A Long-Awaited X-Men ’97 Breakdown, with Mina Kimes and David Dennis Jr.

Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out.

I am Pablo Torre and today we're going to find out what this sound is.

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I didn't click skip intro once throughout

the whole series.

The percent of people who click skipped intro has to be sub 10%.

I was watching this show in the morning, like getting my son ready for school and was making him late every Wednesday.

And we were really, really late this Wednesday.

And I pushed skip intro and he yelled at me in a way that children should not yell at parents.

And I just let it slide because it was fair because I feel like he was justified in yelling at me for skipping the intro.

He yelled at you like Nathan Summers yelling at Cyclops for abandoning him in the future.

Who doesn't sometimes want to just send your child into a portal 2,000 years in the future and say, Somebody else handle this?

I'm done.

All right, so I should confess that I too feel like a child who has been sent into the future because I have been waiting to do this since 1996, okay?

1996, which is when the finale of X-Men the Animated series aired.

And when that show went away, when my favorite television show went away, it left me and my childhood hanging in the balance, waiting for the series to pick back up, waiting for the sequel, which has finally arrived.

X-Men 97 is the title of the animated series over on Disney Plus.

It is the subject of today's show, and I guess I should remind people who aren't familiar that X-Men is a massively popular comic book series about these mutant superheroes that inspired the aforementioned animated series in the 90s, and then a whole bunch of live-action movies, which are, importantly, not part of the Marvel cinematic universe.

And the Marvel Cinematic Universe, if you somehow have been asleep for a decade, that's the highest-grossing film franchise of all time, despite having zero X-Men projects.

Until now.

Until X-Men 97, which we are going to talk about in full, by the way.

So yeah, spoiler alert, what you're about to get is me and two of my similarly obsessive friends, Mina Kimes and David Dennis Jr., discussing what we all found out while inhaling this show.

Which means that, yeah, you're also about to hear the greatest intro in television history.

And the song is

David Dennis Jr.

at Mina Kimes.

I've assembled a brotherhood of mutants, as it were,

to talk about a thing that I need people to appreciate, even if they don't really appreciate X-Men.

David, how old are you?

I am 38.

She turned 38.

Okay, so I am 38, turning 39.

I know Mina is in that same boat, so we're all the same age.

I'm 38 too.

Wow, that's kind of weird.

We're all

exactly 38.

And so

for us, for people like us, Avengers, I think it's safe to say, didn't mean shit.

So the whole idea that we just watched the Marvel Cinematic Universe take over Hollywood Entertainment in real ways, like change the economy of everything, IP, comic book movies, how everything is done, that they did it with a comic book franchise that I didn't care about.

because I was too worried about X-Men sort of explains why it is that I think a lot of people in our age range have been like clawing and thirsting for something that lives up to expectations I've had for, I don't know,

30 years.

When the cinematic movies were coming out and it was like Iron Man, they have Captain America, they have Thor, I remember being like, who cares?

Like these are the dorky Avengers.

Like they are the B team.

The only time I read Avengers was when they had an X-Men crossover.

And I'd be like, hmm, let's try to get into Avengers.

And I was like, nah, I want to get back to X-Men.

That's what I care about.

And for them to turn it into something where like kids, like the generation younger than us, think that they are the premier franchises is offensive.

It's crazy.

And it was also offensive is the way that Marvel has deprioritized X-Men over the last 20 years, which is like one of the most inexplicable decisions I could think of any sort of business or creative entity ever making.

We are watching this at a time when the NCU has deeply disappointed me, which also sets the stage for like why it is that I'm so thirsty for a cake made of nostalgia.

I'm with you guys.

I was an X-Men person growing up, not a comic books person per se, but an X-Men animated series fan.

And we can talk about our love of that series and what this series does in terms of building off of that, continuing it.

So I was never interested in the Avengers.

I was always interested in the X-Men, but I will say, even as someone who grew up so passionate about these characters, I was never really drawn in by the live-action movies.

Some of them are a little bit better than others.

Logan, which I guess doesn't really count, is obviously pretty well done.

But for the most part,

I kind of stopped caring.

And this pulled me in so immediately and so aggressively, and allowed me to experience like a level of nostalgia that I really haven't partaken in with anything.

Yes, I am unapologetically invested in this X-Men 97, essentially sequel to what was a truly formative formative cartoon in my childhood.

And I'm not a person who's into cartoons in this way.

Like I'm a big Star Wars guy.

I should say, full disclosure, my screen name on AOL was Yoda, followed by six numbers.

And those six numbers, David, if you did not know, were two X-Men comic book numbers.

Oh, okay.

All right.

And so that's the level of nerdery I brought to this.

Wow.

But I say that also because I did not give a f about the Star Wars, like animated series stuff, like Rebels.

Like I, I'm just not an animated guy in general, um but i am a comic book guy you know x-men uh the comic books in the last like five years has really sort of picked up steam also

and the the show has really it's almost unlocking a part of my brain that i've like kind of had felt like i'd said goodbye to you know like i had spent years thinking that i was never going to reach this level of fandom with x-men again with something that dominated the entirety of my life as a child and re-watching this show it's almost like listening to an old song from 20 years ago and be like oh i actually remember every single word like there's deep cuts and deep things i'm like i i distinctly recall this moment from when i was seven years old now that we've established we're all the same age when the animated series came out we were eight i think eight through 12 ish yeah six to ten six to eleven eight to twelve okay yeah so basically the perfect age insofar as um old enough to kind of understand what was a pretty complicated series in terms of plot lines, multiverse multiverse stuff,

some adult themes, but young enough to be totally obsessed with it.

I would say, you know, I haven't revisited the animated series in a while.

The new X-Men 97 does feel more mature and more geared towards adults, which is not entirely surprising given that it is made for adults who watched the original animated series.

But I will say, like, my brother and I were...

obsessed with the animated series so much so that uh when they would re-air it we taped them all on vhs which is a thing uh you had to do back then for people who have a gym david i are both nodding

tapes yep exactly right

and would still go back and watch like the apocalypse stuff the dark phoenix saga all the like you know the little series within the series from time to time i think through like high school yeah which is crazy yeah i don't remember which came first so as much as i love the comic books and there are lots of references in x-men 97 to the comics david i think you're probably the biggest comics guy among the three of us.

But I don't even remember, that's how formative the show was, the cartoon was.

I don't remember if I loved the comics or the cartoon first.

I just know that they sort of coexisted in parallel for me into my puberty, basically.

Yeah, so I was a comic book kid first.

You know, my mom would take me to the grocery store or the mall, and I'd sit in the bookstore or sit in the corner.

I still have my very first comic book, which is X-Men One, The Jim Lee, Chris Claremont, which was like the biggest selling comic book of all time.

That was it.

So when X-Men came, I was like, this is a dream come true.

This is these people I love and these characters I love.

And they are on the screen.

And I was a kid watching this.

Like, this is different from the comic.

Like, what are you guys?

Like, I was that kid.

And I was like, so incredibly locked in at the time.

Like, just think about how spoiled kids are now to watch like in-game in the movie theater.

Like.

X-Men, the cartoon was in game for us, like every Saturday morning for years, which is like an incredible thing.

Who are you guys' favorite characters?

My favorite characters from being a child and watching the animated series were Wolverine and Storm, who were arguably the best X-Men, I think.

We cannot debate that.

And which made it really interesting, I thought that this version, X-Men 97, kind of downplayed those.

I mean, Storm got a very cool plot line, but Wolverine, I thought, who is a lot of people's favorite X-Men growing up, probably because of the anime series, because

he was just the coolest one, right?

Yeah.

Kind of was slow played in this series uh and wasn't really present in the finale storm as well i thought that was an interesting decision david because i i'm sure i wasn't alone in loving those two characters yeah i was gonna say those are my two favorite characters too and like to the point like it was everybody's favorite character to the point like i don't know if you guys experienced this as as as children but i remember my friends would say we're watching bart simpson and then they would say we're watching wolverine like that's what they would

i was

to echo everybody I was a Wolverine guy, number one, far and away, like super, super fan, put, like,

knives in between my, my fingers, like, did all of the shit about, you know, pretending I had claws.

You know that

phrase, like, a poor person's idea of a rich person?

You know, Wolverine was a kid's idea of the coolest person on earth.

Absolutely.

Oh, and the fact that he was also short.

Sure.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like, none of it, none of it stopped him from being a cigar chomping badass.

His one-liners, I thought, were, I was like, oh, shit, they did it again.

Yep.

I'm trying out saying bub to people, you know?

When he cut Cyclops' car, I made you a convertible bub.

I was like, dude.

Tell Cyclops, I made him a convertible.

But in retrospect, especially compared to this series, which actually has legitimately good writing and legitimately funny one-liners, those ones ones weren't quite as sophisticated.

I wrote a note to myself, I believe it was right like literally seconds before a pivotal scene that we can now spoil, the penultimate episode, where I'm like, Wolverine not really in this.

And then at the very end, he gets his adamantium skeleton ripped out of his body.

No, sadness, for the love of God, don't do this.

And an echo, David, of maybe the most famous panel, you could argue in comic books, X-Men 25, right?

And they basically frame for frame kind of tried to recreate that.

It would probably say like seven through 11 most traumatic moments of my life before 13.

It's right up in there.

It's like watching Magneto do this.

I took the comic book.

It has a holographic cover of Wolverine cards.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

On the cover.

And then I brought it to school and I showed everybody.

i was like look at what this son of a did to wolverine can you guys believe it it traumatized me and i could not believe i couldn't believe they did it it gets to like why it is that i enjoyed this so much which was when i read it in the comics it was sort of a mind-blowing thing because i was like oh my god of course magneto can do this he like controls metal it did not occur to me until i saw the panel and in this case i was waiting for it and that's it was sort of like this felt like a fan service truly, in a way that was unapologetic.

Yeah, like a reverse fan service or well, like a, like, like David said, I, so we weren't, I wasn't a huge comics book, but I did have some of the comics.

My brother and I splurged on some of them.

And this one was obviously very widely discussed and dramatizing.

I would love to see a list of David's top five most traumatizing childhood moments.

Mine includes the end of Bridge to Terabithia and My Girl When the Kid Dies Because of the Bees,

and this one, oh, and All Dogs Go to Heaven, which is really scary.

But that was kind of like the general tenor of this entire series is like, oh my God, they're doing it.

They're really doing, oh God, they're doing it again.

Oh God.

To the point where it was like a little relentless.

And I appreciated in the finale that they slowed things down a bit because

if I had one tiny critique of the series, it would be like, wow, they did, they squeezed a lot into a very short period of time.

We got Inferno, we got ES4 Extinction, we got Operation Zero Tolerance, Executioner Song, All of these big moments that happen, that they condense pretty well, actually, because, you know, it can get bloated.

But I do want to mention, you know, as we're talking about Wolverine getting his animantium ripped out, we have talked about the first text I sent you guys about the show, which is Professor Rex's Doc Rivers.

Why do you take Wolverine to go fight the master of magnetism?

Also, Professor X, episode one, leaves Gene Gray, Omega level mutant at home and sends Morph to fight the Sentinels.

Like, can we get somebody else in here to make some like actual strategic decisions for this man who is proving to be like a more terrible person?

He's already a terrible person in comic books.

He's more terrible by the day in X-Men 97.

Yeah, historically blowing 3-1 leads all over the place.

Like Professor X, again, look, I'm not here to complain about how I'm confused still about how Professor X could be also an Omega level mutant and also sort of like

useless enough to the point where these battles end up becoming such nail biters.

But

were we as mad at Professor X as kids as I was during this series?

Because I don't recall being so, but now when you see it through the lens of like what he was again, this is now introducing the whole like Magneto was right aspect of the thing, which was actually said aloud in a reference, a fan service-y reference to the meme.

But the scariest thing about Janosha wasn't the death or the chaos, it was a thought-the only sane thought you can have when being chased by giant robots that were built to crush you.

Magneto was right.

Enough.

But also to like the philosophy of what's happening in X-Men, which is about essentially a minority group asserting itself against a genocidal oppressor.

In the case of Genosha, a quite literal on-the-nose version of it.

I was just furious at Professor X pretty much the entire time.

It's crazy for a seven or eight year old, but I remember as a kid having it explained to me in Malcolm X okay terms.

I can't believe I understood that as an eight-year-old with Magneto and Professor X.

All of which is to say, he was not vilified, like he wasn't as stupid.

or naive, I think is the proper word to describe his approach to tactics or lack thereof in this series.

But there were moments where I thought he seemed selfish in the first run.

And like, I mean, can you imagine him being any child's favorite character or any child being a fan of him?

And a lot of characters

got sort of image rehabilitations in this series.

This is the best Cyclops has ever been by far.

You'll never hurt my family again.

Speaking of Malcolm X,

we're getting Malcolm Summers.

Like we We got a little hint of the Malcolm X Cyclops.

Can we get the Malcolm X glasses with the Ruby Quartz Photoshop for this part of the conversation?

He has the line when he's being interviewed.

Yeah.

Where he like flips on Trisha and he's like, you don't deserve our help.

You're ungrateful.

We fight, risk our lives for you.

Evil mutants, robots, crazy aliens.

I gave him up.

I gave him up because you can't say thank you.

Because I have to stomach your questions and prove prove that I'm a person.

I lie because the truth is we're nothing like you.

Thank God because it's the only reason you people are still alive.

Literally, I got like goosebumps when he said that because it was so unexpected coming from him.

I need the ether beat to play in the background while Cyclops was doing that because we're talking bar of the series.

I think it's a tie between

Lalandra's sister calling us the Milky Way ghetto.

Xavier would see his Milky Way ghetto become our new throne world.

Which is like something that I like texted and called people that like you called it the Milky Way ghetto, which is an altimer.

And Magneto saying, hey, you went and married your little bird alien or whatever, bird queen.

When you abandoned us for your Shia bird queen, you bequeathed it to me, asked me to walk your path.

Are you prepared to walk mine?

Those are two absolute keepers.

The diplomat's like, most other nations don't allow a terrorist to be their leader.

Yet so many allow their leaders to be terrorists.

Damn.

So many good lines in this series.

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Whether you're celebrating a big win or simply enjoying some cocktails with family and friends, Remy Martin 1738 is the perfect spirit to elevate any occasion.

So go ahead, treat yourself to a little luxury, and try Remy Martin 1738 Accord Royale.

Learn more at remymartin.com.

Remy Martin Cognac, feeding champagne, afforded an alcoholic volume, reported by Remy Control, USA, Inc.

New York, 1738, Centaur design.

Please drink responsibly.

For people who don't know Cyclops at all, like he is like the generic

captain of the football team, but boring.

No one likes him.

Like straight up.

Anti-Wolverine.

The anti-

Well put.

Wolverine was cool because he was the opposite of Cyclops, who was like the

Boy Scout, was Professor X's like favorite pet.

And in fact, the whole series sorts of

part of what starts the momentum of the series is Professor X has gone to be with his uh bird queen and uh leaves his X-Men.

He keeps on calling them my X-Men, which feels paternalistic in ways that we're all frustrated by, I think, as adults

in the mutant minority metaphor.

But Professor X leaves the X-Men to Magneto instead of Cyclops.

Magneto, what are you doing in our home?

Your home?

I beg to differ, Cyclops.

The last will and testament of Charles Francis Xavier.

As you all will see, his fortune, his school, everything

he built, everything he fought for now belongs to me, my X-Men.

And so now we get this tension of like, what's happening here?

And is this a more radical version of what we were familiar with as kids?

Cyclops really goes through it in the series, right?

Between not getting to be the leader, finding out that the mother of his children was maybe a clone, and it's very unclear when the switch was made and having to reckon with that.

And then he kind of is side texting his old wife on the leaderboard.

Yeah.

And then at the very end, he goes full Cyclops and

tries to basically say, you know, this is not who we are.

Bastion, come join us.

I know how it feels to have the things you trusted, the future you were building, crash down on you and refuse to let go, even as you're buried by what should have been.

You're not alone.

I think older versions, I would have rolled my eyes, but I actually it felt earned in a way because of who he was throughout this entire series.

That made it actually feel like a cool moment.

I still kind of rolled my eyes.

And look, Mike, if I have criticisms of the show, it's not that they shouldn't have leaned into these comic book themes.

And this is like the eternal one, which is the X-Men fundamentally.

The reason they're Professor X's X-Men is because they will not give up on people.

They will look for the good in you.

It just felt, of course, almost classically melodramatic.

I think this is the part where we should talk about the through line between the two series, the thing that...

um that they maintained that you know one of the things that struck a chord with us as children is that x-men fundamentally is an incredibly horny franchise and an extremely extremely horny cartoon that children probably should not have been exposed to the level of horniness and we got some real dirt dog moments professor x being like hey treat me like a dog i wouldn't mind it pure man speaks as if i am your pet

not an entirely displeasing thought hush now beloved you may balk later

Morph and Wolverine, hello, Morph and Wolverine.

Can we talk about that?

So, Morph is like a stand-in for truly, like, as a shapeshifter, a non-binary character in the most literal mutant senses.

And basically, and I was reading an interview with the now, and this is a fascinating subplot of all of this, the now-departed writer of the series, in which he basically says that Morph loves Wolverine and he took on the character of Gene Gray to express it at the moment at which Wolverine, recovering from having the fk Adamantium ripped from his skeleton, needs like a psychological boost basically to stay alive.

she can't see it but i can

i love you logan stay with me

and that i'm just like that's some heavy as well as

to that some super horny

even before then like i you know the glimpses were there when wolverine was sad and morph turns into saber tooth and they like he brings a picnic basket to him and they like go out to like frolic and fight in the woods and then there's like they save rogue and like morph is like snuggled up under Wolverine and Morph's like murder dream, like nightmare sequence is Logan in the shower.

Like, what are we talking about?

And it is, it is important to also note that now Wolverine is semi-canonically in a thruple, has been in a thrupple with Cyclops and Gene Gray for the last few years due to like the horniest diagram in X-Men history, which is Cyclops and Gene Gray's bedroom with a back door to Wolverine's bedroom, like which set the internet world on fire.

And now we have a show where Wolverine is,

in my opinion, canonically banging Morph at some point.

You guys haven't even gotten to the entire finale where Professor X is in Magneto's head and every scene of them, their faces are like one inch apart.

And I'm like, come on.

Come on, guys.

Can I go back to Morph for a quick second, though?

So I thought that the character was largely successful.

I thought the decision to make him like, you know, gender-by-it really made sense and they were very consistent consistent with it.

Like he, he brought some emotion to the series, you know, with his memories and all of that.

But

explained this to me.

If he can morph into everyone, why is he not like the most powerful?

Like, did they ever really address that in the series?

Did I miss it?

Bo DeMayo has said that Morph can morph into anybody who has a physical power.

So he can morph into uh the incredible Hulk.

He can morph into Mr.

Fantastic and stretch.

He can't morph into Cyclops and shoot beams out of his eyes.

Okay, so strength and speed, basically.

And Morph is another character from the series.

My memory of Morph is basically that he was a throw-in in the first cartoon that I hated because he was useless.

And now they did find a way to also rejuvenate the concept of Morph.

But also, let's point out, too, right?

Like you mentioned, amid all of the cucking that was going on through the series,

Rogue and Magneto basically, you know, intimately dancing while flying in Genosha, as everybody was watching as a political move, I suppose.

But also setting the stage for another huge subplot, which is Rogue having to choose between Gambit and Magneto, choosing Magneto, watching Gambit die, and then going back to Magneto, which was a lot to process for me.

And it seemed exclusively to choose Magneto because they can have sex.

Like telling Gambit the dang truth.

I can't touch you, Remit.

Your heart may beat for me, but I can't feel it.

You

light up everything you touch,

but never me.

I love you.

Yeah, yeah.

I also look, I'm willing to just take a lot at face value.

The whole thing of like, due to magnetic, due to magneto's electromagnetic field, they can f.

I'm like,

I'm not going to ask follow-up questions, but sure.

He comes in as her mentor and teacher, and then, you know, it's a little bit glossed over.

It's sort of groomy, it's groomy, yeah, it's a very draw man.

Um, how do we feel about Magneto generally in this series?

Like, what did you guys think of his portrayal?

Um, and then just how things wrapped up with him in the finale.

I love Magneto.

Magneto was bars, all bars, like he was

episode five, which is the gambit death, um, and also like the radic, the further radicalization, the re-radicalization of Magneto.

Um, it just felt like the whole magneto was right thing came to a head there because i was like now i now i've watched the morlocs all these mutants get genocided

And I'm like, yeah, I'm on Magneto's side.

Yeah.

And the whole time, I'm just like, how do I feel about him?

I felt like he was the guy I was rooting for the most out of every character, basically, which I didn't necessarily expect.

But Mina, how did you feel about him?

Magneto was right.

Definitely has a stronger case than Thanos was right.

Another reason why this series is better because it's a case that's actually supported by characterization and writing.

Motive.

Motive, all of it, it makes sense.

And at the end, I did feel conflict.

I wasn't quite sure what outcome I was rooting for.

I mean, I was rooting for the survival of the characters I like, but in terms of like, like, the humans in this series are awful, they are incredibly unsimple.

I mean, including Captain America, by the way.

Well, and that's the other thing, by the way.

Speaking of

well, at the end, so when they cut and there's all these cameos of like Avengers from around the world and various Marvel, none of them are doing,

sir.

King Tachaka is right.

We know next to nothing about asteroid M.

This could do more harm than good.

why aren't they doing anything like it's a planetary risk i think that was very uh deliberate and meant to like kind of illustrate like oh wow like okay the the avengers captain america they're still they have these ties to the government they're in the room when they just make the decision to activate the magneto protocols they call tachaka who's kind of you know raises some questions which is he gets a little bit of a better showing but for the most part it really does

illustrate and I think complicate cooperation.

And, you know, the

title of the final trilogy,

it's tolerance is

extinction.

Yeah.

And it really raised like pretty heavy stuff for children to watch.

My issue.

with X-Men and the way that people who write about X-Men

in general is that like when bad things happen to Spider-Man, it's like happens to Spider-Man, right?

Like Barry Jane breaks up with him, he loses his job, he gets beat up, same thing, you know, like these things happen.

But with bad things happen to X-Men, it happens to an entire race of people.

And like, it's, it's really difficult to watch, especially an allegory for black or queer folks and or queer folks, marginalized folks to watch like.

They do genocide a lot.

Like X-Men have experienced genocide in a lot, especially

it is not, yeah, it's not subtle.

There's Genosha.

There's Scarlet Witch saying no more mutants.

There's like all this genocide that is a part of the franchise that you have to endure.

And one of the things I think was important, an important meta conversation about this was that the Genosha genocide is something that is locked in.

I've tried it all over and over.

Each time we attempt to stop the attack on Genosha, we are temporarily pulled away from the event.

Like it is locked in across multiverses that this will always happen to these people, and you all are going to have to deal with it.

It's really heavy stuff, but at the same time, it's tough to, you know, to experience sometimes.

Like, there are people who have real visceral reactions to these because these are characters we love, but also these are like a reminder that, hey, if you're of the minority, this will happen to you no matter what.

One thing I did not like on just the pure like comic book cartoon series thing,

the Prime Sentinels thing.

Do these people even know what you're doing to them?

I admit the more technical details, but they know they're joining something far greater than themselves.

After this, they wake up in their daily lives with no memory of ever being here.

Then, who knows, maybe a mutant flirts with one of them at a local dive bar and

you said you were building a new sentinel, not weaponizing civilians.

You sound like a dinosaur fretting the fate of an asteroid before impact.

I did the whole like we turned people into sentinels.

Like,

I get,

I mean, they signed up for it, which I feel like is not too unrealistic.

Like, you know, they were taking, they're, they're taking our jobs.

Like, what have they're mad?

They're mad because Colossus in the original series was like a construction worker and was able to build buildings faster than everybody else.

So they turned themselves into sentinels to go and murder mutants.

Like, that seems it does feel like when your neighbor storms the Capitol and you're like, yeah, I probably should have seen that coming.

There was a scene with President Kelly, I can't remember what episode it was, where he says, I'm not giving you guys what you want.

He's talking to a thing Cyclops, but he says, imagine if it was someone else.

They would be way worse than me.

And if scared voters see me helping your kind,

sorry, son, just

unfortunate optics.

Optics, sir?

Guess if Junosha had looked more human, you would be more focused on death tolls over polls.

Now, hold up.

I'm playing politics here to ensure someone less less kind to your cause doesn't end up in the office you're so quick to disrespect.

Be patient, Scott.

And I was like, oh my god, if this is not the most nuanced depiction of like moderate politics I've ever seen.

And like, I, yeah, I mean, there's just so the allegory in this series felt a bit more intense and heavy-handed at times than the child, the 92 series, but again, I think that's just because it was for adults.

So we've mentioned Thanos a couple of times here.

I do wonder like how we would be seeing all of this if we weren't reacting also to the latest slate of just Marvel stuff that has been deeply disappointing.

If I watched this after I watched Infinity War or Endgame, would I be so blown away by the basic idea of good writing and historical analogy?

Because I just feel like I've been thirsting for stuff because it's just been so blah across the board that they soared over a low bar as well.

My frustration with a lot of the latest Marvel stuff, and I actually haven't caught some of it, so I don't want to paint too broad a brush.

Aside from like, it always seems to end these overwrought action sequences and just so much CGI, is like the really the excessive multiverse aspect of of it and the complexity and that seems to be replacing, you know, in some cases, plot.

Yes, I appreciated the simplicity of it, even though it is a complicated show.

And I'm actually a little bit worried about the teaser for next season.

Yes.

When they do, so this is not, if you're listening to this, you've finished the series.

The X-Men are not sucked into the black hole that, you know, fixes the asteroid problem.

They are split up into two groups across across different timelines.

Half of them go into the past, Egypt, where ancient Egypt, pardon me, where you see the original mutant, aka apocalypse, which, you know, I mean, I grew up loving the apocalypse stuff.

So I was like, yeah.

And then

some of them will go into the future where they see

a young Nathan Summers.

And then I forget the woman's name, but it's Rachel Summers' character as well.

So it's cool, but I'm always like, ooh, I really don't want like multiple timelines and like confusion.

It actually, David kind of made me think of some of these latest Marvel movies where personally, I don't enjoy it that much.

There was a lot of sort of

hypothesizing that this could lead into Deadpool and Wolverine, which I'm glad it did not.

Like I'm glad that this had its own standalone thing.

you know the the speed at which they've been moving through these things maybe we'll get like three episodes of this time timey stuff and we can move on i i really like the fact that after the the genosha thing everybody just assumed that there would be a time travel and it would get like wiped off and it'd be non-consequential.

And we would do, and they stayed away from that, which I'm happy about.

One of the lessons of this series that I think Marvel could learn from with their other stuff.

And one of the reasons why I liked it, aside from the writing being amazing and the characters, is how simple the fights were.

I mean, the fight scene, and granted, it's animation, obviously, so you can do whatever you want, but I found the fight scenes, the battle scenes to be very easy to follow, even when they're being fought on multiple planes.

And I think to like the latest Marvel movies, half half the time I have no freaking clue what's going on.

And that was something that I think was like really remarkable about this series is like the action was amazing.

I mean, look, what did animation teach us about how the MCU, and by that I mean just like movie, live action movies are going to be disappointing?

It's an interesting question because I now prefer the animation

just because I don't have the confidence in the live action.

And I say that as somebody who watched, I think every, I think I've seen David every MCU series or movie.

And

no, it's just, it's, I watched like Quantum Mania and I was like, this looks like.

Yeah.

And was confused, like, and has ended up like confused sometimes about what's going on.

As somebody who like reads some of the comic books, I'm still like, this was so

this is competently done, competently done fight scenes, giving every Jubilee got a moment.

Game over, Please OI.

Everything matters in these fights.

It's not just like we're just throwing stuff and just making people fight.

Rogue gets her moment.

His name was Cambod.

Remember it.

Literally clapped his ass.

Incredible.

No, but I would draw like, like, something instructive to me.

I saw Cheng-Chi and the legend of the 10 rings in the theater.

The fight scene on the bus rules.

Yeah, because at the end, it's the same.

It's like that Marvel, like, oh my God, I can't.

There's all that going on, the CGI.

Keep it simple with these fight scenes because they don't have to be that convoluted.

On the point of Jubilee, I do want to ask you guys, so I hated her in the original series, which was really tough,

you know, as Asian representation because she was a dork and her power sucked and she wore like a raincoat.

They, I thought she, along with several other characters, was pretty heavily rehabilitated for me in this series.

Even the video game episode, which is probably the weakest one,

was still entertaining.

She got funny lines.

So I have to ask you, like we nodded to this earlier, which characters do you think in this version got the biggest glow up from the previous X-Men?

I'll go a little bit offbeat with this, which is to say I really liked what they did with Gambit,

including killing him.

And my disappointment is that the end of this, the mid-roll credit scene indicates that he's not actually going to stay dead, is that he will be the horseman of the apocalypse, probably death.

And I'm just like, oh, I thought it was a little braver what they did with Gambit, including, by the way, his outfits, which I was like, yo, casual Gambit.

We'll talk about the casual wear.

Casual Gambit.

Oh, Gambit upset a lot of people.

Beta Gambit with his showing his belly button.

How dare he while cooking beignets?

What a beta meal.

Yeah, he got a huge glow up.

Gene Gray, I thought, had a pretty cool glow up.

And the fact that like the joke is is that there is a really disturbing, but kind of hilarious, a supercut of Gene Gray fainting in the original, like every time anything happened.

But we got like super power Gene Gray here and Gene Gray, who was like, you know, pushing Cyclops a little bit.

I mean, you know, we can be angry at her because she definitely made out with Wolverine before she got mad at Cyclops, but that's neither here nor there.

But she was dealing with her clone.

It's she had her off chest.

She had stuff going on with Gene Gray.

And the Gene Gray storm relationship was really really cool that was cool mind your weather weather your mind whoever wrote that they took like the net they took the rest i know they wrote that and just took the day off make them mind your weather sister and them weather your mind

They just put their pencil down and was like, I'm going to Cinnabon.

I'll catch y'all tomorrow.

Like that, they had a really beautiful relationship.

Storm cheering when Gene Gray turned into Phoenix was like really awesome to see us to see too.

So that, you know, yeah, Gene Gray, I think for me.

That was another thing.

Like, again,

there were some new interpersonal dynamics that I really liked in this series that were different.

You see the Storm-Gene relationship.

Another smaller thing that I loved was Magneto, like Storm being the only one he respects.

And then ultimately her, what they did to her driving him.

to retaliate when um you know at the end in episode three when storm loses her powers uh i i really liked that like it just checked out it made sense and it was something kind of new and fresh is it telling that we haven't even mentioned Bastion by name, who is the super villain of this thing, the guy that ostensibly the X-Men were fighting and then trying to convert and then quote unquote killed, although it seems like he may also be alive at the end.

The mutant who hates his mutinous so much that he wants to destroy all mutants.

Who exactly is Bastion?

Bastion.

He's a sentinel, given human form.

Do you understand the futility of fighting the future?

By the time we got his origin story, I just started referring to him as metal Jason Whitlock, but that's neither here nor there.

We needed someone saying to Bastion, you

bastard.

He was a good villain.

He was a good villain.

He stood for something, David explained it.

And I think it was believable the way they gave him some backstory was believable.

He was sort of in between a lot of different factions and that he was his like motives and ends were changing as a result of that and i think it made sense he wasn't like an apocalypse level baddie though and but that's it's season one right you can't immediately come out with one of the best villains in season one right um another little touch that i loved was when at the end of episode five when gambit dies um they do the thing the nfl does with the like piano acoustic version of the theme song on the way out.

They did the finale too.

Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Where they

with the choir backing them.

The orchestral

da da da da da da.

Yes, the orchestral choir version.

And the finale was fucking amazing.

I feel like beyond the speed running through history X-Men lore and beyond like the fan service, I'm trying to think of like what other lessons are going to be taken forward by Marvel having now experienced a thing that has pulled so crazily well.

And I think a basic one might just be, please make less stuff every year and make better stuff.

Maybe that's the most simple one.

It's just like.

If I'm thinking about what I consume from the Marvel cinematic universe, broadly speaking, including the cartoons this year, I'm thinking about X-Men 97 and not anything else.

When it comes to making content, stories, writing are what matters.

That is why this series was great.

I mean, there's a lot of things we liked about it.

The look of it, I thought, was good as well.

The voice acting was excellent, but the writing is why this rocked.

I mean, it just, from start to finish, it was so unbelievably well written.

We've been talking about some of the quotable lines, but it's beyond that.

It's, there was no,

I didn't cringe at all.

I mean, there was no corn.

The exposition felt seamless, the dialogue felt realistic, the characters were all very true to their stories.

And I think when we think about like these big, you know, huge action series and action movies, that tends to be what seems to be overworked and sacrificed and overwrought in the name of fan service or, you know, these overly CGI'd action sequences.

So to me, that's just.

whoever the the people who wrote this series just knocked it out of the park yeah for me i mean along those lines is give me characters I care about.

Like, give me people.

Like, you're giving me so many of these like big explosions and all this other stuff.

Like, like you mentioned, Shang-Chi, by the end of the movie, I didn't really care about the characters as much as like, are they going to defeat the like dragon or whatever monster that popped out of the thing?

Like to me, it's, I, I'm looking at the like scale of the cinematic universe and looking at the new event, the new people who are going to be Avengers, for instance, and they've been around for years and I don't necessarily care about that many of them in terms of like what what they're going to do.

What is their moment going to do?

When endgame happens, or even before endgame, when Infinity War happens and Spider-Man disappears and he has his moment with Tony Stark and they have the, like, do you care about that, right?

X-Men, I care about the characters.

I care about what Wolverine is going to do next.

I care about Cyclops and Gene's relationship.

When Storm does something badass, I want to cheer.

When Rogue said his name was Gambit, remember him.

I'm like, that's, that's it.

You know, like, I care about the characters.

And I just don't, I think they've, we've sacrificed a lot of that for the big moments.

When Rogue scolds Professor X about how Gambit should be remembered, Remy was the most Cajun man I ever met.

As much as he wanted to escape the bayou, he knew our lives are about what bits of us we leave behind and what we carry into the future.

Maybe if you saw us as people and not students, you'd have realized that.

The nuance in like you only thought of him as a mutant.

Yeah.

And actually, he was this other thing that everybody should have a three-dimensionality

that is acknowledged was also just a level of character development and investment.

And the other thing that Marvel has sort of like fallen into, because I think a lot of what happened with the Avengers stuff, which is where we started the conversation, is that they sort of realized, okay, people like funny.

And so they started foregrounding funny.

And so many of the movies have tried to lead with humor.

and some of it has worked for Ragnarok is amazing, but the imitators of that and it gets to Gardens of the Galaxy, which started off funny and then started being less and less so because it tried to foreground it.

I was like, foreground what X-Men 97 foregrounded, right?

Which is like a sincere appreciation for character and superpowers.

Like, don't ever underestimate how you need to be culminating this shit in an awesome fight sequence.

Yeah.

Like, please reverse engineer from there because that's ultimately why we're watching this stuff and not just watching you know documentaries that can give us the character development and the history, but not the superpowers.

Like a series of memes is

what, like, a lot of movies these days feels like if you tell good stories with good characters, people will come, and then everything else is sort of incidental to that: the humor, the callbacks, all of that.

That's not the points, not the main thing.

The stories are the main thing.

Mina, David Dennis Jr.,

thank you for doing this.

Thank you for reliving our childhood together.

I just want more.

That's all I want now.

I just want more of this.

When is season two coming?

Can we hurry up?

It's already been written, apparently.

Let's do it.

Let's do it.

Hurry up.

This has been Pablo Torre finds out a Meadowlark media production.

And I'll talk to you next time.