[Transcript] Season 4, Episode 3. X-Men ‘97 Spoiler-Free Review
The X-Men are back! Ron and Mon caught the Canadian premiere of X-Men '97 at Toronto Comicon 2024, and the following episodes. We share our review of the new season, all the feels about seeing our favourite X-people onscreen, and what we're looking forward to from the rest of the season. No spoilers!
Read Mon's Episode 1 review at Vocal, and learn more about the creation of the show with Mon's Comicon recap. Ron shares her experience at the X-Men '97 activation at Toronto Comicon 2024 on WWAC.
Listen to the episode on Spotify.
(L-R): Beast (voiced by George Buza), Wolverine (voiced by Cal Dodd), Morph (voiced by JP Karliak), Bishop (voiced by Isaac Robinson-Smith), Rogue (voiced by Lenore Zann), Gambit (voiced by AJ LoCascio), Storm (voiced by Alison Sealy-Smith), Cyclops (voiced by Ray Chase) in Marvel Animation's X-MEN '97. Photo courtesy of Marvel Animation. © 2024 MARVEL.
Hello and welcome to a brand new episode of Stereo Geeks.
I'm Mon.
And I'm Ron.
Today, we will be discussing X-Men ‘97.
The new season of the 1990s X-Men animated show has got everybody a flutter.
We managed to catch the Canadian premiere at Toronto Comic Con 2024, and the hype was real.
I have never seen this many X-Men t-shirts, X-Men cosplayers, X-Men art, X-Men love, anywhere ever before.
And as two X-Men fans, this was a jam.
We literally went to Toronto Comic Con this year, just trying to get as much X-Men stuff as possible, and we did well.
Well, it's also nice because you suddenly see that there are other X-Men fans out there.
They love this franchise.
They love these characters.
Some of them are a little too enthusiastic.
But the highlight for a lot of people was the X-Men activation at Toronto Comic Con.
But it was an experience, getting in there.
Listen, with these exclusive things, it's always a bit of planning, a lot of loss of sleep, considerable anxiety before you can actually get there.
Sometimes you get lucky.
The stars align, the timings of your transporter line, and you get there well in time to stand in line and actually get into the room where it's happening.
The X-Men activation, we were already told several times, limited seating, you should get there early.
So that's exactly what we did, even though we'd spent all of Friday at Comic Con and it was kind of a late night for us.
But yeah, we were there first thing in the morning for the X-Men activation zone.
And it's a good thing that we went as early as we did.
So the activation was called Xavier's Lounge for Gifted Youngsters.
At first, I thought this meant it was only for young folks, like family zone or something.
Thankfully, it was open to everyone.
It was just, the naming of it was a bit odd.
But anyway, basically what this activation was, it was a couple of conference rooms turned into a giant North American living room like you would have back in the 90s.
It was Saturday morning, which is when the original show used to air.
And that's when they had the premiere.
I'd say there were about 10, 12 people before us, and this was a good half an hour, 40 minutes before the show even started.
So yeah, we were there really early.
Yeah, and you're talking about the show as in Toronto Comic Con.
That's not even when the screening started.
That started later, and it actually ran late.
So we missed another session.
But anyway, all in all, it was such a cool experience to be sitting amongst all these X-Men fans.
A lot of people had dressed up, a lot of t-shirts out there.
We were also wearing our X-Men t-shirts.
And just a great deal of buzz and excitement about this franchise that so many of us have loved for a really long time.
The thing is, you and I didn't grow up with this X-Men show.
It never came to India.
The X-Men movies, they came, and then we suddenly just fell in love with this group of characters, and we've been in love with them since.
But for a lot of people in North America, this was their introduction to the X-Men.
This is how they got into the comics.
So for them, this revival is huge.
Yeah, but also just spending time with the X-Men is so special.
It's weird because the X-Men weren't a thing when we were growing up.
Not just this show, but just in general, you never saw X-Men comics.
You never saw anybody refer to them.
So the movies were a game changer for us.
And then on the back of those movies, we had the PSP game, X-Men Legends 2 Rise of Apocalypse.
That really changed how we saw these people because there were all these characters in there, so many of them who still haven't made it to the big screen.
Then we went into reading the Wiki articles about them and finally got to the comics.
And that's how we learnt about this amazing group of people.
Now listen, comics, man, they're tough.
Some are good, some are bad.
Most of them are disasters.
You'll go through some runs and you're like, why do I like these people?
But in general, the X-Men do speak to a kind of community a lot of us feel, which is that you feel different, you feel like an outsider, you don't feel like you belong, and then you have the X-Men to turn to.
This is a really very important group of folks for us, and for a lot of people as we figured out at Comic Con this year.
And we were really like, you get pulled into that excitement.
Even if you're a little bit apathetic or unsure, I was like, oh, you know, like, you just get sucked into this.
Yeah, and we were so excited for anything X-Men related at Toronto Comic Con that we watched all five seasons of the 90s X-Men show on Disney Plus in anticipation for this event.
And I'm glad we did because at Toronto Comic Con, most of the main conference rooms were running the trailer for the X-Men ‘97 show.
And that starts with the ending of the 92 show.
Which has a huge spoiler for what happens in there.
So yes, I'm glad we watched it.
We marathon watched it.
Maybe that wasn't the best way to watch it.
And also as adults, you kind of do look at things differently.
On top of that, we're entertainment writers, so you're constantly analyzing everything you watch.
We are not devotees of the original series.
We have our criticisms of it.
But listen, it's the X-Men.
We had so much fun spending five seasons with them.
And I've gotta say, there were some very interesting notes in that original series.
And when I think about it, I'm like, wow, in the 90s, they were doing this.
I really enjoyed that aspect of it.
And there were some minute character changes, which I really enjoyed as well.
So yeah, I just enjoyed watching all these characters that we've completely fallen in love with for so many, so many years.
And I've been reading the Krakow era comics.
I keep telling you about everything that's been happening.
It's tough to get into those.
It's so vast.
There are so many different series.
I still don't know how certain plots ended because they weren't in the runs of the books that I was reading.
And I'm just like, okay, I'm just going to have to accept that this character died and just move on from that.
I will never find out how it happened.
Well, this revival is also happening at the same time that a comic book revival is happening.
So that's interesting.
I might actually start with these new comics because as you said, the Krakow era, I started it, but it's just too much.
There's too much to do in the world to catch up with that many comics.
I was kind of six months behind on the Krakow comics during Christmas.
And I literally didn't do anything else during the Christmas break, aside from reading comics from the Krakow era.
I'm caught up now and now I'm behind.
Such is the life of a comic reader, especially the Marvel comic readers.
Never know.
Anyway, shall we talk about 97?
Indeed, X-Men ‘97.
There's already a little bit of controversy just before the show launches on Disney Plus with creator and showrunner, Bo DiMeo, unceremoniously being fired.
No idea why.
And I think it's kind of odd because he was talking a lot about how much he loves the X-Men.
I don't know what happened.
We can't really speculate or anything, but it is a bit strange.
And it was obvious from the cast and previous producer and director, Larry Houston, when they were at Toronto Comic Con, nobody mentioned Bo DiMeo.
I was like, obviously the PR people got to you guys.
It's always uncomfortable when you start off something with a little bit of controversy.
His name is still in the credits from what we saw in the screeners.
So there's that.
But anyway, aside from the controversy, there's also been a lot of discourse about Morph.
We won't get into that because that's not even there in the first three episodes.
So let's just talk about the story.
First of all, we are not going to share any spoilers for the first three episodes.
The first two will be dropping on March 20th.
And then there'll be weekly episodes, total of 10 episodes.
All happening on Disney Plus.
So the show kicks off from the previous storyline.
It's not immediately after.
Things have changed.
Visually, things have definitely changed.
The animation style is gorgeous.
I would say it's almost too sexy.
I love the animation, the colors, the movement.
Actually, Larry Houston kind of said, that is really the Disney money because he couldn't get any of that kind of movement when he was doing the show in the 90s.
But yeah, oh God, it looks so good.
And there's a scene that for some reason, they've already shared it on Marvel's Instagram of Jubilee dancing.
It's absolutely gorgeous.
You would not have got that kind of movement in the 90s show.
Definitely not over here.
It's like your eyes just cannot move away from the screen.
Yeah, and the music is outstanding.
Not only has the theme tune been tweaked and updated to be more modern, but there's like these beautiful synth pop background tunes going on, which I'm like, this is exactly what I like.
Yeah, I'm like, are they going to unveil Leila Cheney here?
But you know, she wasn't there.
So one thing the voice cast at Toronto Comic Con mentioned was that the creators of the new show wanted to showcase the X-Men using their powers, but in new ways.
And that's obvious from the first episode itself.
And speaking of the powers, that's what makes the action in this episode so spectacular.
Each character and their awesome powers are introduced one by one.
This allows audiences old and new to acclimatize to the new era as well as the characters.
It was great to watch this.
And it's a really tight episode.
And honestly, it was more fun because we were watching it to the crowd and we were all like oooing and eyeing when the characters were in peril and ooh, they got out of that tight situation, yes.
So yeah, it was a lot of fun.
And another thing that, not that I noticed it, but the cast actually mentioned that the episodes in this season are going to be slightly longer.
So looking at the runtime, it's about 30 minutes for each of the episodes.
And I believe the 92 show, the episodes were generally about 21, 22 minutes.
So you get about six, seven minutes more story.
And I don't know whether that's the reason why it's only 10 episodes long.
We'll talk about that later.
Yeah, so the first episode really sets up a bunch of plot lines, which we're going to be seeing throughout the show.
The story does seem interesting.
The main story maybe, I don't know.
And then there's the Magneto drama, which honestly, I am far more into that than anything else.
Listen, if there's one thing that the X-Men is extremely good at, it's drama.
We don't care about who these big bad guys are that are attacking them.
We live with the drama.
Superhero soap operas, that's what we like.
Let's talk about Storm.
I know that the creators had said, oh, she's going to be powerful and cool.
In the first episode, she is definitely powerful.
She's never been more bad as before.
Yes, Storm's mohawk hair, like that just signifies that this is going to be an era.
I thought she was so cool, so powerful, and I love what she does with her powers.
It's different.
And I don't know whether it's because I've been reading the Krakoa era comics and all the characters are super powerful.
I just feel like it's a nod to what she can do in those comics.
So yeah, I like it.
On the flip side, Morph's look, that's a choice.
Well, Morph's look is much more consistent with their comic book look.
He looks like that?
In the comics, yes.
And now Morph and Bishop have been added to the main cast.
As you see, they're in all of the promos, etc.
Morph's human looking face, I don't know, I felt like it's been softened a little bit from the rather severe angles of the original show.
I don't know if it's a different choice because they have adopted a different default look or if it's just part of the animation style.
Bishop on the other hand, his powers are just so cool.
Again, the way they're using their powers in this show this time around, it's gonna blow people's minds.
I also feel like Rogue's face is slightly more soft.
The angles are gone.
I don't mind it, but because we've been watching the old show, and immediately after we see this one, you feel it.
I don't think this is a spoiler when I say Roberto da Costa has been added to the cast.
A lot of these characters, as we know, they sort of expand their roster, but it's not like they have full on main cast roles and screen time.
But love seeing Roberto, the way he's animated, so beautiful, really beautiful voice acting as well.
Now, we have seen one other new mutant in all this while.
One and a half, if you take into account little Ileana.
But what about the rest of the new mutants?
Also, so Bertro is like a little bit problematic in the comics, especially when he was first introduced.
I really hope they don't have all that misogyny in there.
Listen, when I see Bertro, my lad, I am so happy.
Listen, we lost Adam Cantor, who was a very lovely Bertro to see on the big screen.
I was so happy to see him, and it's really sad that we lost him.
But now we've got Bertro in this show, and he's being voiced by Guy Agostini.
I think he's doing a great job.
It's exactly what I'd imagine Bertro to sound like.
He's not sleazy here.
He's actually kind of sweet, very lost, and I really enjoyed the way they did his story.
There's a particular line that he says that got everyone in the feels.
Having said that, I don't think anybody ever gets Bertro's skin color right.
Like the New Mutants movie, let's not even start with that.
Bertro's mutant powers kick in because he's being bullied so badly because he has dark skin.
He's a very rich young boy.
It doesn't matter.
He's still getting bullied because of his skin color.
I just don't think it's correct in this show.
Like I love the fact that Bertro is here, but it's not right.
Yeah, no, I agree with you.
I really wish that they had just gone with the darker skin tone.
It's always these little things, you know.
Well, one course correction here has been the voice actor for Jubilee.
She's finally being voiced by Southeast Asian actor Holly Cho.
The original Jubilee actor, Alison Court, she said that she has a different role on the show, and she's actually very happy that she has passed on the baton to somebody who has the lived experience of Jubilee.
Court did not mention who she's playing, though.
Very, very sedative.
Yeah, I'm very happy that Holly Cho is taking over this role.
She got a really great shout out actually from Alison Court during the Q&A section.
She's really very happy about this new addition to the cast.
I'm really glad to see that they're willing to make these changes, you know, after everything that happened during the pandemic.
So it's a good change.
Can't help but wonder why we needed it in the first place.
Having said that, I did do some research, and at the time that Alison Court got the role, when she was, I think she said she was like 16, 17, they didn't tell her Jubilee's origins.
Poor thing was a bit shocked when she found out.
Well, at least they cost corrected.
So another cost correction, if you can call it that, is that this show is finally realizing how hot Gambit is.
Listen, I'm a writer at WWAC.
The WWAC team loves Gambit.
We once did an entire post about how much we love Gambit.
That's how much we love Gambit.
This episode, oh boy, people are going to love Gambit in this one.
Wow, yeah, how is Gambit this hot?
That's all we're going to say.
We're going to leave the rest to your imagination, because he doesn't.
That's a good one.
Oh wow.
So we had a kind of sad reason for a new addition to the cast.
Ray Chase has joined the cast as Cyclops' voice.
And this is unfortunately because the original voice actor Norm has passed away.
I absolutely love Ray Chase.
He is doing a great job.
When I started listening to Cyclops' voice in this show, I was like, this is it.
This is how Cyclops sounds.
Chase is doing a really good job of channeling Norm Spencer, but his voice acting is just so perfect.
He is exactly the way I hear Scott in my head.
I don't know what it is.
Maybe the timbre in his voice or something.
Scott is still a little bit more snarky in both these shows than I would expect him to be, but I love it.
It's so good.
I would listen to Scott in this show forever.
So we'll end the review for this episode by saying, it gets you in the feels.
There's a lot of emotion involved, not least because of the nostalgia value.
You're back with these characters.
You're spending a whole 30 minutes with them, which is honestly more time than you get to spend with the X-Men most of the time.
So this is great.
The best part of this episode is kind of in the trailer, but at the same time, every time I think about it, still makes me kind of teary.
This is quite an experience.
I don't know if it was heightened because of the Toronto Comic Con community and the whole premiere and the voice cast and meeting the person who made most of our favorite shows from our childhood, Larry Houston.
I don't know what it was.
It was a combination of a lot of things, but let's just say this first episode is worth the wait.
100%.
We can't really talk much about what we see in episodes 2 and 3.
We did get screeners to see them.
Let's just say they're quite different from the first episode, and comics fans are really, really going to love this.
From episode 2's credits itself, your mind is blown.
They're openly telling you nothing is the same anymore.
Without revealing anything about the episode, I will say that it was very tense, and honestly, there was one scene which I felt like it was riffing off the January 6th insurrection in the US.
Those sort of visuals and the tension of it, really scary stuff.
Now, whether it's intentional or whether we're putting those sort of visuals together because it literally happened not so long ago, I don't know.
Sometimes I do think art is sending a message, and if an X-Men show is not sending a message, it's not doing it right.
But from the scary to the sublime, if Magneto is so bad, why is he so hot?
That costume, that's something else.
It's making me question a lot of things.
Oh man, well, you know, Magneto's outfit is straight from the comics.
But I think it's the way it's drawn in this animated show.
It's really striking.
And I think it's because you don't usually see male characters dressed in that combination.
We can't reveal too much.
It may already be in the trailer, but when you see it in action, it definitely has a different feel to it.
And on top of that, you have this beautiful animation style and the colors are so beautiful, which actually makes a lot of sense because the X-Men are so colorful.
Like you have to have a colorful show.
Now what I do like, especially in this episode, is how they amalgamate a bunch of storylines into one tight story arc.
It's great because especially if you read different comics, you'll be like, oh, that bit's from this comic arc and this one's from that run.
I really love how they've done that.
Episode 2 for me was the best episode so far in 97, but probably the best episode of all of the original series as well.
Wow, that is high praise.
And I understand the sentiment because the X-Men, the 92 show, it kind of consistently had one message.
No matter what the mutants do, no matter how many people they save, humans will still hate them, humans will still hunt them.
The way that the Krakoa era comics have been going right now, that is the underlying theme.
It doesn't matter that the mutants have found their own island, that they're trying to just help people, cure people, it doesn't matter.
At the end of the day, they'll always be other, and because they are other, they must be eradicated.
This episode leans into that, and I think that's why it really hits you that these events can keep unfolding over and over again, despite what's happened to the X-Men.
The humans in this world will not accept them ever.
Well, one of the things which you can intuit from the first two episodes is that the humans are gonna hate the mutants because they don't see them as people.
And that is literally the real world issue with so many marginalized communities.
The people in power don't see them as people, so they don't see their suffering as an issue.
Now, how many people watching this in the year 2024 are gonna be able to draw that through line?
I have no idea.
Well, one of the things that was really hard hitting during the Q&A at Toronto Comic Con, George Booza and Lawrence Bain, both talked about how the X-Men appeal to people who don't fit in, who feel like they're on the periphery of society, the freaks, as Lawrence Bain called them.
They find refuge in the X-Men, which is what George Booza said.
And that's what makes the X-Men so enduring.
I do have to say that the Krakow era comics, I don't think they did justice to that feeling.
They got kind of lost in all the sci-fi stuff.
Very interesting to read, very imaginative, but so often I would be reading it, and I'm like, all those strong messages about it doesn't matter who you are, what you are, who you love, you're still a person who deserves respect, and the right to not be killed, whether you're mutant or human.
It just didn't come across that much in the Krakow era comics.
I'm hoping that the rest of the season really plays with that, because if you look at it, every time Bishop travels back and forth from the past, he's doing the same thing.
He's trying to save mutants, because humans just will not stop fighting mutants.
And honestly, at a time when the world is so divisive and so ready to fight over absolutely nothing, we need this show to send a message.
And I think it is, in its own way.
I think we're getting very maudlin over here.
Let's talk about the action.
The action was great.
Like the first episode, I loved the action.
It was so crisp.
And again, because we've been watching the old series literally days before, the movement of the characters was really something to behold.
What I loved about the action in the second episode is it's really hard to predict the outcome.
Again, maybe it's the crisp animation, but I felt I could really follow the different characters as they were fighting.
And sometimes in the old shows, I didn't always feel like I could figure out which character was fighting which.
I guess you could say the direction is a little bit crisper.
Again, technology has improved, so you can move animation and camera angles, et cetera, in a different way.
So it's much easier to follow, and it really ups the tension and the pacing a lot.
And Storm has a very interesting storyline here.
It's very different from episode one, but I believe we know which storyline from the comics this is.
So I'm very intrigued to see how the show is going to handle it.
So we mentioned the music in the first episode and how fun it was.
In this one, I felt like there were some musical throwbacks to the films, and it kind of reminded me of the Gotham Knights TV show, Short-lived, Why Did It Get Cancelled?
It was so good.
But that show had a few musical throwbacks to the Dark Knight trilogy.
It really worked to cement that show as part of that universe.
I kind of liked it.
Yeah.
Alright, episode 3.
Now this one, we really can't talk about anything here.
I swear every frame was a spoiler.
So we'll just give a sort of brief idea of this episode.
It kicks off with some extremely disturbing horror imagery.
If I was a child watching this, I would be awake for a few weeks.
This is not for the faint of heart.
And it actually makes me think, is this show for kids anymore?
The original show definitely was.
It was a Saturday morning cartoon.
It was meant for children to watch.
But watching the aesthetics of this show and some of the story arcs, I'm beginning to think this is a show for the people who had been kids when the original was around.
Yes, this episode was the first time when I thought to myself, who is this show for?
Because there are some really mature themes thrown in here.
They do scale back on some of the costumes because the comic storyline, oh boy, they did not leave anything to the imagination.
So that's definitely a bit different here.
But even then, like the horror elements, those were pretty disturbing for adults.
Forget children.
So the other thing I'd say, and I don't know if you noticed this, but Berthold's powers, it's borderline giving me trypophobia.
I really hope it doesn't actually because in the comics it never bothered me, but over here, because of the movement again, I don't know, it was like, oh boy, oh boy.
I really hope it doesn't get any worse.
Oh wow, I didn't notice that.
Now I'm worried.
But I do like how they're adapting stories from the comics.
And the original 90s show also did that, with Dark Phoenix saga and everything.
But the one that's in this episode takes place over several issues, and it's all kind of clumped together in this 30 minutes.
I don't know if that had to be so rushed.
I agree, it felt really rushed.
This was definitely one of those stories that required multiple episodes for the entire arc to run.
But again, how do you squeeze in a multi-arc story when you only have 10 episodes in this season?
The original show, one of the seasons had 13 episodes.
Some of the other seasons had 17 episodes, 19 episodes.
That's a good long time to base out your story.
But also there were a couple of other moments in this episode where I was just like, are people going to know who these characters are?
Because if you're a comics fan, you're like, oh yeah, oh yeah, this is great, this is wonderful.
If you're coming to this show as a newbie, you're going to be like, who's this?
There was definitely one character who I felt like, okay, they've put this character in there because they were part of the original comics arc, but there's no way the X-Men know about this person.
Or does this person even exist in this timeline?
It just doesn't make sense.
It's a great Easter egg, but it just doesn't make sense story-wise.
Talking about things that don't quite make sense story-wise, there's that love triangle.
Where did this love triangle come from?
I mean, it's alluring because the people involved are kind of hot.
But at the same time, it's also ecky.
Was it even canon in the comics?
When you guys watch it, you will know what I'm talking about.
Was it?
Okay, but I think we read about this in the trivia section of the Rise of the Apocalypse game.
I'm pretty sure.
But still, that doesn't mean it's canon.
Must be canon at some point.
This is so weird.
It's really weird.
This is probably the first episode of the three where I could tell that Gambit has a new voiceover artist.
He sounds a lot gruffer.
I couldn't tell.
He sounds the same.
He just looks great.
Yeah, the animation is so beautiful.
Yeah.
So yes, after watching these three episodes, how do you feel about the show?
Oh, I am super excited.
I'm enjoying it.
I love how many of the comic stories I can actually recognize.
I'm interested to see what's happening with the characters.
The animation is just so, so stunning.
I really just love being able to see it.
But I'm very intrigued by some of the story arcs that they've decided to adapt for this season.
And honestly, more X-Men.
Can't go wrong with that.
I completely agree with you.
Enjoying the action, the characters, the storyline, it's all great.
And we love the X-Men.
So glad this show is back.
And that's all from us talking about X-Men ‘97.
What did you think about the show?
Ron: You can find us on Twitter @Stereo_Geeks. Or send us an email
[email protected]. We hope you enjoyed this episode. And see you next week!
Mon: The Stereo Geeks logo was created using Canva. The music for our podcast comes courtesy Audionautix.
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