X-Men '97 - The 90s Marvel Universe is BACK

[Music] in an almost unprecedented move Disney and Marvel Studios have decided to go back in time to the Beloved and acclaimed X-Men the Animated Series and do a direct continuation nostalgic branding spectacular animation and a very honest discussion about social issues abound as we break new ground in the futuristic year of before I was born X-Men 97 is getting a lot of critical praise right now and rightfully this show is everything I wanted it to be after I heard that they were going to do it I love this distinct world that it takes place in and these particular takes on the characters are so endearing and fun to watch this really is a blast from the past as you know I live and breathe comic books even the older ones nothing quite beats the feel of opening a Marvel book from the 9s and seeing all the shiny robot arms evil clones and massive shoulder pads and with the help of today's sponsor I can help pass that feeling on to you this week on June 1st at 400 p.m. eastern time I'll be doing a live stream on whatnot to auction a whole lot of old and rare Comics whatnot is an amazing app for buying and selling merchandise with a personal touch to connect sellers With Their audience whatnot is an app that lets you do auctions like eBay but also live and interactive with the seller so I can talk to you and answer questions during the show I'll even read your name off as the lucky winner if you want there's a ton of sellers on there already selling action figures Comics DVDs and more you can use my link in the description to sign up for whatnot and get a $115 credit towards your first purchase then you should go to my account and set a reminder for my stream so you won't miss it on June 1st see you there now back to the video we jump immediately back in after that somber season five finale with the X-Men trying to hold down the fort without Charles Xavier because he kind of sort of died but not really but it felt like he did Sunspot is a new hero who joins the X-Men Nightcrawler is finally brought back for a full spot on the team after it got teased a couple times and we get to see this world adapting storylines from Comics that happened after the original show ended or just other ones that they never got around to the main villain of this season is the evil cyborg mutant Sentinel named Bastion and combines a couple of his most important story arcs into one in fact a lot of this season is adaptations of X-Men story lines from all over the place ranging from the mid 80s to the mid 2000s and much like the old Seasons they just alter the context so that storyline works for this particular team roster instead of having to shift around all the mutants so heavily it seems like operation Zero Tolerance in the books is more of an Iceman story but the show uses Cyclops as the leading man most of the time you got to love how after the past quarter Century of liveaction movies making Cyclops look like a total Punk to prop up Wolverine we finally have an adaptation that wanted to treat him with some respect and rehabilitate the character in The mainstream a little bit well it's a shame that that his original voice actor Norm Spencer passed away a few years back and couldn't reprise his role Ray Chase does an incredible job of sounding so similar that you almost can't even tell the role was recast he was a great choice to fill that spot the series brings back as many of the original cast members is possible but also remains aware of when someone's voice changed in the last 25ish years and they can't convincingly sound like a character in their 20s or 30s so they're avoiding that weird thing going on with Matt graining characters lately no I B to Twitter the whole company the original cable voice now plays executioner the original Gambit now plays cable the original Jean Gray plays Valerie Cooper and the original Jubilee plays a much older version of Jubilee and they have a cute little passing of the torch moment otherwise everyone else still sounds about right and returns to their roles it's a blast hearing my friend Cal Dodd playing Wolverine in the mainline animated X-Men show again I think he got the call about the Revival just shortly after he recorded wol voice lines on my channel a few years back and they announced the new season before the video was finished it's almost like he's aged into the role and sounds even better as Logan now than he did back then and it's just fun getting to hear him finally cuss a little bit kids here but there are too many damn sets it really feels like the same show just a tad more mature there's a little bit of blood there's some sexuality the political discussions are more direct and Frank and it just feels like it's allowed to pull its pun punches less and less it makes the material a lot more impactful Cal's Wolverine is the first TV cartoon Wolverine who gets to actually use his claws for stabbing and there's some blood I mean it's kind of crazy how long it took for that to happen well okay there's the Hulk versus movies in the anime but those had different rules it's just so cool returning to this world in this particular version of the characters even with some of the voices recast they do a good enough job of selling you on the idea that this is the same characters having more Adventures since we last saw them people tend to talk about this show like it's totally its own thing but I want you to remember this is season six of a pretty good show and watching the first five before it makes you appreciate it just that much more and because the crew and writers were watching The Original season so religiously during production you get all kinds of great payoffs for old story threads that were set up in the old show we never saw what Boliver tras was planning to do next after he went on the Run we checked in on him a few times hiding in South America but didn't get to see the X-Men finally take him in until the season premiere of this one they actually even took the time to really adapt the complicated backstory for cable his mother being a clone and him being from the future but way in the future and as dumb as this all sounds on paper the way it's handled is easy to wrap your mind around and feels like it works for these characters I never thought I'd see a comic event as exhaustingly long as Inferno boiled down to a single TV episode without losing the main point of it shame that the Hobgoblin doesn't get demon powers as a consequence of this and then splits off into demo Goblin I used to mostly read Spider-Man so that's my frame of reference for like 90% of the Marvel universe as how it affected his books I do think it's a bummer that they sideline Bishop for most of the Season without really showing why he just dips out and that's it and I liked his old haircut better I'm also a little tired of this Trope of Captain America being a jerk and X books when in his own Comics he'd be completely on their side 100% it's that crossover phenomenon where the person whose title it is gets special preference and the guest character acts a little dumber and less confident I talked about that at length with the Turtles Forever movie just recently cap is really the only guest character that has a somewhat important role in an episode everyone else just has a line or two and bugs out like doom and general Ross I think it's funny how it's now become a consistent character trait for the Captain America of this universe that his sleeves now get miscolored as blue all the time and animation errors that's a level of authenticity most could only strive for I'm actually wondering is that intentional I mean These are 3D models how do you do did they do that on purpose the original series had great character designs but struggled a bit in the actual animation Department because these designs were so complex to match the comics you got the base color the Highlight the Shadow the inking layer then some characters are covered a thousand details the showrunners of the original series Eric and Julia lewald sent me a copy of their art book for the show and it really puts it into perspective how ambitious these model sheets were like look at this Captain America design you're me you can't expect someone to draw that 12 times per second yet they tried the new season pivoting to a 3D art style that's cleverly disguised to look like 2D was controversial at first but it paid off in achieving the look of the old show without sacrificing smooth motion some of these models are just too much to handdraw and they knew that and figured out a great workaround sometimes in the earlier episodes of the season it's more clear that you're looking at a 3D model when you get motion that's a little too smooth or a pose that's a little stiff that a 2d artist probably wouldn't draw friend of the channel and artist on TMNT 2003 Emilio Lopez did a great thread on Twitter breaking down the Tells he spotted as an animator for what's 3D and what isn't like the foreshortening on the sentinel's hands Mak it look like they have big hammy wrists instead of defined uh Palms I find that kind of thing interesting and it's fun to watch this show and try to guess what's been drawn and what's a model sometimes I forget there's any 3D in this show at all and it just looks handdrawn all the way when the first image of the art style leaked we all thought it would look exactly like what if and I just couldn't be happier to be wrong sure there's a dialogue scene or two that can be a little stiff but that's all right if it means saving the budget for the really intense Parts every once in a a while they just pull out all the stops and give us scenes like this where it's like holy [ __ ] what am I looking at this is incredible and don't get me wrong it's in like my top five favorite shows of all time but those 50 minute long episodes and Hollywood celebrity voice actors aren't doing Invincible any favors when it comes to managing their animation budget this show looks so good and it's got a really appealing color palette and some nice contrasting Shadows the characters are updated but still familiar it's also nice they even got the Cameo characters looking right okay yeah so the original series was bursting at the seams with cameos because showrunner Larry Houston was a giant Marvel nerd and wanted everything to be like the comics his rule was that if there was a scene full of incidental mutant characters in a crowd shot they all had to be real named characters from the books there's X-Men characters packed into every shot but on top of that he was also making strides to have the greater Marvel un bleeding into so he put unauthorized cameos from characters like Spider-Man War Machine Ghost Rider Thor Doctor Strange The Watcher the Hulk he was trying to make it clear that there was a whole world of characters outside of the X-Men who could see what they were doing when the scope got large enough even though he didn't technically get the rights or clearances to do any of this so the character models are named things like mutant assassin number one because no one was going to tell that it was Deadpool and Callum out on it during production only the fans watching at home would understand who that is it's kind of the benefit of these things not being so mainstream back then he got away with mutant hand for the first Spider-Man Cameo then after that he stuck Peter in the Scarlet Spider costume to get away with it again he went on to showrun season 2 of the Fantastic 4 Series from around this time and kept doing the same thing but connecting together the cartoons into a big Animated Universe even though these five shows were split across two TV networks he made it a point to attach X-Men and Fantastic 4 together in a bunch of subtle and cool ways even did his Scarlet Spider trick again despite being on different networks and not technically being allowed to have a shared Universe he built one anyway and as a fan I think that's insanely cool X-Men 97 manages to follow suit because we live in the age of Marvel owning all the TV and animation rights for all of their characters finally Larry Houston's Legacy of obsessive C lives on everyone is under the same roof all at once so they don't have to be as koi with connections and they can finally do things like showing Tas Spidey on screen in full clarity or having him and Mary Jane seeing the chaos caused by Magneto in the season finale oh there's Flash Thompson they even have connections to the other Marvel cartoons of the 9s like morph turning into the same Hulk and Mr Fantastic designs from their respective cartoons in the Animated Universe Iron Man shows up sporting his outfit from season 1 I think they went for this design because it was the most clear about what the reference is like yes this is meant to be that guy but it have been more sensible Cannon wise for him to wear the suit from his series finale because that was a bioorganic suit that wouldn't be affected by the electromagnetic pulses so he could still wear it despite Magneto shutting down the world's electricity but its DNA Bas circuitry would not be affected by Mandarin's anti- technology the god I've watched too many of these the one thing that's a bummer though about Canon is that sir King to Chaka is right I think there's a rule from the higher ups that Marvel should not include tala and things because of Chadwick boseman's passing this should be tala voiced by Keith David and tala hereditary chief of the wakandas does not give his word lightly that can't be tachaka he died in the 1980s it All Began 10 years ago he called himself ulyses claw and demanded our sacred mound of the precious Eternal Rock from my father tchaka who refused be gun who I bother speaking at all that's when I heard the sound I would remember all my life they have slain Taja but his Death Shall Not Go unpunished I shall be as strong and as Fearless as the sacred black panther he was never a black panther in this world I don't think this means the Fantastic for show is now not Cannon I think it just means they pied up like when Spider-Man homecoming says the wrong number of years in the caption at the beginning these movies and shows are made by fallible human beings after all we will begin talks to admit the mutant nation of josha into the United Nations josha a un Nation never thought I'd see the day wait what did he just say that don't make a li of sense perhaps you sold them into josian slavery the Republic a free josha object strenuously to the use of the term slavery I I guess maybe they consider the mutant run josha a different from the human run josha like they're like two different countries even though it's the same island just with a 5-year time Gap so maybe maybe they just like maybe they just thought it was like a different genosa in their minds or something I don't know I like how the cameos are handled in this in the old Seasons because they're not stopping the story dead in its tracks and pausing for the audience to cheer they feel organic to the situation and they make sense like yeah Captain America would be looking for Trask after he pulled that Mecca Godzilla stunt on josha yeah Spidey would be swinging around New York when all the lights go out things like this just assert the scope and size of the events happening sometimes the MCU could take a page from this because you get huge Earth shattering events in someone's Solo movie none of the other Avengers come to help or even really notice they don't have to always be like major characters for big crossover events sometimes it could just be little subtle things I want to know the answer to the age-old question what was Daredevil doing during all this when Daredevil is not on screen all other characters should be asking where's Daredevil and then morph is just a cameo machine like the old days so that's cool too you can use morph to have so many other minor mutants get a quick mention or the spotlight after spending so long in the MCU version of Marvel or having other adaptations taking so much from the MCU in terms of characters and their aesthetic it's cool to just play around in a completely different Marvel Universe for a little while this is so far removed from all that and predates it by decades so it's really got its own distinct look and feel I really did not grow up with any of these shows they're just slightly before my time I was raised on Xmen Evolution and Spider-Man the new animated series and spectacular and world's greatest her hero but in the last four or five years I've gotten really into this universe and have watched all of these shows connected to X-Men multiple times each to take hundreds maybe thousands of pages of notes I've been collecting Universe dates and times charting where each character goes and what costume they're wearing at any given time even figuring out episode chronology for a massive project with Diego Rivera and James streker from Watchtower database people have asked James for years to create a full timeline for the Marvel Marvel animated universe and figure out what's Canon and what isn't but he's more of a DC guy and he was too busy fighting Zeta robots or whatever to pull it off alone so my good pal Diego and I stepped up and started doing the research and analyzing all of it so James could put it all together between the three of us working on it together we've cracked the code mostly sometime soon we're going to do a series of videos explaining the full timeline of events and how these six shows are connected and how certain other shows most likely aren't but it's been a lot of fun diving into every episode and seeing how it all fits together as one big puzzle and I have to give major props to the creators of X-Men 97 for treating these shows like one Universe instead of following that dumb note from the handbook that says they're separate just because they were on different TV channels these numbers are worthless and I don't respect them I could actually ramble about that for hours if you get me started I will someday but doing that research over the past year and a half and then having this season come out and validate a lot of it was really cool and I'm glad the writers did their own research to make it feel authentic to that old version of this universe I'll just say right now I know everyone's asking for Spider-Man 98 because of these scenes but the majority of Spider-Man the Animated Series takes place over the course of 94 to 96 in Universe which is why Captain America is freed from the time Vortex and but he's got the real MJ with him again instead of a water clone it's funny storm already met Captain America before and also Iron Man and Captain America met but they don't remember because they all had their memories erased it actually make more sense for them to call this show Spider-Man 97 if they did that but I I mean if they want a bigger time Gap I guess 98 could work I mean I like that year it's the year I ruin the world forever big budget live action is often put on a pedestal as the Beall end all form of Storytelling when games comics and animation can accomplish most if not all of the same things let someone else have the spotlight for a second I'm just so happy that X-Men 97 is a critical in financial success it's really cool to have an animated superhero project just get as much attention as the liveaction stuff because I personally like superhero comics to be adapted in animation more you don't have to worry about condensing dozens of serialized stories into a single 2hour episode with a two to four year gap between the next installment you don't have to fight tooth and nail to be taken seriously and make it feel like something that could exist in real life the fact that it's animated gives it that slight disconnect from reality enough that it's just much easier to suspend your disbelief when a cartoon character is wearing a silly comic book costume you know compared to a living breathing human being animation has much less baggage less to prove and more freedom to just do whatever the hell they want this asteroid M sequence from the finale would make for an expensive ass movie but it's a cartoon you just draw it just draw the thing it's fine it's a drawing it doesn't got to look real I hope this show and Invincible bring about more Prestige television that's animated imagine a 2d Game of Thrones show I've never watched Game of Thrones but it'd be much cooler if it was a cartoon and it looked like berserk now I've heard some people criticize the ending with the X-Men extending a hand of friendship to Bastian and appealing to his Humanity even though he tried to robot genocide them I think storytelling is a lot harder in this new age of moral absolutism you couldn't have the Darth Vader Redemption Arc in this day and age because a 15-year-old on Twitter would say but he literally choked his wife he's toxic tell that to the people on alderon I think the X-Men are superheroes and they were doing the most heroic thing at that moment for better or worse I mean how'd they deal with the person behind the josha attack in the comics there are some things you just shouldn't be allowed to get away with you okay with this she had to be neutralized Logan [Applause] Charles it killed 16 million mutants it would have killed all of us may posterity forgive me May our dry cleaners forgive you Charles dear may God award you a medal for your uninhibited Marksmanship hardcore chuck oh I always get mad at YouTube for not putting my videos in the subscription box because people will comment finally Xavier uploads again after all these years not knowing three other videos came out within the last month already so maybe that stupid Bell icon thing will help you remember I exist if you want other ways to support the channel you can always go hit up that patreon for early videos and exclusive stuff because it's just a dollar I'm not kidding it's only $1 Isn't that cool if just 5% of the people subscribed to me donated only $1 a month I could make videos even faster and keep my house you can also check out our merch on tuu or just buy some of my random stuff on eBay I have a pretty substantial collection of old toys that are still in the box in perfect condition so go take a look in case you find something you like and lastly since this is a YouTube video and you probably play fortnite drop my Creator code Xavier GM next time you buy a silly dance or a cool character skin really helps me out see you next time [Music]

Channel: GodzillaMendoza

Views: 72,831

Keywords: X-Men, X-Men The Animated Series, X-Men '97, 97, 1997, 90s X-Men, Fox Kids, Cal Dodd, Wolverine, Xavier, Review, Marvel, Marvel Animated Universe, Spider-Man, Spider-Man The Animated Series, Spider-Man TAS, X-Men 92, X-Men '92, Disney+, Bastion, Cyclops, Storm, Motion Comic, Retrospective, Season 6, Revival, New Season, Stan Lee, The X-Men, Uncanny X-Men, Cartoon, Animated

Id: yp3opwcVTyE

Length: 22min 28sec (1348 seconds)

Published: Thu May 30 2024