Spoilers for X-Men ’97 follow!
Over the course of the last ten weeks, X-Men ‘97 has cemented itself as one of the biggest and most beloved Marvel adaptations in years. Through its exciting takes on iconic characters like Magneto, Cyclops, Jean Grey, Wolverine, Gambit, Rogue, and many more, this Disney+ original series has managed to exceed all of the hefty expectations placed on its shoulders. Following up the classic cartoon X-Men: The Animated Series, which originally ran on Fox from 1992 to 1997, was no easy task. However, thanks to a skilled creative team, of which creator/head writer Beau DeMayo and supervising director Jake Castorena played a huge role, many fans are in agreement that X-Men ’97 is on track to surpass its famed predecessor in nearly every way imaginable.
In the first season of X-Men ’97, the titular team of mutants focused on rebuilding after the departure of their former leader, Professor Charles Xavier (Ross Marquand). The arrival of Erik Lehnsherr/Magneto (Matthew Waterson) as the new leader of the X-Men on Xavier’s behalf spiraled the superhero team into immediate drama. Next came the revelation that Jean Grey (Jennifer Hale) had been replaced by an evil clone created by Mister Sinister (Christopher Britton) named Madelyne Pryor at some point. This drastically affected the relationship between the original Jean Grey and Cyclops/Scott Summers (Ray Chase), especially since Scott and Madelyne celebrated the birth of a new son, Nathan Summers, in just the previous episode. Oh, and that same son soon arrives as the time-traveling Cable (Chris Potter) to warn the X-Men of an imminent disaster, but it’s too late.
All of this drama culminated in an epic attack on Genosha, Magneto’s new mutant nation, leaving many mutants dead — including the fan-favorite hero Remy LeBeau/Gambit (A.J. LoCascio). With the X-Men down many members, a split occurred due to opposite ideologies. Cyclops led a side determined to act under the X-Men’s righteous values, with Jean, Logan/Wolverine (Cal Dodd), Hank McCoy/Beast (George Buza), Kurt Wagner/Nightcrawler (Adrian Hough), Ororo Munroe/Storm (Alison Sealy-Smith), Jubilation Lee/Jubilee (Holly Chou), and Forge (Gil Birmingham) remaining by his side. Magneto, meanwhile, went back to his old destructive ways by leading an opposing side determined to annihilate anybody, or anything, against mutants, with Rogue (Lenore Zann) and Roberto da Costa/Sunspot (Gui Agustini) standing by him.
With Professor X forced to reenter the scene and take down his former best friend Magneto, the X-Men had no choice but to make the ultimate sacrifice as they faced the supervillains Bastion (Theo James) and Mister Sinister. Although fans are first led to believe that all the heroes were vanquished, X-Men ’97 Season 1 ends with the shocking reveal that the team is actually lost in time. Jean and Cyclops are stuck in 3960 A.D., a dystopian future where they meet Mother Askani and a younger version of Nathan Summers. Meanwhile, Xavier, Magneto, Rogue, Nightcrawler, and Beast are trapped in ancient Egypt, where they meet En Sabah Nur, who is, of course, a young version of the almighty X-Men villain Apocalypse.
With the epic season one finale of X-Men ’97 and all of its Marvel cameos — including the likes of Spider-Man, Iron Man, Black Panther, Daredevil, Doctor Strange, and Captain America — having now had the time to simmer on fans’ minds for a few weeks, it’s time to dive into the intricacies behind this treasured animated revival. DiscussingFilm got the chance to sit down with X-Men ‘97 supervising director Jake Castorena for an exclusive interview to discuss the creative challenges of bringing a popular animated series back after 27 years and what’s coming in the next season. Audiences should know that Jake Castorena is no stranger to the superhero world, having worked as a storyboard artist and director on Batman: The Brave and the Bold, Young Justice, Green Lantern: The Animated Series, The Death of Superman, Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Justice League Action, and more.
With X-Men ’97 Season 2 already deep in development at Marvel Studios Animation, fans won’t want to miss out on this rich conversation with one of the masterminds behind the show.
Exclusive Interview with Director Jake Castorena for X-Men ’97
X-Men ‘97 takes place after five seasons of a TV show that originally aired decades ago. How did you work to effectively continue the story X-Men: The Animated Series and satisfy its fans while ensuring that X-Men ’97 could serve as a fresh jumping-on point for newer audiences?
Jake Castorena: Luckily, that mandate and mission statement was there from day one with [X-Men ‘97 head writer] Beau DeMayo’s series bible. In tandem, our show is a revival, a spiritual successor — we’re not a reboot. Thus, if we are a revival and a spiritual successor, certain things are ingrained in the original show’s DNA that if we remove, change, or alter in any shape or form, it quickly doesn’t become excellent anymore. Much of that was figured out in the writer’s room and script phase.
At the end of the day, we’re all fans. It sounds counterintuitive, yet the reality is you don’t make stuff for the rest of the world. You don’t do that because that’s too many contingencies and too many “what-ifs.” It leads to you getting nothing done, you end up making nothing out of fear. However, we also aim to make it a little more intimate. What story do I want to see that we’re trying to tell? As a born artist, what’s the scene I need to see next? You act on instinct. On a broader scale, that’s every teammate, every step of the way. We need to live in the DNA that’s been ingrained in the idea of the show. But at the same time, when we make stuff for ourselves that we’re happy with, the audience is happy with it too!
Courtesy of Marvel Animation
Jake Castorena: If we’re not convinced the scene is working, the audience won’t be convinced either. We all got very sad over Episode 5. Our episodic director Emi Yonemura and myself, personally, got really sad working on that damn thing. We reboarded and retold the Gambit send-off, not the actual death, but the goodbye of Rogue holding Remy dead in her arms. We did the approach of that send-off three separate times in three different ways, because it’s about story over everything. What supports the narrative? What pushes it forward? And, more importantly, checking if we are giving things justice. Are we putting respect on the name of the characters and the IP, the allegories that they represent and stand for? A lot comes into play, but we try to make it very intimate and ask, “What do we want to see?”
Compared to the original series, which faced a lot of traditional network oversight, you had the freedom to take more leaps with X-Men ‘97, like allowing the characters to swear, showcasing violence, and even having the finale be 40 minutes. How did these elements influence the way your team approached telling this story?
Jake Castorena: It absolutely affects how we set up technically for animation as a whole, knowing that we don’t have that sort of broadcast standard. We take that into consideration because we have to ship a certain amount of time. For example, Episode 10 was roughly 40 minutes; we worked with 20-something minutes of actual footage at first and then sent it out overseas. They animated it, gave it back to us, and then we worked in tandem with the vendor. Once we get that back, that makes for room to elongate scenes, add or adjust banter, or create quiet moments to let characters and pacing breathe. Having those parameters and freedom is great, knowing if we need to make more time or shorten the time for a moment to work. Like you said, we can show violence and not have to shy away from it as well.
But with that said, and what I appreciate about our crew and what we did, we have to give ourselves false parameters in every aspect. We would love to put all these bells and whistles on the show’s style, but that’s a little too advanced for what the original series probably would have had. So we ask, “Can we do this in a way they would have had to tackle it back then?” For example, we have a way that we’re working on water right now. One of our vendors gave us an effects pass, and it was like, “Oh, that’s too clean. To do a painted card and then a two-frame cycle, that’s just too advanced.” Then, we tried a low-tech approach, and it was like, “Wow, this really works.” These kinds of false parameters only helped us to better achieve the feeling of the original show.
On the topic of animation, the visual look of X-Men ‘97 has received a lot of well-deserved praise. How did you approach modernizing the classic designs and art style of the original ’90s cartoon for a new generation?
Jake Castorena: First and foremost, I have to shout out Amelia Vidal, our lead character designer, and her team. I don’t envy the task that she had, adapting the iconic Jim Lee designs and all of their 90s-styled lines, bulk, and shading. Going into this show, it had to be producible and more manageable in this day and age. Make the designs work, but don’t change them too much. It all came down to one of the phrases that I know got me the job: “Fresh but familiar.” It’s not the same show verbatim, it’s got to be the show you remember but in 4K. It was taking that fundamental rule of thought and asking, “What does that look like?”
Courtesy of Marvel Animation
Jake Castorena: One of my favorite rudimentary examples is how the original show handled hair on the head versus how we handled it. Let’s take Jubilee and Gambit, for example. In the original cartoon, there are a lot of spikey and wavy designs. It looks great, especially for that time, yet it’s something that we’ve learned over the years of being in animation; that’s a lot of crap to track. It can become unnecessarily tedious to track that kind of stuff. It’s like, “Oh, that hair pops out too much. It’s so noticeable. We have to fix that.” But what we also really wanted to fix was the acting on the face. If you wanted to push that nuance, then we had to fix the acting on the hands. Wait, though, we still have to go back and fix the hair. So, now, we’re out of quality control.
You want to avoid trying to cross the finish line at the very last second versus here, let’s take that understanding and wealth of knowledge of over 30 years and see that there’s a way to simplify the hair and still have the feel of that ’90s era but have it be manageable for our vendors and ourselves without compromising. If you notice, like Jubilee and Gambit’s hair, there are larger forms and chunks that turn easier. It just comes down to understanding what we’ve learned over the years. We can pull back the risk of unnecessary retakes based on how we design stuff, how we ship it to be animated, or what indication and notes we have. That’s merely one little aspect of the entire scope of our production on X-Men ’97.
Lastly, since the original animated series ended, there have been almost 30 years of X-Men stories that have thrived in Marvel comics. Are you interested in diving into X-Men stories from the 2000s or even the last few years, or do you want to keep X-Men ’97 focused on ’90s comics?
Jake Castorena: We touched on that, even in season one with “E is for Extinction,” which was definitely not of the ’90s run per se but in the zeitgeist of the era that came a little later. Once so much time passes, that’s pretty much late ’90s — we’re still dressing like that. That’s how I validate it, “When did the clothing style change?” That’s the time we’re in. We play with a little time fudging, like in “E is for Extinction.” But, to your point, there are 30-plus years since the show’s been over where the comics have expanded. Speaking in comic book lore, past and present, X-Men is and always should be an allegory for prejudice, first and foremost. The minute you take that element away, you’ve automatically taken away the excellence.
The X-Men always should be the underdogs. There’s a reason why they’re not tattered or received as well as The Avengers. But there’s also a reason why they work so well, and why they have things like the Danger Room. While the Avengers might just wing that shit, the X-Men work together. They have their squabbles, they have their drama, their love triangles, though they always come back together as a unit. When using the Chris Claremont or Jim Lee runs, or even pulling from Giant-Size X-Men, they are all great but, also, I think it’s fair to say that enough time has passed to where we can fudge a little bit of that time bringing in early 2000s stories.
However, we must always adapt X-Men stories in the ’90s fashion and tradition, which I think our show does absolutely well. That’s credited to the vision from day one and all of us working together. But in tandem, we’re called X-Men ‘97, so we’re in a sandbox that we have to stay in: the year 1997. Lastly, the same sort of timeline treatment that we did with respect in season one, I will say we are absolutely doing in season two as well.
All episodes of X-Men ’97 are now streaming on Disney+!
Created by Beau DeMayo.
Based on X-Men by Stan Lee & Jack Kirby.
Executive Produced by Brad Winderbaum, Kevin Feige, Louis D’Esposito, Victoria Alonso, & Beau DeMayo.
Produced by Danielle Costa & Sean Gantka.
Main Voice Cast: Ray Chase, Jennifer Hale, Alison Sealy-Smith, Cal Dodd, JP Karliak, Lenore Zann, George Buza, AJ LoCascio, Holly Chou, Isaac Robinson-Smith, Matthew Waterson, Ross Marquand, & Adrian Hough.
Theme Music Composers: Haim Saban & Shuki Levy.
Composers: The Newton Brothers.
Production Company: Marvel Studios Animation.
Episode Count: 10 (Season 1).
