X is for X-Men #AtoZChallenge #PandemicAlphabet

Full disclosure: The is the one time I’m breaking my self-imposed rule and posting about something I’ve already used before for an A to Z Challenge. I think the reason is obvious but just in case it’s not: X IS A HARD LETTER. The only thing I have watched that starts with an X is X-Men. I have read no books that start with an X. So it is what it is.

And what it is, is the X-Men…cartoon from the ’90s.

I decided my next pandemic comfort rewatch is going to be X-Men: The Animated Series on Disney+. #xmentas

— Akilah (she/her) (@THEakilahbrown) January 15, 2021

Yes, that’s right, I started rewatching the X-Men animated series (Disney+) in January of this year, and it was an AWESOME choice. That tweet is the first of a thread of my reactions for the duration of said rewatch.

First of all, I definitely watched this show on Saturday mornings when I was a kid. Second of all, everything I know about the X-Men is based on what happened in that show. Third, it’s super fun to see what I do and don’t remember from the show! There are a lot of things that I remember in broad sweeps (Logan and Jean had a thing? Mystique is Rogue’s mom? Jean turns into Phoenix? — question marks because I also couldn’t remember if these things were accurate or not until they were confirmed on the show) and other things I don’t remember AT ALL (Storm and Wolverine are a couple in an alternate universe, there are a lot of aliens, and there’s quite a lot of time travel). Other things I remember in clear detail, and by that, I mostly mean how hard I shipped Rogue/Gambit.

I have been moving slowly through the series, mostly because I watch it while I eat breakfast as that adds to the Saturday morning cartoon energy from my youth but also because I spend a lot of time looking up character bios and info on the internet. Back in my day, all that I had to go on was what actually happened on the show but now! The internet exists! So I can find out all kinds of things about character or storyline backstory that’s hinted at or that I thought happened differently. Why, just today, I actually read Logan’s Wikipedia page because I forgot that he ages so slowly and is basically 3894732 years old at all times in a present narrative and got a nice little capsule of the horror that was his life before joining the X-Men–and that’s not even including the adamantium experimentation.

Most of the show still holds up (except for the fact that Jubilee is basically the only kid in this children’s cartoon and somehow the only actual student at Xavier’s school), and it really is a great intro to the world of the comic books, if you want it to be. I’m not interested in reading the comics, but my daughter requested a Marvel Unlimited subscription as a gift so she could read some of the storylines. Or, you could do like I always did and just compare the cartoon and the movies.

Also, it was the ’90s so you know that theme song was a banger.

If you do decide to watch just know that the episodes are not in order on Disney+. I’m using this list as a guide for how to watch them.

This has been a super fun way to spend the last four months (I’m only three episodes from the end!), and I highly recommend it if you also need either a good nostalgia kick OR an entry point into some of the background of the characters from the movies. Bonus! There are some fun cameos from the Marvel universe throughout, including Spider-Man, Scarlet Witch, and Captain America. So there’s also that to look forward to.

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For this year’s A to Z Challenge, I have decided that I’m going to focus on comfort reads/watches as we enter our second (!) April in the pandemic. Tune in tomorrow to see what I choose for Y!