While everyone’s talking about the revival of the 1997 Fox Kids X-Men cartoon, which isn’t doing well in the ratings after Disney+ and Marvel Studios chased off so many Marvel comic fans from the platform there aren’t enough left of the nostalgic to watch, it was not the first attempt at an X-Men cartoon. In the 1980s, Marvel Productions wanted to build off their success with Spider-Man and the Incredible Hulk by bringing the mutant heroes to television. The X-Men even appeared in a few episodes of Spider-Man & His Amazing Friends, which had Spidey teaming up with former founder Iceman and new character Firestar, both depicted as former X-Men. This led to a few visits to the mansion and the first time we saw Canadian Wolverine with an Australian accent.
Thankfully, more fitting actors were chosen for the pilot, “Pryde Of The X-Men”, which sadly never got picked up by NBC or any other network at the time. Fans of the X-Men show would get to see the first attempt when it replaced RoboCop for a week in the original Marvel Action Universe syndicated programming block that included truncated episodes of Amazing Friends and toy adaptation Dino-Riders. (Marvel was making a RoboCop comic at the time but how did Dino-Riders fit in there? Good show, though.) It was also released on home video and I think I have the coffee table sized screencap comic adaptation around here someplace.
The story shared a few ideas from the more successful 1990s pilot in that they used an existing teen girl to introduce us to the team and Magneto was an early opponent as he tried to destroy the world. This time it was Kitty Pryde, who Spidey fans would already have seen as Sprite in the Amazing Friends appearances, but this would be how she joined the team. Magneto has plans to throw a comet at the Earth and hope somehow enough mutants survived so he could take over. I don’t think he thought this plan out very well. Mutant hatred is still a plot device and obstacle for the heroes rather alleged racist allegory, as we discussed earlier this week, and Stan Lee serves as narrator as he did for Spider-Man & His Amazing Friends and The Incredible Hulk for NBC. Too bad all we got out of it was a video game because I would have watched this along with the 80s Spidey and Hulk shows. Enjoy.
The Truth About Stan Lee’s X-Men
I need to get my posting schedule back on track after yesterday’s lateness. So I’m tagging in some help from the Literature Devil.
As much as I try to avoid political discussions here, as my focus is on how the activists took over, it gets tougher and tougher as they replace the traditional superhero narratives with their own. Instead of physical action they’d rather get into social conflict, one-sided sociopolitical pandering born of stereotypes, and the everything for meeeeeeeeeeeeeee crowd in general insisting anything popular must be made for them. As “geek media” grows in popularity the anti-geek Hollywood types try to wrestle superheroes away while the businessmen who don’t understand or care about superheroes are ignorant of the whole failure, wondering why what used to be huge profit is taking such huge hits.
As the cool cliques and activists try to defend their position, the new warcry is “but it was always like this”. This falls on its face when you realize “if this is how it always was then why is it only now being ridiculed as it fails miserably and ruins both pop culture icons and the very marketing they wanted to use to push their agendas, whether it was money, ego, or politics?”, which the usual suspects have no actual answer for. Now the claim is that Stan Lee always meant for the mutants of the X-Men to reflect not just outcasts in general but the specific outcasts of the latest cause du jour, that Professor X was a stand-in for Martin Luther King, Jr and Magneto for Malcolm X (the wrong guy got the “X” in his alternate name?), and that it was always political or “woke”. So if it was always “woke” why do the anti-woke crowd or general people of all political views, races, genders, and orientations suddenly upset with what’s come out the last few years to what was escapist entertainment that maybe made them think about the world around them without heavy-handed preaching a one-sided narrow view ridden with stereotypes and false understandings?
In the following video by Literature Devil, he disputes these claims not only with the history of the X-Men but Stan Lee’s own words and the words of other creators who came after him, including the one who leaned more into the bigotry allegory when he took over. He also looks at depictions of the Hulk and She-Hulk in light of the differences between the MCU and the comics and what both messed up in recent years.
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Posted by ShadowWing Tronix on May 16, 2024 in Marvel Spotlight and tagged Chris Claremont, commentary, Hulk, Literature Devil, Marvel Comics, Marvel Universe, She-Hulk, Stan Lee, X-Men.
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