Time to wake up with some cereal and get ready for our cartoons again! We finally got our first look at what the new animated series X-Men ’97 will bring to us, and god, do I miss the days of waking up to watch my cartoons every weekend.
There are few theme songs out there that will make Marvel fans extremely hyped, and the theme for X-Men: The Animated Series is definitely high up on the list. A thrilling time capsule of the ’90s, the cartoon was, for a lot of ’90s kids, their entry point into comics and loving the X-Men as a team. I remember a lot of the ’90s but nothing as clearly as watching this show on television.
Woven into the fabric of so many nerds, X-Men: The Animated Series still holds a special place in our hearts, which is why it has been so exciting to see news about X-Men ’97 hitting the internet! The trailer shows us a world without Charles Xavier and what the X-Men must do to uphold his teachings—especially when Magneto comes to take everything that once belonged to Charles, including Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters.
The tension is high, Logan has a quip, and Scott’s in charge of things. We get to see Rogue and Gambit back in action, and everything about it just really feels like being transported back to being a kid, waiting for my show to start.
The music, the characters, the animation style! All of it makes up the fabric of X-Men: The Animated Series and why we love it. Seeing how this version of the show is set to bring it all back just makes this all feel that much more special.
Right back where we started
Nostalgia is not always great. It is how we end up with half-baked shows or ideas that are not fully the series we remember. What has made waiting for X-Men ’97 so exciting has been how true to the original series it feels. We are going right back to when the show ended and giving the kid in all of us a chance to enjoy a show again.
There were many cartoons from this era that meant a lot to all of us nerds. We had shows about Spider-Man that brought the wall-crawler and his villains to life and we had Batman trying to protect Gotham, but what made X-Men: The Animated Series so special was that it gave many of us our first taste of this world.
While X-Men ’97 is going to bring a whole new generation of fans into these characters and let them find their own love of the X-Men, it’s still very much for us and that childlike wonder we all still have for our favorite mutants.
So I hope you spend your day singing the theme song from X-Men: The Animated Series and remember just how much fun we all had in the ’90s. Now we just need Disney+ to have an entire lineup of cartoons like this that we can all watch on Saturday mornings—for the memories, of course.
(featured image: Disney+)
