X-Men: The Anim… oh, nevermind

I’ve been indulging the hell out of my mostly-​​quiet inner 9-​​year-​​old with a 2-​​week marathon of that clas­sic 90s Sat­ur­day morn­ing toon. This is only sort of like my Star Trek: TNG Obses­sion of 2010; I watched TNG reli­giously, with my fam­ily, every Sat­ur­day night. For seven years. But X-​​Men was mine and mine alone. My sis­ter didn’t care; my folks didn’t get it. I had to be care­ful not to blow my week­end TV quota before Sat­ur­day at 11:00. Some­times I hid so my par­ents wouldn’t know I’d indulged away that pre­cious half-​​hour.

Lemme lay it out for you: A TV show, about a band of mis­fits, with super-​​human pow­ers, with all kinds of inter­per­sonal prob­lems, fight­ing to make the world safe for their kind. That’s like the most right­eous shit con­ceiv­able to an 11-​​year-​​old. Not only could they do what­ever the hell they wanted – because they were fuck­ing mutants – but because they were adults. (Except for Jubilee, but she had a good five years on me, any­way, and I had a thing and a half for Rogue, any­way any­way.) I longed for Wolverine’s fear­less bravado (and claws), Gambit’s abil­ity to con­vince any­thing to explode. I wanted so fiercely to be able to fly, even by telekine­sis. I dreamed of the brav­ery that seemed to come with respon­si­bil­ity. I dreamed of the glamor – even if it was the glamor of being a self-​​healing, adamantium-​​skeletoned pseudo-​​wolf rejected year after year by the woman he loved. I’d have set­tled for being a vil­lain in that world, if it meant I could turn into any shape at will. Or fuck­ing tele­port.

At least, that’s how it played in my 11-​​year-​​old heart.

Does every­one look pained at all times in this world?

Unfor­tu­nately, in the mid­dle of my 29^th year, it doesn’t really look so… three-​​dimensional. Every plot either revolves or resolves around vio­lence, and the deus ex machina in this series is mighty. The jokes are Mia Wallace/​Fox Force Five ter­ri­ble. As Gam­bit says at one point to the Pro­fes­sor (I think), “Seems we spend more time try­ing to make the world safe for our­selves than mutants.” Wolverine’s love for Jean Grey, and her romance with Cyclops, are so unre­mark­able: there’s no room in that 19-​​minute pack­age for ten­der­ness. Gam­bit and Rogue, who I remem­bered as star-​​crossed lovers, don’t even let on they like each other for the first two sea­sons; as they do, it’s all, “Oh, I could give a crap about Cajun. Why, what hap­pened? Is he hurt?!” Even the ani­ma­tion, I guess char­ac­ter­is­tic of the early 90s, looks a lit­tle flat.

And then there’s the racism. Oh my god, the stereo­types. And how is it that a series which posits Dif­fer­ence Is Power – a pretty trans­par­ent mask for the civil rights move­ments of the lat­ter 20^th cen­tury – has only one black char­ac­ter? The few times an Indian shows up, he’s got a god­damn feather in his head­band? In the Sav­age Land, where everyone’s half-​​dressed and so-​​tuned-​​in to the nat­ural world, our protagonist’s tribe are fooled into wor­ship­ping a mutant trapped ages ago in the rock. Every time an Asian char­ac­ter enters, or the gang’s in Japan, the music switches to tra­di­tional drums and flutes? I know, it was only the 90s, and we had so much depro­gram­ming left. I’ve got my the­o­ries – maybe Stan Lee and crew were really cru­sad­ing for nerds’ rights, and every­one else was a con­ve­nient over­lap. It is true that Muir Island, Scot­land gets the same treat­ment (bag­pipes), which makes me think the pro­duc­tion team were just after lowest-​​common denominators.

And before you get your Dude, It Was A Kid’s Show box­ers twisted up, it’s because it was a kid’s show this shit mat­ters. What did that teach us 11-​​year-​​olds? Oh, they must be Japan­ese because of that music. Oh, that must be an Indian, judg­ing by the feather pop­ping out of the back of his head. It’s clear the pro­tag­o­nists were, at their most pro­found, two-​​dimensional char­ac­ters. That means the odd sup­port from some (Chick­a­saw? Sioux? Comanche? Who?) Indian was at best a one-​​dimensional man or woman. All the diver­sity on that show seemed to be fun­neled into mutant pow­ers. The most pro­foundly any­one could imag­ine was about how the cre­ators could be any­thing other than what they were. Sounds familiar.

Still, there are lit­tle things that charm me. Wolver­ine might want to solve every imag­in­able prob­lem with his claws, but he’s a funny moth­er­fucker. When Bishop, mer­ce­nary from 2055, keeps pop­ping up in the War Room, Wolverine’s response is, “Watch your­self, time-​​jockey.” When one of his old lovers shows up, in a sewer under the city:

Prof. X: (concerned) Who is that?
Wolver­ine: An old friend. (affec­tion­ately) She wants me dead.

Or this gem, on sav­ing the empress of the Shi’ar Galac­tic Empire:

Jubilee: Any­one know what she looks like?
Wolver­ine: She’s from another galaxy. You see a woman you don’t rec­og­nize, res­cue her.

Gam­bit and Rogue have some good ones, too. And Beast, while he’s mostly just incon­gru­ously stat­ing the obvi­ous in fancy lan­guage, or quot­ing Ten­nyson while under attack by hotel-​​sized robots, has a few moments of gen­uine clar­ity. Wolverine’s insis­tence he must face his demons alone – which he does, head on. It’s those sur­pris­ing moments of pro­fun­dity that make it so hard just to dis­miss the series. Ok, that, that and that for all its short­com­ings, this show waited for me every Sat­ur­day morn­ing in some of the first years of my dream­ing imag­i­na­tion. I feel I owe it some­thing, even if the deeper I get into it, I real­ize that’s less and less.