Growing up, as a young lad, I was obsessed with X-Men: The Animated series, which ran on Fox from 1992 to 1997. I bought the VHS tapes, bought the comics based off the television show, entitled X-MEN ADVENTURES, and I even signed up for every Fox contest for the cartoon, which my sister sadly won after pretending to be 4 years old... I'm still salty about that.
I thought it would be fun to go back and look at a show I loved so much in my pre-teens and teenage years. It's been twenty years since I've seen anything from this show, aside from listening to the theme song on YouTube over and over again. So here we go with the first Nostalgia Flashback, where I talk about a show from my childhood while watching the episode.
Now, there are over 70 episodes to this series, so finding the right one to talk about was going to be tough, I thought. Luckily, in the first season, this show tackled the Days of Future Past story, which was also adapted into the movie X-Men: Days of Future Past. Now, this was the first two-part story for the animated series. Before we get into the episode, let's start the episode off with a familiar song. If you want to watch the episode along with me while I chat about it, it's located here on YouTube.
First and foremost, the intro has me pumped for what I hope to be something incredibly awesome. We get an opening with Sentinels attacking some mutants, which live in the sewer with the words "X-MEN" scratched into the entrance, which is seriously stupid. Anyway, the Sentinels are really easy to defeat, which makes me wonder how the Sentinels won the battle in the first place.
Bishop shows up and takes down Wolverine and captures him. Anytime Bishop does anything, there's some sweet blues music playing and TONS of harmonica. If you don't laugh, then there's something wrong. Then again, most of this music on the show is really jazzy. We get to see all the X-Men are dead and have headstones with their X-Men name on it.
This is supposed to be a dystopian future, but the only thing that looks different about these characters is that Wolverine hasn't shaved in a few days. The future is tough when Gillette doesn't exist. Bishop and Wolverine team up and meet Forge and they need to travel back in time to prevent an assassination. As a kid, I was super-excited to see Forge on this show. However, he didn't really make an impact here. Yeah, he's got the time machine, but
Bishop ends up getting to go back in time because the future is ageist. It takes a while to travel back in time though, as Bishop is stuck floating in the air for a minute. Then, Nimrod comes in and tries to give him a back-rub.
Bishop ends up traveling back in time and talks to himself a whole lot, while some sweet blues music plays. That's the thing about this show. Characters are always talking to themselves, out loud.
Cut to Beast, in jail. This is something that really stood out to me, as I always remember Beast being in jail for a giant chunk of the series. Also, he was always hanging upside down, which is not the best of ideas since all the blood rushes to your head. There's no toilet in his cell, so just like any animal in a confined space, Beast did his business in the corners.
Rogue and Gambit pay him a visit and bring him a book. He's probably just going to store bags of toilet wine in there. Wait... there's no toilet. Nevermind. Wait... Rogue and Gambit are in prison with him? Color me confused.
While Bishop deals with the emotional trauma of not knowing why he's gone back in time, while hiding in an abandoned, broken down building, which are apparently everywhere in this city, a couple of kids run by and yell about their new video game called "Assassin," which has Punisher on the cover. Bishop's wrist computer is silly and tells Bishop to stop the X-Men from assassinating someone. It's the worst piece of future technology ever.
Bishop steals a bus and heads to the mansion, which is hilarious. He runs onto the bus, with his gun, and immediately, everyone runs off screaming. Then, he drives the bus. He makes a sweet 90 degree turn to pull into the mansion. Bishop's gun it totally worthless. It's explained later that it was on "stun," but Bishop gets two shots off on Storm and Cyclops, and essentially, it just shoves them down. Later, Jean Grey is amazed with said technology. Everyone is a bit obsessed with the gun just as much as Bishop's mission.
Nimrod comes back and beats everyone up. Nimrod is the dumbest looking character. He's a very stiff, weird looking character here. Apparently, the worse you look on this show, Storm does her whole "over-the-top expositional dialogue" thing while freezing Nimrod and they win. Back at the X-Mansion, Gambit walks in and Bishop gets all mad and says he needs to kill Gambit. Oh no! To be continued...
From the first episode of this two-part story, I can tell you that the show doesn't hold up. There was a feeling of excitement and adventure the first times I saw it, but that's faded a bit. The show is unintentionally funny though for the plethora of reasons above. It's insanely over-dramatic with a pretty cheesy backing score that was unnecessarily bluesy. The animation, compared to other shows of its day is not up to par. It feels like there's a lot of shortcuts within the show.
So the show is a tad bad, but it's still a lot of fun to watch. Yes, Bishop talking to himself, outloud, about everything happening is silly, but it's a good laugh. What's cool about this show is that there is a lot of episodic elements to the series, which is something we're very accustomed to now as television viewers. Beast is in jail because of things that happened in previous episodes and after this, Bishop does pop in and out of the show too. We're not talking Breaking Bad levels of storytelling her, but there's some nice callbacks to where other people are in the story.
That does it for this edition of Nostalgia Flashback. If there's a comic book television show, movie, or cartoon you want us to check out, let us know in the comment section. We'll see you next time.
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