Why do I care so much that the X-Men are coming back? The return of X Men: The Animated Series as X-Men ’97 is nothing special. You could look at it as just Disney refreshing some IP, cashing in on nostalgia. So why does this feel so different? And why is this hitting people in such a visceral way? I think I know why — or at least I think I know why this is the case for me. I didn’t realize until a recent therapy session, where the X Men come up frequently, that the X-Men… kinda saved my life. It’s not as dire as it sounds, but when I think of who I was in 1992 and 1993 and what I needed over the years coinciding with X-Men’s original run on Fox, I really don’t know who I’d be or where I’d be if I didn’t have this franchise to hold onto.
There had never been anything like X-Men aired on Saturday mornings. Before the X-Men, I loved G.I. Joe and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. G.I. Joe were real American heroes. They were the literal army in superhero drag. They were the backbone of an adolescent power fantasy. The Ninja Turtles, despite being being sequestered away from society, living in a sewer with a rat as a dad, the cartoons and movies never deeply explored themes of isolation. They were party dudes, first and foremost.
X-Men was not that. The very first episode of X-Men — an episode immortalized on VHS tapes paired with personal pan pizzas at Pizza Hut — features the team striking against a government organization that collected private data on American citizens without their consent. On the way to committing this crime against the government, Rogue tells the team, “I’d like to kill my daddy when he found out I was a mutant.” Cyclops responds, “We all had to face that problem.” This passes as small talk amongst the X-Men. The first episode spotlights so many complex, intersecting identities among the team. They are hated for being different. All of them relate differently to being a mutant, but they are all united because they are mutants.
I watched this when I was eight. I was in the third grade and I knew I was different. I knew whatever friendships I had were conditional. I knew that, ultimately, no one liked me. No one wanted to talk to me. I couldn’t fit in. Everything I said was criticized and kids came up with hurtful nicknames for me. I understood exactly what Jubilee was going through, finding out she had been branded as different against her will. I was so afraid of other people that I didn’t let whatever could have been friendships flourish. I didn’t socialize. I didn’t do anything, except I did watch X-Men and I held onto that show tightly
X-Men gave me everything that I was denied. The show gave me friends who understood what I was going through, friends who wouldn’t turn on me because they already knew what betrayal felt like. I fantasized about being sent away to a mansion where I could go on missions, where my differences — that of a chronically sick, artistic, indoor kid — were turned into superpowers.
I will say, X-Men was so popular in 1993 that it gave me a taste of what a real childhood could be like. There had never been a show like X-Men, where literally everyone, every tiny human body in that third grade class watched it religiously. It was the lone common denominator, and that probably only lasted for a month or two (time passes so slowly before it’s gone so quickly). We were all buying comics, reading character guides, and selling Marvel trading cards to each other for a dime when the teacher’s back was turned. And those playground days — where I was included with everyone else — were probably the only times that I felt like a normal kid (normal meaning “how the kids on TV act”). When everyone was playing X-Men, everyone was in agreement: we look up to these weirdos, we are all weird, we’re in this together.
When Season 2 premiered, I was in the fourth grade. I remember running up to my partner in X-Men, the one friend I had made and somehow held onto through the summer, and I remember saying, “Morph is back!” The X-Man that was killed in the premiere — killed! On a cartoon! — had returned from the dead. My friend looked at me and he said, “I haven’t even taken my jacket off and the first thing you want to tell me is, ‘Morph is back’?” And he walked away. And that was the end of that — except it wasn’t for me.
I was once again the outcast weirdo, the one kid who held onto a cartoon — a way of life — that everyone else had dropped. When I couldn’t talk to my parents about whatever I was feeling, when I was alone every weeknight and weekend, I could channel all of that into my own stories, my own X-Men. The X-Men didn’t just give me entertainment. They give me a reason to create, write, and draw. They set me on a path that I traveled alone, but at least I had a direction. I wouldn’t have been directionless without it, but I don’t know where I would have ended up.
This is why X-Men: The Animated Series stuck with me, and why I stuck with the X-Men even as I made friends in high school, came out of my shell, and just plain came out. My grip on the X-Men has loosened just a little bit over the last 30 years, because I finally had other things to hold on to.
And now it’s 2024. I’m 39. The internet exists now and I can see everyone else’s excitement. I know I’m not alone. I know from interviews that the people who created the show were kids like me. And I look at where I am now, four years into a pandemic/post-pandemic world, still feeling the isolation. Still grappling with the anxiety and depression that I’ve always had, now diagnosed and agitated for a myriad of reasons. I guess this is a midlife crisis and the entire world is at my party. Hey — I guess I am a party dude after all. I feel more nothing than ever before — and this is when the X-Men are coming back. Right when I need them, the X-Men are back. It’s nostalgia, but it’s nostalgia for the series that ignited an inferno of an imagination and made me feel whole despite objectively being one crayon in a shoebox full of little army men. I know what this cartoon is capable of. I know how I felt and how I feel, and I know the X-Men are going to save me again.