Pablo Torre Finds Out - A Long-Awaited X-Men ’97 Breakdown, with Mina Kimes and David Dennis Jr.

Episode Date: May 21, 2024

This episode is what happens when three X-Men superfans wait roughly three decades to devour a cake made of nostalgia. Unapologetic, horny nostalgia — with important lessons for the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe therein. Also: Casual Gambit, Magneto being right, adamantium strategy, thruples, and Metal Jason Whitlock. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out. I am Pablo Torre. And today we're going to find out what this sound is. Right after this ad. You're listening to Draft King's Network. I didn't click skip intro once throughout the whole series. The percent of people who click skipped intro has to be sub 10%. I was watching this show in the morning, like getting my son.

ready for school and was making him late every Wednesday. And we were really, really late this Wednesday. And I pushed Skip intro. And he yelled at me in a way that children should not yell at parents. And I just let it lie because it was fair because I feel like he was justified and yelling at me for skipping the intro. He yelled at you like Nathan Summers yelling at Cyclops for abandoning him in the future. Who doesn't sometimes want to just send your child into a portal, 2000 years in the future

and say, somebody else handle this. I'm done. But all right, so I should confess that I, too, feel like a child who has been sent into the future. Because I have been waiting to do this since 1996. Okay? 1996, which is when the finale of X-Men, the animated series aired. And when that show went away, when my favorite television show went away, it left me and my childhood hanging in the balance, waiting for the season.

to pick back up waiting for the sequel, which has finally arrived. X-Men 97 is the title of the animated series over on Disney Plus. It is the subject of today's show, and I guess I should remind people who aren't familiar that X-Men is a massively popular comic book series about these mutant superheroes that inspired the aforementioned animated series in the 90s,

and then a whole bunch of live-action movies, which are, importantly, not a bunch of movie, not part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And the Marvel Cinematic Universe, if you somehow have been asleep for a decade, that's the highest grossing film franchise of all time, despite having zero X-Men projects. Until now.

Until X-Men 97. Which we are going to talk about in full, by the way. So yeah, spoiler alert. What you're about to get is me and two of my similarly obsessive friends, Mina Kimes, and David Dennis, Jr., discussing what we all found out while inhaling this show. Which means that, yeah, you're also about to hear

the greatest intro in television history. And the song is... Dan, dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun dun David Dennis Jr. I've assembled a brotherhood of mutants as it were to talk about a thing that I need people to appreciate even if they don't really appreciate X-Men. David, how old are you?

I am 38. I am 38, turning 38. Okay, so I am 38, turning 39. I know Mina is in that same boat. So we're all the same age. I'm 38, too. Wow, that's kind of weird. We're all the same.

Exactly 38. And so, for us, for people like us, Avengers, I think it's safe to say, didn't mean shit. So the whole idea that we just watched the Marvel Cinematic Universe take over Hollywood Entertainment in real ways, like change the economy

of everything. IP, comic book movies, how everything is done. They did it with a comic book franchise that I didn't care about because I was too worried about X-Men sort of explains why it is that I think a lot of people in our age range have been like clawing and thirsting for something that lives up to expectations I've had for, I don't know, 30 years. When the cinematic movies were coming out and it was like, Iron Man,

they have Captain America, they have Thor, I remember being like, who cares? Like, these are the dorky Avengers. Like, they are the B-Team. The only time I read Avengers was when they had an X-Men crossover. And I'd be like, hmm, let's try to get into Avengers. And I was like, nah, I want to get back to X-Men. That's what I care about.

And for them to turn it into something where, like, kids, like the generation younger than us, think that they are the premier franchises is crazy. Offensive. It's crazy. And it was also offensive as the way that Marvel has deprioritized X-Men the last 20 years, which is like one of the most inexplicable decisions I could think of any sort of business or creative entity ever making.

We are watching this at a time when the MCU has deeply disappointed me, which also sets the stage for like why it is that I'm so thirsty for a cake made of nostalgia. I'm with you guys. I was an X-Men person growing up, not a comic books person per se, but an X-Men animated series fan.

And we can talk about our love of that series and what this series does in terms of building off of that and continuing it. So I was never interested in the Avengers. I was always interested in the X-Men, but I will say even as someone who grew up so passionate about these characters, I was never really drawn in by the live-action movies. Some of them are a little bit better than others. Logan, which I guess doesn't really count, is obviously pretty well done.

But for the most part, I kind of stopped caring. And this pulled me in so immediately and so aggressively. and allowed me to experience like a level of nostalgia that I really haven't partaken in with anything. Yes, I am unapologetically invested in this X-Men 97, essentially sequel to what was a truly formative cartoon in my childhood. And I'm not a person who's into cartoons in this way. Like, I'm a big Star Wars guy.

I should say full disclosure, my screen name on AOL was Yoda followed by six numbers. And those six numbers, David, if you did not know, were two X-Men comic book numbers. Oh, okay, all right. And so that's the level of nerdery I brought to this. Wow. But I say that also because I did not give a fuck about the Star Wars, like, animated series stuff.

Like, rebels. Like, I'm just not an animated guy in general. But I am a comic book guy. You know, X-Men, the comic books in the last, like, five years has really sort of picked up steam also. And the show has really, it's almost an unlocking. part of my brain that I kind of had felt like I'd said goodbye to. You know, like I had spent ears thinking that I was never going to reach this level of fandom with X-Men again, with something that dominated the entirety of my life as a child.

And re-watching this show, it's almost like listening to an old song from 20 years ago and be like, oh, I actually remember every single word. Like, there's deep cuts and deep things. I'm like, I distinctly recall this moment from when I was seven years old. Now that we've established a world the same age, when the animated series came out, We were eight, I think, eight through 12-ish. Yeah, six to ten, six to eleven, eight to twelve. Okay.

So basically the perfect age insofar as old enough to kind of understand what was a pretty complicated series in terms of plot lines, multiverse stuff, some adult themes, but young enough to be totally obsessed with it. I would say, you know, I haven't revisited the animated series in a while. the new, NextMen 97, does feel more mature and more geared towards adults, which is not entirely surprising given that it is made for adults who watched the original animated series. But I'll say, like, my brother and I were obsessed with the animated series, so much so that when they would re-air it, we taped them all on VHS, which is a thing you had to do back then for people who have a genuine generation. We all, David and I were both nodding hard.

Yep, exactly, right? And would still go back and watch like the apocalypse stuff, the Dark Phoenix saga, all the little series within the series from time to time, I think through like high school. Yeah. Which is crazy. Yeah, I don't remember which came first.

So as much as I love the comic books and there are lots of references in X-Men 97 to the comics, David. And I think you're probably the biggest comics guy among the three of us. But I don't even remember that's how formative the show was, the cartoon was. I don't remember if I love the comics or the cartoon first. I just know that they sort of coexist. in parallel for me into my puberty, basically.

Yeah, so I was a comic book kid first. You know, my mom would take the grocery store or the mall, and I'd sit in the bookstore, sit in the corner. I still have my very first comic book, which is X-Men won. The Jim Lee, Chris Claremont, was like the biggest selling comic book of all time. That was it. So when X-Men came, I was like, this is a dream come true.

These people I love and these characters I love, and they are on the screen. And I was a kid watching this like, this is different from the comic, like, what do you guys? Like, I was that kid, and I was, like, so incredibly locked in at the time. Like, the thing about how spoiled kids are now to watch, like, endgame in the movie theater. Like, X-Men, the cartoon, was the end-game for us. Like, every Saturday morning for years, which is, like, an incredible thing.

Who are you guys' favorite characters? My favorite characters from being a child and watching the animated series were Wolverine and Storm, who were arguably the best X-Men, I think. we cannot debate that, and which made it really interesting, I thought that this version, X-Men 97, kind of downplayed those. I mean, Storm got a very cool plot line,

but Wolverine, I thought, who is a lot of people's favorite X-Men growing up, probably because of the animated series, because he was just the coolest one, right? Yeah, yeah. It was slow-played in this series and wasn't really present in the finale, Storm as well.

I thought that was an interesting decision, David, because I'm sure I wasn't alone in loving those two characters. Yeah, I was going to say those are my two favorite characters, too. And to the point, like, it was everybody's favorite character. To the point, like, I don't know if you guys experienced this as children, but I remember my friends would say, we're watching Bart Simpson, and then they would say we're watching Wolverine. Like, that's what they would.

Oh, I was, to echo everybody, I was a Wolverine guy, number one, far and away, like super, super fan, put, like, f***ing knives in between, my fingers, like, did all of the shit about, you know, pretending I had claws. You know that phrase, like, a poor person's idea of a rich person, you know, Wolverine was a kid's idea of the coolest person on him. Absolutely. Oh, and the fact that he was also short, he was sort of like, yeah, yeah, yeah, like none of it, none of it stopped him from being a cigar-chomping badass.

His one-liners, I thought, were, I was like, oh, shit, they did it again. Yep, I'm trying out, I'm trying out saying bub to people, you know. When he cut Cyclops' car, I made you a convertible bump. I was like, damn! Tell Cyclops, I made him a convertible. But in retrospect, especially compared to this series, which actually has legitimately good writing and legitimately funny one-liners, those ones weren't quite as sophisticated.

I wrote a note to myself. I believe it was right, like literally seconds before a pivotal, scene that we can now spoil the penultimate episode, where I'm like, Wolverine, not really in this. And then at the very end, he gets his f***ing adamantium skeleton ripped out of his body. And an echo, David, of maybe the most famous panel, you could argue, in comic books, X-Men 25, right? And they basically frame for frame kind of tried to recreate that. It would probably say, like, seven through 11 most traumatic moments of my life before 13. It's right up in there. It's like watching Magneto do this.

I took the comic book. It has a holographic card. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. On the cover. And then I brought it to school and I showed everybody. I was like, look at what this son of a bitch did to Wolverine. And you guys believe it. It traumatized me and I could not believe.

I couldn't believe they did it. It gets to like why it is that I enjoyed this so much, which was when I read it in the comics, it was sort of a mind-blowing thing because I was like, oh my God. Of course Magneto can do this. He like controls metal. It did not occur to me until I saw the panel. And in this case, I was waiting for it. And that's, it was sort of like, this felt like a fan service, truly, in a way that was unapologetic.

Yeah, like a reverse fan service. Well, like David said, so we weren't, I wasn't a huge comics book, but I did have some of the comics. My brother and I splurged on some of them. And this one was obviously very widely discussed and dramatizing. I would love to see a list of David's top five most traumatizing childhood moments. Mine includes the end of. bridge to Terribithia. And my girl, when the kid dies

because of the beaches. And this one. Oh, and all dogs go to heaven, which is really scary. But that was kind of like the general tenor of this entire series. It's like, oh, my God, they're really doing it. They're really doing it again. Oh, God. To the point where it was like a little relentless. Yes.

And I appreciated in the finale that they slowed things down a bit because if I had one tiny critique of the series, it would be like, wow. They squeezed a lot. lot into a very short period of time. We got Inferno, we got E is for Extinction. We got Outrace Zero Tolerance. Executionary's song.

All of these big moments that happened that they condensed pretty well, actually, because it can get bloated. But I do want to mention, you know, as we're talking about Wolverine getting his animantium ripped out, we have talked about the first text I sent you guys about this show, which is Professor Rex is Doc Rivers. Why do you take Wolverine to go fight the master of magnetism. Also, Professor X, Episode 1, leaves Gene Gray, Omega-Level mutant at home and sends Morp to fight the Sentinels. Like, can we get somebody else in here to make some, like, actual

strategic decisions for this man who is proving to be like a more terrible person. He's already a terrible person in comic books. He's more terrible by the day in X-Men 97. Yeah, historically blowing 3-1 leads all over the place. Like Professor X, again, and look, I'm not here to complain about how I'm confused still about how Professor X could be. also an omega-level mutant and also sort of like useless enough to the point where these battles end up becoming such nail biters.

But were we as mad at Professor X as kids as I was during this series? Because I don't recall being so. But now when you see it through the lens of like what he was, again, this is now introducing the whole like Magneto was right aspect of the thing, which was actually said aloud in a reference, a fan service he referenced to the meme.

It's the scariest thing, Genosha, wasn't the death or the chaos. It was a thought. The only sane thought you can have when being chased by giant robots that were built to crush you. Magneto was right. Enough. But also to like the philosophy of what's happening in X-Men, which is about essentially a minority group asserting itself against a genocidal oppressor in the case of Janosha, quite literal on the nose version of it. I was just furious at Professor X pretty much the entire time.

It's crazy for a seven or eight-year-old, but I remember as a kid having it explained to me in Malcolm X in OK terms. Right. I can't believe I understood that as an eight-year-old with Magneto and Professor X. All the which is to say, he was not vilified. He wasn't as stupid or naive, I think is the proper word, to describe his approach to tactics or lack thereof in this series. But there were moments where I thought he seemed selfish in the first run.

And, like, I mean, can you imagine he being any child's favorite character or any child being a fan of him? And a lot of characters got sort of image rehabilitation in this series. Cyclops. This is the best Cyclops has ever been by far. You'll never hurt my family again. Speaking of Malcolm X, we are getting, we're getting Malcolm Summers. Like, we got the. We got a little hint of the Malcolm X Cyclops.

Let's. Can we get the Malcolm X glasses with the Ruby Quartz Photoshop over this part of the conversation? He has the line when he's being interviewed. Yeah. Where he like flips on Trisha and he's like, you don't deserve our help. You're ungrateful. We fight. Risk our lives for you.

Evil mutants, robots, crazy aliens. I gave him up. I gave him up because you can't say thank you. Because I have to stomach your questions and prove. that I'm a person. I lie because the truth is we're nothing like you. Thank God, because it's the only reason you people are still alive. Literally, I got like boost bumps when he said that because it was so unexpected coming from him.

I need the ether beat to play in the background while Cyclops was doing that because if we're talking bar of the series, I think it's a tie between the Landra's sister calling us the Milky Way ghetto. Xavier would see his Milky Way ghetto become our number. new throne world. Which is like something that I like texted and called people that like you called it the Milky Way ghetto, which is an all-timer. And Magneto saying, hey, you wouldn't marry your little bird alien or whatever, bird queen.

When you abandoned us for your sheer bird queen, you bequeathed it to me. Asked me to walk your path. Are you prepared to walk mine? Those are two absolute keepers. The diplomats like, most other nations don't allow. a terrorist to be their leader. Yet so many allow their leaders to be terrorists. Damn.

So many good lines in the series. For people who don't know Cyclops at all, like he is like the generic. Loser. Captain of the football team, but boring. No one likes him. Like straight arrow. The anti- Wolverine.

Well put. Wolverine was cool because he was the opposite of Cyclops who was like the Boy Scout. Was Professor X's like favorite pet? And in fact, the whole series sort of part of what starts the momentum of the series is Professor X has gone to be with his bird queen and leaves his X-Men,

keeps them calling them My X-Men, which feels paternalistic in ways that we're all frustrated by, I think as adults, in the mutant minority metaphor. But Professor X leaves the X-Men to Magneto instead of Cyclops. Magneto, what are you doing in our whole? Your home, I beg to differ, Cyclops. The last will and testament of Charles Francis Xavier,

as you all will see, his fortune, his school, everything he built, everything he fought for. Now belongs to me, my X-Men. And so now we get this tension of like what's happening here, and is this a more radical version. of what we were familiar with as kids. Cyclops really goes through it in the series, right? Between not getting to be the leader, finding out that the mother of his children was maybe a clone,

and it's very unclear when the switch was made and having to reckon with that. And then he kind of is side texting, his old wife on the subtly and environmentally. Yeah, telepathically, yep, texting. Yeah, and then at the very end, he goes full Cyclops and turns out of him.

tries to basically say, you know, this is not who we are. Bastion, come join us. I know how it feels to have the things you trusted, the future you were building, crash down on you, and refuse to let go even as you're buried by what should have been. You're not alone. I think older versions, I would have rolled my eyes, but it felt earned in a way

because of who he was throughout this entire series. That made it actually feel like a cool moment. I still kind of rolled my eyes. And look, Mike, if I have criticisms of the show, it's not that they shouldn't have leaned in to these comic book themes. And this is like the eternal one, which is the X-Men fundamentally. The reason their professor X's X-Men is because they will not give up on people.

They will look for the good in you. It just felt, of course, almost classically mellow dramatic. I think this is the part where we should talk about the through line between the two series, the thing that they maintained that, you know, one of the things I struck a court with us as children is that X-Men fundamentally is an incredibly horny franchise and in an extremely, extremely horny cartoon that children probably should not have been exposed

to the level of horniness. And we got some real dirt dog moments. Professor X being like, hey, treat me like a dog. I wouldn't mind it. Your man speaks as if I am your pet. Not an entirely displeasing thought. Hush now, beloved. You may bark later.

Morph and Wolverine. Hello. Morph and Wolverine. Can we talk about that? So Morph is like a stand-in for truly, like, as a shapeshifter, a non-binary character in the most literal mutant senses. And basically, and I was reading an interview with the now, and this is a fascinating subplot of all of this, the now-departed writer of the series, in which he basically says that Morph loves Wolverine and he took on the character of Gene Gray to, express it at the moment at which Wolverine recovering from having the f*** adamantium ripped from his skeleton needs like a psychological boost basically to stay alive.

She can't say it, but I can't. I love you, Logan. Stay with me. And that I'm just like, that's some heavy shit as well as some super horny shit. Even before then, like, you know, the glimpses were there when Wolverine was sad and morph turns into Sabretooth and they like, he brings a picketoe that. big basket to him and they go out to like frolic and fight in the woods. And then there's like they save rogue and like Morp is like snuggled up under Wolverine

and Morph's like murder dream like nightmare sequence is Logan in the shower. Like what are we talking about? And it is important to also note that now Wolverine is semi-canonically in a thruple, has been in a thruple with Cyclops and Gene Gray for the last few years due to like the horniest diagram in X-Men history, which is Cyclops and Gene Grace bedroom with a back door to Wolverine's bedroom, which set the internet world

on fire, and now we have a show where Wolverine is, in my opinion, canonically banging Morp at some point. You guys haven't even gotten to the entire finale where Professor X is in Magneto's head, and every scene of them, their faces are like

one inch apart. I'm like, come on. Come on, guys. Can I go back to Morph for a quick second, though? So I thought that the character was largely successful. I thought the decision to make him, like, you know, gender-biter, it really made sense and they were very consistent with it. Like, he brought some emotion to the series, you know, with his memories and all of that. But explained this to me.

If he can morph into everyone, why is he not like the most powerful community? Like, did they ever really address that in the series? Did I miss it? Bo DeMayo has said that morph can be. morph into anybody who has a physical power. So he can morph into an incredible Hulk, he can morph into Mr. Fantastic and Stretch. He can't morph into Cyclops and shoot beams out of his eyes.

Okay, so strength and speed, basically. And Morph is another character from the series. My memory of Morph is basically that he was a throw-in in the first cartoon that I hated because he was useless. And now they did find a way to also rejuvenate the concept of Morph. But also, let's point out too, right? Like, you mentioned, amid all of the cucking that was going on through the series.

Rogue and Magneto basically, you know, intimately dancing while flying in Genosha, as everybody was watching as a political move, I suppose. But also setting the stage for another huge subplot, which is Rogue having to choose between Gambit and Magneto, choosing Magneto, watching Gambit die, and then going back to Magneto, which was a lot to process for me. And it seemed exclusively to choose Magneto because they can have sex. Like telling Gambit the dang truth.

I can't touch you, Rame. Your heart may beat for me, but I can't feel it. You light up everything you touch, but never me. I love that part, by the way. She tells me, she's like, you can't touch me, sure. Yeah, yeah. I also, look, I'm willing to just take a lot at face value. The whole thing of, like, due to Magnet, due to Magnetot's electromagnetic field,

they can fuck. I'm like, I'm not going to ask follow-up questions, but sure. He comes in as her mentor and teacher and then, you know, it's a little bit glossed over. It's groomy.

It's groomy, yeah. Very problematic. How do we feel about Magneto generally in this series? Like, what did you guys think of his portrayal? And then just how things wrapped up with him in the finale. I love Magneto.

Magneto was bars, all bars. So many bars. Episode five, which is the Gambit, death. And also like the further radicalization, the re-radicalization of Magneto. It just felt like the whole

Magneto was right thing, came to a head there because I was like, now I've watched the Morlocks, all these mutants get genocided. And I'm like, yeah, I'm on Magneto's side. Yeah. And the whole time, I'm just like, how do I feel about him? I felt like he was the guy I was rooting for the most. In, out of every every character, basically, which I didn't necessarily expect.

But Mina, how did you feel about him? Magnino was right. Definitely has a stronger case than Thanos was right. Another reason why this series is better. Because it's a case that's actually supported by characterization and writing. Motive. All of it, it makes sense. And at the end, I didn't feel conflict.

I wasn't quite sure what outcome I was rooting for. I mean, I was reading for the survival of the characters I like, but in terms of like, the humans in this series are awful. They are incredibly unsympic. Including Captain America, by the way. Well, and that's the other thing, by the way. Also useless. Well, at the end, so when they cut and there's all these cameos of like Avengers

from around the world and various marble, none of them are doing shit. Sir, King Tachaka is right. We know next to nothing about asteroid M. This could do more harm than good. Why aren't they doing anything? Like, this is a planetary risk. I think that was very deliberate and meant to, like, kind of illustrate, like, oh, wow, like, okay, the Avengers, Captain America, they're still, they have these ties to the government. They're in the room when they just make the decision to activate the Magneto Protocols.

They call Tchaca, who's kind of, you know, raises some questions, which is he gets a little bit of a better showing. But for the most part, it really does illustrate and, I think, complicate cooperation. And, you know, the title of the final trilogy, its tolerance is extinction. Extinction. Yeah. And it really raised, like, pretty heavy stuff for children to watch. My issue with X-Men and the way that people who write about X-Men in general is that, like, when bad things happen to Spider-Man, it's like happens to Spider-Man, right?

Like Barry Jane breaks up with him. He loses his job. He gets beat up. Same thing. You know, like these things happen. But what bad things happen to X-Men, it happens to an entire race of people. And like, it's really difficult to watch, especially an allegory for black or queer folks and or queer folks, marginalized folks, to watch, like, they do genocide a lot. Like, X-Men have experienced genocide in a lot, especially in the last few years.

It is not, yeah, it's not subtle. There's Genosia. There's Scarlet Witch saying, no more mutants. There's, like, all. all this genocide that is a part of the franchise that you have to endure. And one of the things I think was an important meta-conversation about this was that the Genosia genocide is something that is locked in. I've tried it all over and over.

Each time we attempt to stop the attack on Genosia, we are temporarily pulled away from the event. Like, it is locked in across multiverses that this will always happen to these people. And you all are going to have to deal with it. It's really heavy stuff. But at the same time, it's tough to, you know, to experience sometimes. Like, there are people who have real visceral reactions to these because these are characters we love, but also these are like a reminder that, hey, if you are of the minority, this will happen to you no matter what.

One thing I did not like on just a pure, like, comic book cartoon series thing. The Prime Sentinels thing. Do these people even know what you're doing to them? Oh, I admit the more technical details, but they know their job. joining something far greater than themselves. After this, they wake up in their daily lives with no memory of ever being here. Then, who knows?

Maybe a mutant flirts with one of them at a local dive bar and... You said you were building a new sentinel, not weaponizing civilians. You sound like a dinosaur fretting the fate of an asteroid before impact. The whole, like, we turn people into sentinels. Like, eh, I guess...

Nah. I mean, they signed up for it, which I feel like is not too unrealistic. Like, you know, they were taking our jobs. Like, what have, they're mad. They're mad because Colossus in the original series, like, was like a construction worker and was able to build buildings fast and everybody else. So they turned themselves into Sentinels to go and murder mutants. Like, that seems.

It does feel like when your neighbor storms the Capitol and you're like, yeah, I probably should have seen that comment. There was a scene with President Kelly. I can't remember what episode it was. where he says, I'm not giving you guys what you want. He's talking to, I think, Cyclops. But he says, imagine if someone else, they would be way worse than me. And if scared voters see me helping your kind,

sorry, son, just unfortunate optics. Optics, sir? Guess if Genosha had looked more human, you would be more focused on death tolls over polls. Now, hold up. I'm playing politics here to ensure someone less kind to your cause, doesn't end up in the office you're so quick. to disrespect.

Be patience, Scott. But I was like, oh my God, if this is not the most nuanced depiction of like moderate politics I've ever seen and like, yeah, I mean, there's just so, the allegory in this series felt a bit more intense and heavy-handed at times than the child, the 92 series.

But again, I think that's just because it was for adults. So we've mentioned Thanos a couple of times here. I do wonder like how we would be seeing all of this if we weren't reacting also to the latest slate of just Marvel stuff, that has been deeply disappointing. If I watched this after I watched Infinity War or Endgame, would I be so blown away by the basic idea of good writing and historical analogy?

Because I just feel like I've been thirsting for stuff because it's just been so blah across the board that they soared over a low bar as well. my frustration with a lot of the latest Marvel stuff and I actually haven't caught some of it so I don't want to paint too broad or brush aside from like it always seems to end these overwrought action sequences

and just so much CGI is like the really the excessive multiverse aspect of it and the complexity and that seems to be replacing you know in some cases plot this I appreciated the simplicity of it even though it is a complicated show and I'm actually a little bit worried about the teaser for next season when they do. So this is not, if you're listening to this, you've finished the series.

The X-Men are not sucked into the black hole that, you know, fixes the asteroid problem. They are split up into two groups across different timelines. Half of them go into the past Egypt where, ancient Egypt, pardon me, where you see the original mutant, aka Coppocalypse, which, you know, I mean, I grew up loving the apocalypse stuff. So I was like, yeah. And then some of them will go into the future where they see a young Nathan Summers. And then I forget the woman's name, but it's Rachel Summers' character as well. So it's cool.

But I was like, ooh, I really don't want like multiple timelines and like confusion. Actually, David kind of made me think of some of these latest Marvel movies where I personally, I don't enjoy it that much. There was a lot of sort of hypothesizing that this could lead in the digital. Deadpool and Wolverine, which I'm glad it did not. Like, I'm glad that this had his own standalone thing. You know, the speed in which they've been moving through these things, maybe we'll get like three episodes

of this time-timey stuff and we can move on. I'd really like the fact that after the Genosha thing, everybody just assumed that there would be time travel and it would get like wiped off and it'd be non-consequential and we would do, and they stayed away from that, which I'm happy about.

One of the lessons of this series that I think Marvel could learn from, with their other stuff. And one of the reasons why I liked it, aside from the writing being amazing and the characters, is how simple the fights were. I mean, the fight scene,

and granted, it's animation, obviously so you can do whatever you want. But I found the fight scenes, the battle scenes, to be very easy to follow even when they were being fought on multiple planes. And I think to, like,

the latest Marvel movies, off the time, I have no freaking clue what's going on. And that was something that I think was really remarkable about this series. It's like the action was amazing. I mean, look,

what did animation teach us? about how the MCU, and by that, I mean, just like movie, live action movies are going to be disappointing. It's an interesting question, because I now prefer the animation, just because they don't have the confidence in the live action. And I say that as somebody who watched,

I think every, I think I've seen David, every MCU series or movie. And, no, it's just, it's, like, I watched, like, quantumania and I was like, this looks like shit. Yeah. And was confused. And it end up, like, confused sometimes about what's going on. As somebody who's, like, read some of the comic books.

I'm still, like, this was so confident. The war, this is competently done. Competently done fight scenes, giving every, Jubilee got a moment. Everything matters in these fights. It's not just like we're just throwing stuff and just making people fight. Rogue gets her moment. Literally clapped his ass. Incredible.

No, but I would draw, like, like, something instructed to me. I saw Chang Chi and the Legend of Ten Rings in the theater. The fight scene on the bus. rules. And at the end, it's the same, it's like that marvel, like, oh my God,

I can't tell us what on. There's all that shit coming on, is CGI. Keep it simple with these fight scenes because they don't have to be that convoluted. On the point of Jubilee,

I do want to ask you guys. So I hated her in the original series, which was really tough. Why? You know, as Asian representation, because she was a dork and her power sucked

and she wore like a raincoat. I thought she, along with several other characters, was pretty heavily rehabilitated for me in this series. Even the video game episode, which is probably the weakest one, was still entertaining. She got funny lines.

So I have to ask you, we nodded to this earlier, which characters do you think in this version got the biggest glow up from the previous X-Men? I'll go a little bit offbeat with this, which is to say, I really liked what they did with Gambit, including killing him.

And my disappointment is that the end of this, the mid-roll credit scene indicates that he's not actually going to stay dead is that he will be the horseman of the apocalypse, probably death. And I'm just like, I thought it was a little braver what they did with Gambit,

including, by the way, his outfits, which I was like, yo, casual gambit? Casual Gambit. Oh, Gambit upset a lot of people. Beta Gambit with his showing his belly button. How dare he, while cooking bignets? What a beta meal. Yeah, he got a huge glow up.

Gene Gray, I thought, had a pretty cool glow up in the fact that, like, the joke is that there is a really disturbing but kind of hilarious supercut of Gene Gray fainting in the original, like, every time anything happened. But we got, like, superpower Gene Gray here. And Gene Gray, who was like, you know, pushing Cyclops a little bit. I mean, I know we can be angry at her because she definitely made out with Wolverine before she got mad at Cyclops. But that's neither here nor there. She was dealing with her clone. It's a tough time. Yeah, she had stuff going on.

Lucy-Gusie time. And the Jean Grey Storm relationship was really, really cool. That was cool. Mind your weather, weather your mind, whoever wrote that, they took like the net. They took the rest. I know they wrote that and just took the day all. Make them mind your weather sister. And them weather your mind.

They just put their pencil down and was like, I'm going to send a bun. I'll catch all tomorrow. Like that, they had a really beautiful relationship. Storm cheering when Jean Grey turned into Phoenix was like really awesome to see, to see two. So that, you know, yeah, Gene Gray, think for me. That was another thing. Like, again, there were some new interpersonal dynamics that I really liked in this series that were different. You see the Storm gene relationship. Another smaller thing that I loved was Magneto, like Storm being the only one he respects.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then ultimately her, what they did to her, driving him to retaliate when, you know, in episode three when Storm loses their powers, I really liked that. Like, it just checked out It made sense, and it was something kind of new and fresh. Is it telling that we haven't even mentioned Bastion by name, who is the supervillain of this thing, the guy that ostensibly the X-Men were fighting and then trying to convert and then, quote-unquote, killed, although it seems like you may also be alive at the end.

The mutant who hates his mutinness so much that he wants to destroy all mutants. Who exactly is Bastion? Bastion. He's a sentinel given human form. Do you understand the few times? of fighting the future. By the time we got his origin story, I just started referring to him

as metal Jason Whitlock, but that's neither here nor there. We needed someone saying to Bastion, you bitch. You bitch. You bitch. You bastard. He was a good villain.

He was a good villain. He stood for something. David explained it. And I think it was believable. The way they gave him some backstory, story was believable. He was sort of in between a lot of different factions and his like motives and ends were changing as a result of that. And I think it made sense. He wasn't like an apocalypse level, baddie though. And that's, it's season one, right? You can't immediately come out with one of the

best villains in season one. Right. Another little touch that I loved was when at the end of episode five, when Gambit dies, they do the thing the NFL does with the like, piano acoustic version of the theme song on the way out. They did the finale too. Yes, yes, yes, yes. With the choir backing them. The orchestral, oh my God, yes. Yes, the orchestral choir version in the finale was fucking amazing.

I feel like beyond the speed running through history, X-Men lore, and beyond like the fan service, I'm trying to think of like what other lessons are going to be taken forward. by Marvel having now experienced a thing that has pulled so crazily well. And I think a basic one might just be, please make less stuff every year and make better stuff. Maybe that's the most simple one. It's just like, if I'm thinking about what I consume

from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, broadly speaking, including the cartoons this year, I'm thinking about X-Men 97 and not anything else. When it comes to making content, stories, writing are what matters. that is why this series was great. I mean, there's a lot of things we liked about it. The look of it I thought was good as well. The voice acting was excellent.

But the writing is why this rocked. I mean, it's just, from start to finish, it was so unbelievably well written. We've been talking about some of the quotable lines, but it's beyond that. There was no, I didn't cringe at all. I mean, there was no corn, the exposition felt seamless.

The dialogue felt realistic. The characters were all very true. to their stories. And I think when we think about these big, you know, huge action series and action movies,

that tends to be what seems to be overworked and sacrificed and overwrought in the name of fan service or, you know, these overly CGIed action sequences. So I,

to me, that's just whoever, the people who wrote this series just knocked it out of the bark. Yeah, for me, I mean, along those lines, it's give me characters

I care about. Like, give me people, like, you're giving me so many of these like big explosions, and all this other stuff. Like, you mentioned Shane Shee, by the end of the movie, I didn't really care about the characters as much as, like,

are they going to defeat the, like, dragon or whatever monster that popped out of that thing? Like, to me, I'm looking at the, like, scale of the cinematic universe and looking at the new event, the new people who are going to be Avengers, for instance, and they've been around for years, and I don't necessarily care about that many of them in terms of, like, what they're going to do, what is their moment going to do? When end game happens, or even before end game, When Infinity War happens and Spider-Man disappears and he has his moment with Tony Stark and they have, like, do you care about that, right? X-Men, I care about the characters.

I care about what Wolverine is going to do next. I care about Cyclops and Gene's relationship. When Storm does something badass, I want to cheer. When Rogue said, his name was Gamb to remember him. I'm like, that's it. You know, like, I care about the characters. And I just don't, I think we've sacrificed a lot of that for the big moments. when rogue scolds Professor X

about how Gambit should be remembered. Remy was the most Cajun man I ever met as much as he wanted to escape the bayou. He knew our lives are about what bits of us we leave behind and what we carry into the future. Maybe if you saw us as people and not students, you'd have realized that. The nuance in like you only thought of him as a mutant.

Yeah. And actually he was this, other thing that everybody should have a three-dimensionality that is acknowledged was also just a level of character development and investment. And the other thing that Marvel has sort of like fallen into, because I think a lot of what happened with the Avengers stuff is where we started the conversation is that they sort of realized, okay, people like funny. And so they started foregrounding funny.

And so many of the movies have tried to lead with humor. And some of it has worked. Thor Ragnarok is amazing. But the imitators of that, and it gets to Gardens of the Galaxy, which started off funny and then started being less and less so because it tried to foreground it. I was like foreground what X-Men 97 foregrounded, right? Which is like a sincere appreciation for character and superpowers. Like don't ever underestimate how you need to be culminating this shit in an awesome fight sequence. Yeah.

Like please reverse engineer from there, because that's ultimately why we're watching this stuff and not just watching, you know, documentary. that can give us the character development and the history, but not the superpowers. Like a series of memes is what a lot of movies these days feels like. If you tell good stories with good characters, people will come. And then everything else is sort of incidental to that, the humor, the callbacks, all of that. That's not the point, it's not the main thing. The stories are the main thing. Mina, David Dennis Jr., thank you for doing this.

Thank you for reliving our childhood together. I just want more. That's all I want now. I just want more of this. When is season two coming? Can we hurry up? It's already been written, apparently. Got to get it.

Let's do it. Let's do it. Hurry up. This has been Pablo Torre finds out. A Metal Arc Media production. And I'll talk to you next time.