Did Spider-Man make an unapproved cameo in the X-Men animated series? Ever wonder how popular
the show was when it first premiered? This is the untold truth of "X-Men: The Animated Series."
In the 1980s, Margaret Loesch was working as a producer in TV animation,
helping to get shows like G.I. Joe and Muppet Babies on the air. But she still
couldn't get her passion project off the ground: a cartoon adaptation of Marvel's X-Men comics.
While working at Hanna-Barbera, Loesch met Stan Lee, Marvel's prolific creator and company face,
and pitched him on an X-Men show. She recalled telling Lee in the book Previously on X-Men,
"It's really about a group of disenfranchised teenagers,
and a lot of teenagers feel that way … so why wouldn't this be a hit with kids?"
Lee was convinced, and the two then set out to pitch the X-Men show. Alas, ABC,
NBC, and CBS all passed. Loesch had all but given up until a fourth broadcast network emerged. She
eventually became head of Fox Kids, the division of the Fox network responsible for its Saturday
morning lineup. So in her new position, she commissioned an X-Men series in 1992.
The creative staff for X-Men: The Animated Series came together in early 1992,
with Fox looking to premiere the series in the fall of that year. Considering the long production
lead times required for animation, showrunner Eric Lewald's team had mere weeks to come up
with a "series bible," which is a 20-to-100 page document outlining the show's world, characters,
and aims. Lewald basically had to figure out the entire series in that short period,
and it didn't help that he wasn't intimately familiar with the X-Men comic books.
A first step toward acquainting himself and his team with the mutant superheroes would be to
acquire as many X-Men back issues as possible, but that proved difficult. The title was relatively
obscure, and Lewald had to make do with whatever source material he could find. He procured it all
in a haphazard way, buying up old anthologies, borrowing issues from friends, and getting Marvel
Comics to black-and-white photocopy old issues and mail them. Most of the show bible was even heavily
influenced by the X-Men board game The Uncanny X-Men Special! Campaign Set, which included
character descriptions, a map of the X-Mansion, and The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe.
While the look and feel of X-Men: The Animated Series comes from the
post-1975 reboot of the comic series, Eric Lewald didn't directly adapt old issues.
That's in part because a comic book's method of storytelling is significantly
different from that of a TV show. As Lewald explained to Blast from the Past in 2007,
"Time the actual action in a book, and you get about three minutes."
Longer arcs from the comics were a better fit for adaptation, but as Lewald noted,
"There we had to deal with the various secondary plots that weave in and out of the main story."
Some of those plots worked for a children's cartoon, while others didn't. As Lewald put it,
"If you were to compare the actual '[Dark] Phoenix' books to the animation story,
I'd wager that about 50 percent of the original was trimmed away."
Furthermore, Lewald's team couldn't just take old material and animate
it because the public at large wasn't terribly familiar with
the vagaries of the franchise. As Sewald told Comics Beat in 2017,
"When we started, we were telling stories primarily
for people unfamiliar with the X-Men world."
"No one knows who will be a mutant at birth.
We discover our extraordinary powers at about your age."
X-Men: The Animated Series features a massive cast of characters. In addition to those who
enjoyed regular appearances, many more mutants arrived for cameos, one-offs, or
to populate finite story arcs and then disappear thereafter. Deciding what mutants from the comics
to use as the main characters was especially challenging for the cartoon's developers. Marvel
helped the show's writers determine which of them were must-haves, such as Professor X,
Cyclops, Wolverine, and Jean Grey. But, as Eric Lewald told Blast from the Past,
"Beyond that, any out of a couple dozen major mutants
could have filled out the rest of the core."
Lewald and his team decided on Storm because her ability to control the weather would translate
well in a visual medium like TV. Rogue was picked because her inability to be touched
offered an emotionally compelling characteristic, plus her strength and flight would work well in
fight sequences. Additionally, Lewald knew that the show needed a juvenile character,
and Marvel reps liked Jubilee more than other young mutants. And then Morph,
based on a relatively obscure comic character named Changeling, was added for the specific
purpose of having a sympathetic friend of Wolverine who would be killed early on.
"This one's for you, Morph!"
Fox ordered X-Men in February 1992 and wanted to debut it that fall — a rather daunting prospect.
But somehow, Eric Lewald and company were ready for their premiere date, and X-Men: The Animated
Series debuted on Fox on October 31, 1992, with the episode "Night of the Sentinels: Part 1."
Fox was so confident in the series and wanted to give it as big of a launch as possible that it
aired the initial episode at 7:00 PM. The series then moved to its regular Saturday morning
time slot, albeit sporadically. "Night of the Sentinels, Part 2" aired on November 7,
but then the quickly building audience was left without a new episode for three weeks.
And then the next new installments didn't air until late January.
According to Lewald, the gap was because of animation problems, which took months to
fix. This led to major production delays. But once the show got going with regular airings,
ratings soared and X-Men became one of the biggest hits in Saturday morning history.
As many as 8 million homes tuned in, and some weeks,
it would attract more viewers than the competition on ABC, CBS, and NBC combined.
X-Men: The Animated Series marks a watershed moment in both comic adaptations and Saturday
morning cartoons. It was one of the first shows to present Marvel Comics characters and stories in a
serious and dramatic way, and it was also one of the few kids cartoons that was serialized.
Making such an ambitious series would require a very special cast of voice actors,
and X-Men producers found them, though not right away. The casting and voice directors,
who were used to wacky Saturday morning cartoons, didn't understand the show's vibe, so they hired
actors who did a lot of silly, broad voices. As Eric Lewald told The Hollywood Reporter in 2017,
"We tried to convey to them what was different about X-Men,
and they didn't hear it. They thought, 'They want to do something goofy and childish.'"
The initial recordings were so bad that the crew had to throw everything out and start over.
The voice team worked out of Canada and recruited veterans
of the Toronto entertainment world, including Alyson Court as Jubilee
and Cal Dodd as Wolverine. Interestingly enough, those two already knew each other.
"Is the child all right?" "Not for long."
"They were fighting, and I wanted to help him, and boom!"
For many Marvel fans, Cal Dodd's portrayal of Wolverine on X-Men:
The Animated Series is the definitive take on the clawed and conflicted Canadian mutant.
Dodd pulled from a number of disparate sources to get the voice just right. During an audition,
a casting director told him to emulate tough-guy actor Steve McQueen because Wolverine is similarly
introspective and quiet. As Dodd recalled to The Hollywood Reporter, he also threw
Clint Eastwood and Western star Ward Bond into the mix. Meanwhile, Wolverine's scrappiness
came straight from Dodd, who is a Canadian as well. As he revealed to The Hollywood Reporter,
"I had grown up in a small town with many fights. I had seen these kinds of guys,
so I threw in a bit of [raspy voiced DJ] Wolfman Jack."
Dodd is proud of his work and how it affected the viewers, including one in particular.
An overweight, bullied, and depressed fan sent a letter in which he revealed that
he had considered suicide. But, as Dodd recalled,
"He was so in love with the X-Men Saturday morning cartoon and Wolverine [...] He was
about to jump off his roof, but then he said 'I can't do this, I'm going to
miss the Saturday morning X-Men episode.' That's the kind of impact it had on kids."
"You called me friend."
One of the most memorable elements of X-Men: The Animated Series is its opening sequence.
While character-identifying clips and scenes of mutant battles fly by at frenetic pace,
the soundtrack offers a suitably high-energy theme song built around a speedy, ominous, and totally
catchy hard rock guitar riff. And let’s not forget those attention-grabbing keyboard stabs.
The theme song has brought a lot of joy to a lot of people, even independently of the series, as
amateur cover versions are all over YouTube. But it wasn't such a lovely experience actually making
the song, according to composer Ron Wasserman. He wrote several songs for X-Men producer Saban
Entertainment in the '90s, including the theme for Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers.
Wasserman claims that the company cut him off from talking to anyone at Marvel or Fox about how the
song should sound, fearing that they'd poach him for higher-profile composing work. Nevertheless,
representatives of Saban were very hands-on and critical. As Wasserman told Inverse in 2016,
"[X-Men] was just a boatload of work because there was a lot of involvement.
A lot of, 'Let's tweak this, make this bigger, redo this.' We ended up with
80 or 90 tracks for that thing. They just kept trying to get more and more energy out of it."
Superheroes popping up in movies and TV shows about other characters is an almost mundane
phenomenon in the 21st century. For example, Thor: Ragnarok heavily involved the Hulk,
Spider-Man was a major part of Captain America: Civil War, and dozens of comic book legends all
converged together in Avengers: Endgame. But back in the early 90s, shared movie and/or TV universes
weren't a matter of course, especially since the rights to different characters created by the same
publishing entity had been sold to several different studios and production companies.
Nevertheless, X-Men: The Animated Series dabbled in crossovers and universe sharing,
even though doing so could violate copyrights and contracts.
As show artist and self-proclaimed treasure hider
Larry Houston revealed to The Hollywood Reporter in 2017,
"Some of my favorite Easter eggs were the unexpected ones that I added for the fans,
like Doctor Strange, Deadpool, the Black Panther, all of whom are now superstars
in their own feature films. I never added cameos if it distracted from the main story."
Higher-ups heard that Houston had added Spider-Man to a scene
and ordered it deleted. So, as he recalled,
"I had to sneak him into another episode, but it was just an arm,
shooting webbing to save someone off-camera from falling debris."
Obviously, X-Men: The Animated Series is based on Marvel's various and long-running X-Men comic
book series. But the show proved so popular that it ended up also being influential in
the development of the franchise in the other direction. Over time, things introduced by the
show's writers were integrated into the comics, making them canonical to the X-Men universe.
The 1995 to 1996 X-Men comics crossover event "Age of Apocalypse" was directly inspired by the X-Men:
The Animated Series two-part episode "One Man's Worth." The premise focused on a time-hopping,
alternate history adventure in which characters go back in time to kill Professor X,
thereby altering the present and sending several X-Men into the future. Eric Sewald conceived the
idea, but it came to him from media outside the X-Men universe. As he told Comics Beat in 2017,
"Most good stories have been told many times in many different forms.
I 'borrowed' from It's a Wonderful Life and [the Star Trek episode] 'City on the Edge of Forever'
for the central idea: 'What would the world have been like without this one crucial man?'"
"It's incredible how one kid could mean so much to so many people."
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