Originally published at: The X-Men series that was lost to time | Boing Boing
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Me aged 6: Mum can I have an X-Men the animated series video please?
Mum: We’ve got one at home
The X-Men animated series video at home
We got it in a charity shop (goodwill for US folks), and it had the one episode on and a weird episode of Spider-Man and his amazing friends with the X-Men in and a half naked robot man was taking over the mansion.
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This gives me another excuse to post the intro to the Japanese dub of the 90s X-Men cartoon!
This video has the same 1st opening, as well as some Japanese commercials for the X-Men toys and comics, and the ending credits to the show:
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I didn’t find it too dissimilar to X-Men: The Animated Series. Other than the animation quality, it easily passes as if it were a pilot episode.
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I missed this when it first released, but I picked up a (VHS!) copy for my son when he was a lot younger. Played the hell out of that thing.
It’s really not all that bad for the period, aside from Logan having an Aussie accent.
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The Paul Hogan effect!
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The story goes that this was the basis for the popular X-Men arcade game, though it too took some liberties. (Who would have thought that Colossus never had that explodey attack in any other canon?)
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“That’s not a knife. These are knives.”
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I can’t unsee that now.
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Also, there’s a creepy ad at the beginning where Spider-Man tells you to vote. So, yeah, there’s that.
You mean the ad where we get to see Spider-Man attempt voter fraud? Peter Parker is signing the voter registration as Spider-Man.
The main way I found out this even existed was when Marvel published a graphic novel using cels from the episode as art. It eventually showed up on a kids’ TV channel over here as a schedule filler.
Yes, the classic Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, and Iron Man series were massive hits in the 60s
Spider-Man was. Fantastic Four was canceled after one season. There was no '60s Iron Man series; I think you’re thinking of the Iron Man segments on The Marvel Super Heroes, which I’d also be hard-pressed to describe as a “massive hit”.
The '92 series was helmed by the same producers as Pryde: Margaret Loesch, Will Meugniot, and Larry Houston. I’m reading Previously on X-Men and Houston says that the two-part opener with the Sentinels that kicks off the '92 series is the story he wanted to do in '89, but the toy people insisted they introduce Magneto and the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants in the first episode instead. When you look at Pryde as an attempt to sell toys, it explains why it’s got such a giant, unwieldy cast (even by X-Men standards). I guess that’s one way to get enough characters to fill an arcade game out of a single half-hour episode.
I find it interesting that “teenage girl joins the X-Men and acts as a point-of-view character to introduce them to the audience” is the plot that survived from X-Men #1 in 1963, into this '80s TV pilot, the '90s series, and the 2000 movie, but that it’s a different girl in each version (Jean Grey, Kitty Pryde, Jubilee, and Rogue, respectively).
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