disher tells a fun anecdote in Previously, On X-Men about taking her son to a comic shop and he saw some older kids looking at X-Men comics and told them who his parents were; they were very excited to meet Jean Grey.)

Loved how they did the closing credits with the rotating figures and the list of their powers, like the original series. Noticed that Morph was described with they/them pronouns; they're played by JP Karliak, who Wikipedia says is genderqueer.

I'll add that this show's pretty upfront with the gay metaphor; there's a bit where Gyrich dismissively talks about mutant acceptance as a fad, "I have a mutant friend," and there's a scene between Sunspot and Jubilee where she realizes "You haven't told your parents." Add that to the list of ways this show enrages people who are very confused about X-Men.

[Thad]

Episode 2:

I love the touch that they kept Professor X's intro in the opening titles of the first episode, then replaced him with Magneto in the second.

The entire sequence with Jean's water breaking was delightful. Wolverine driving on the sidewalk. And Jean rips the roof off his Jeep -- she made him a convertible!

When I was a teenager I found the central metaphor of the series a little overbearing. The older I get, the more I feel that subtlety is overrated and social justice is worth shouting about loudly and unambiguously. Magneto's speech at the UN did a pretty fantastic job summing up what X-Men is about, and "Never again" was particularly pointed.

More thoughts on the cast:

the voices are a little off (and I'm not just talking about Cyclops being recast; they're all out of practice and I'd say everybody but Storm sounds at least a little different).

On second thought I think it's just Lenore Zann's Rogue. Wolverine, Beast, and Storm are all pretty much the same, and everyone else is recast; Rogue's the only one who's got the same VA but sounds significantly different. (Specifically, she sounds like she's doing an impression of Dolly Parton.) I wonder if part of it's that she wanted to dial the Outrageous Claremont Accent back, but I suspect part of it's just that it's harder to do that kinda throaty voice when you're thirty years older.

Which brings me to

Jennifer Hale is Jean Grey, which is interesting, because Catherine Disher is on the show as Valerie Cooper. I'm kinda curious how that came about. (If I had to speculate wildly:

I may have been overthinking it. After spending a little more time with Val Cooper I think Disher's voice has probably just gotten too deep with age to sound like Jean anymore.

[Mongrel]

Oh, so the credits don't list voice actors by character?

[Thad]

Oh, so the credits don't list voice actors by character?

They do (and unlike the credits in the vast majority of streaming cartoons, you can actually pause them and read the names, without hitting a "skip to the next episode?" prompt right at the moment they come up, or having a gradient overlay half the screen when you pause), but remember when I wrote that first post I'd been cut off halfway through the episode and hadn't seen them yet.

[Thad]

And episode 3 brings us another returning cast member, Chris Britton as Mr. Sinister.

I particularly like the bit where Cyclops is like "Sinister." and Sunspot's like "Mr. Sinister?" even though nobody said the "Mr." part.

[Thad]

Also, the show continues to handle some pretty heavy issues. I admit to tearing up a little at Maddy's speech about giving up her baby because she owes him the best possible future. Punched me right in the adoptive-parent center.

On the lighter side, I'm enjoying how they're using Morph as a way to cram in a bunch of cameos. Most of them have been characters who appeared on TOS (like Lady Deathstrike and Spyral) but AFAICT Magik is the first character he's turned into who's never been on the show.

[Büge]

AFAICT Magik is the first character he's turned into who's never been on the show.

ackshully

[Thad]

AFAICT Magik is the first character he's turned into who's never been on the show.

ackshully

Illyana Rasputin has been on the show before. Magik hasn't. We've never seen her as an adult in costume before.

[Thad]

okay it was obvious from the jump that they knew exactly who their audience was

but "mojo episode that's also an homage to the X-Men arcade game and various other Konami beat-em-ups" is further evidence of what we already knew

[Thad]

Apparently they're changing Wolverine's creator credit to include editor Roy Thomas, and what do you know, this is the first time I've ever heard of someone being added to a creator credit and not been happy about it. WTF, Roy?

I guess for a guy who made a career of following in Stan Lee's footsteps, claiming credit for things he didn't do is just the next logical step.

[Thad]

Returning VA this week: Adrian Hough as Nightcrawler

The rest of the characters we saw for the first time since TOS were recast. Interestingly, we've got another original cast member playing a new role: Chris Potter, who played Gambit in TOS, as Cable.

Oh, and some stuff happened I guess.

[Niku]

Finally started in on this over the weekend and went through all the available episodes and -- yeah it's kind of a wild ride with just how well they know who their audience was and is. The writing hits that melodramatic mishmash of the comic book soap opera and Saturday morning cartoon straight down the middle, but in a way that would've been easy to slip into lazy parody. And it doesn't! It's legitimately good at doing exactly what it's trying to do.

I also really liked them cheekily slipping in a Magneto Was Right in episode 4 prior to seeing actual Magneto Is Right protest signs in episode 5.

Also we get some New X-men cameos in episode 5! Hell yeah, Glob Herman.

[Niku]

Episode 6 immediately reminds you how much Claremont DNA is in this series by having a woman pin a man down with her high heel hard enough to bleed and then shortly thereafter insinuating that Charles Xavier is down with pet-play.

[Thad]

Finally started in on this over the weekend and went through all the available episodes and -- yeah it's kind of a wild ride with just how well they know who their audience was and is. The writing hits that melodramatic mishmash of the comic book soap opera and Saturday morning cartoon straight down the middle, but in a way that would've been easy to slip into lazy parody. And it doesn't! It's legitimately good at doing exactly what it's trying to do.

The longer it goes the more I'm in legitimate awe of what it's pulling off. "It's as good as you remember it being, and better than it actually was" is a hell of an achievement in itself, but like you say it also manages to walk that fine line of winking self-reference while still playing it straight and not tipping into parody.

And the writing in today's episode was really sharp in how it tied the two storylines together with the theme of colonialism. And the Kipling dig was the perfect mix of literary and pointed. It's like a Frasier joke but with teeth.

In Previously, On X-Men, Lewald talks about how the reason Beast has a bigger role after season 1 is that the writers were having a blast coming up with big words for him to say and literary references for him to make. There's even a section of the book where he cites all those references. The Kipling line made me think of that; it's one of many ways the writers on the new series have managed to perfectly evoke the vibe of TOS.

[Thad]

Also, there was so much going on that I almost missed that Xavier felt Gambit die but not Magneto.

Which, y'know, nice touch, even if I'm long past taking any superhero death seriously anyway.

[Niku]

Also, there was so much going on that I almost missed that Xavier felt Gambit die but not Magneto.

Which, y'know, nice touch, even if I'm long past taking any superhero death seriously anyway.

Notably the MasterMoldipede also stopped detecting an Omega Level Mutant threat while Magneto was clutching the child who suppresses mutant powers.

Something I did not notice until it was pointed out to me is a particular cameo in episode 5: The Watcher appears in the sky right before the fireworks (metaphorical and literal) start.