X-Men: The Animated Series is widely beloved by fans of Marvel and animation
alike. Remember Wolverine's darkest hour? Or the coming of Apocalypse?
Keep watching for the best moments from the show's run.
It doesn't take long for X-Men: The Animated Series to start delivering some of its most
iconic moments. The two-part pilot, "Night of the Sentinels", is absolutely full of them,
which is one of the reasons why it makes such a great introduction to the show's characters.
If you happened to get "Night of the Sentinels" on a VHS tape from Pizza Hut back in the day,
then you probably watched it pretty much constantly throughout the summer of '93.
If not, well, that's what Disney+ is for.
A few minutes into the episode, the series introduces Jubilee,
a young mutant who would serve as the audience's viewpoint character for most of the series.
After learning that the government has dispatched giant robots to round up mutants,
she does what most people do when they get bad news — she goes and plays some video games.
In her case, it's the arcade at the mall, and it's here that she runs into a problem.
Jubilee's mutant power mostly involves shooting pyrotechnic sparks out of her hands,
but one of its less convenient side effects is that she tends to accidentally make electronics
explode when she gets emotional. When this happens at the arcade,
the manager gets understandably angry, and this is the exchange that follows:
"Do you know how much that game cost?"
"Yeah, a quarter."
Talk about a slam dunk.
The first proper mission that the X-Men go on in The Animated Series
doesn't exactly go well. While the team does manage to destroy the government's database
of mutant identities and rescue Jubilee from Henry Gyrich, their victory comes with a cost.
During their mission, the shape-shifting X-Man known as Morph is apparently killed in action by
the Sentinels. This, of course, mostly came as a shock to the viewers who didn't realize he'd
been created for the show and was therefore fated to be killed off in its early stages.
Wolverine takes Morph's death especially hard, and he levels the blame squarely on Cyclops
for leaving his fellow mutant behind to die — which earns ol' Scott Summers a punch in the
gut from Logan. When their fight is broken up by Jean Grey, Wolverine decides to take out his
anger on Cyclops in another way. Before heading out to drown his sorrows in a local biker bar,
Wolverine warms up by slashing his claws into the roof of Scotts boxy, early '90s sports car.
In a pretty impressive display of thoroughness, he cuts through the entire
frame, destroying pretty much the entire car in the process, and when Jean tries to intervene,
Wolverine offers up a line that hits the signature sweet spot of equal parts goofy and badass:
"Tell Cyclops I made him a convertible."
The X-Men are arguably the greatest ensemble in the history of superhero comics, with a roster of
characters that are compelling and well-crafted in their own right. They work best as a team,
however, playing off of each other and cultivating the connections that form the addictive drama at
the heart of the group. That said, it's pretty obvious that Wolverine has been the breakout
star for about 40 years now, since shortly after he joined the team all the way back in 1975.
And really, he should be. Wolverine is a superhero,
a secret agent, a samurai and a berserker all at once,
he's got a fascinating, tortured past, and his adamantium claws are straight-up iconic.
Even by X-Men standards, that's a lot, but it also means there's something for everyone to like.
However, it also means that, every now and then, you have to take him down a peg.
Case in point? The Animated Series' fifth episode, "Captive Hearts." In addition to being the episode
in which this happens, it's also the one where the team faces off against the Morlocks, an
underground gang of mutants who have been rejected by society for their grotesque appearances.
"Underground" being the operative word, since they literally live in sewers and subway tunnels. And
while beating up the homeless might not seem like a crime that would require the attention
of the X-Men, it soon turns out the Morlocoks are more formidable than anyone could have imagined.
So when Wolverine tries to fight Annalee,
she casts a telepathic illusion that makes Wolverine think that he is, as she says:
"Covered with scorpions, covered with scorpions!"
"No! Covered with scorpions!"
How's that for a humbling experience?
The debate over whether comic books have any real educational or literary value has been raging for
about as long as they've existed. Even today, when comic books are criticized as childish or simple,
the people who defend them will usually cite the same couple of examples from 35
years ago, such as Watchmen or Maus. Nothing against those books, of course,
but it's always worth mentioning that the X-Men have been serving as a long-running and
hugely important metaphor for the struggles against bigotry and inequality for decades.
This metaphor is explored many times in the comics, but one of the best
instances occurs in The Animated Series. In the show's third episode,
"Enter Magneto," Beast is put on trial for breaking into the Mutant Control Agency's
headquarters and destroying the records that they were using to round up mutants.
As part of his defense, Beast paraphrases Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, trying
to convince both the judge and the assembled crowd that mutants and humans are the same.
"If you prick us, do we not bleed?"
Is it corny? Sure. Is it also the perfect way for noted turbo-nerd Hank McCoy to make his point,
while also sparking an interest in Shakespeare for the show's younger audience? Absolutely. Despite
the inherent goofiness of this moment, it's part of one of the best-acted scenes in the whole
series — one that is only made more affecting by the fact that, despite his moral high ground,
Beast is denied bail anyway. Teaching kids about the enduring themes of Shakespeare is one thing,
but teaching them that the system can be stacked against their heroes is something else entirely.
In the first episode of The Animated Series, the mutant Gambit is introduced doing three things:
hitting on a girl working at a store that sells a suspicious amount of playing cards, shoplifting
a deck when the girl gets distracted by killer robots, and suggesting she get insurance to pay
for the subsequent damage. And his sleazy uncle vibes only get more intense as the show goes on.
Gambit's absolute best — or worst — moment comes in the sixth episode, "Cold Vengeance," in which
the X-Men investigate the island of Genosha. Unlike other countries, this tropical paradise has
been extremely welcoming to the mutant population, and the team decides that they need to check it
out to see if their kindness is legit. Spoiler warning for a TV show from almost 30 years ago:
it's not. The infiltration team is made up of Storm, Jubilee, and Gambit,
who visit the island under the pretense that they're average, non-mutant tourists.
Aside from the extremely dubious tactic of sending a 15-year-old who shoots fireworks
out of her hands on an undercover mission, the funniest moment of the episodes comes
when the trio is checking into the hotel. Here, Gambit notices a sign indicating a
"Mutant Discount." Being a professional thief, Gambit turns to Storm and asks:
"Whaddya think? We'd save maybe 10%, n'est pas?"
"Just put it back, Gambit."
This is a guy who is willing to put the entire mutant population of the world
at risk for the sake of, at most, $50. You've got to admire a hustle like that.
The greatest tragedy of the X-Men: The Animated Series is that, in the show's entire 76-episode
run, there's only one holiday special: season four's "Have Yourself a Morlock Little Christmas."
The good news, though, is that it's absolutely fantastic. First there's the opening scene,
in which Cyclops sings "Deck the Halls" so poorly that you genuinely can't help but wonder if he's
ever heard a song in his life, much less a Christmas carol. And there's the bizarre
church bell and trumpet remix of the theme song that plays in the background in a few key scenes.
The best moment by far, however, involves Gambit and Jean Grey cooking up Christmas dinner.
For one thing, these two characters seem to despise each other with a fervor that makes
Wolverine and Cyclops look like Batman and Robin — at least as far as their time in the kitchen is
concerned. Gambit fires the first shot by retching in disgust after tasting some of Jean's cooking,
and by the time he's trying to give the ham a so-called "juicing up," Jean is threatening
to beat him to death with a gigantic piece of broccoli unless he leaves the kitchen.
In the grandest and most long-standing Marvel tradition, the two characters end up taking a
"fight then team up" approach to dinner, only to find that the rest of the group has decided
to spend Christmas with the Morlocks instead. When Jean suggests that they just warm it all
up in the microwave on the 26th, Gambit replies with the show's most intense line read by far:
"Gambit does not make TV dinners."
Sometimes, the best parts of a show aren't the goofy subplots or the compelling dramatic beats.
Sometimes, you just need to see something flat-out awesome.
Take season one's "Come the Apocalypse," for example.
There's a lot to like about this episode in terms of classic, action-packed X-Men thrills. The main
plot finds Apocalypse gathering up disaffected mutants in order to find his Four Horsemen,
while Rogue faces an internal struggle over the possibility of losing her powers via a new mutant
cure. The best moment, though, comes at the end of the episode. After he's revealed as the sinister
mastermind behind the mutant "cure" and his horsemen are defeated, Apocalypse decides to bail.
So naturally, he takes his secret elevator down to his secret headquarters under Stonehenge,
and then flies away in the transforming spaceship that he hid there a thousand years ago.
It doesn't hurt to take a step back and actually think about what you've just watched:
a spaceship emerging from Stonehenge after a battle between super-evolved humans and the Four
Horsemen of the Apocalypse. This kind of thing is exactly why people love superhero stories.
One of the coolest things about the The Animated Series is how it hints at the long history of
both the X-Men and the wider Marvel Universe. Some episodes feature flashbacks to the early
days of the original X-Men, while others make offhand references to characters such
as Deadpool and Punisher. Occasionally, the show throws in a full cameo, too.
This sort of thing only really heated up once Spider-Man: The Animated Series hit the airwaves
in 1994, paving the way for its own set of crossovers. But X-Men got the ball rolling,
and the show's biggest crossover was also one of the best episodes of the series.
"Old Soldiers" is one of the few high spots in X-Men's final season. The superhero show was
originally meant to end after season four's multi-part "Beyond Good and Evil" saga,
and the last minute reprieve meant a change of animation studios and a less-than-stellar
redesign for the main characters. This episode, though, made it all worth it.
"Old Soldiers" is very loosely inspired by Uncanny X-Men #268, the classic story
in which Captain America and Wolverine team up to rescue a young Black Widow from Nazis. The
animated version doesn't have Black Widow, but it does have Cap and Wolverine taking
on a Hitler's minions and their secret weapon: a giant killer robot commissioned by the Red Skull.
It can't be overstated how awesome this was for kids of the '90s. The runaway success of the MCU
means Marvel crossovers are commonplace nowadays, but "Old Soldiers" was a novelty at the time — it
was Captain America showing up on an X-Men TV series! If you were a kid who loved Marvel Comics,
then Cap showing up in all his Nazi-stompin' glory was a treat all on its own.
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