X-Men: the Animated Series’ best episodes, picked by its creators

Original publication of this story: X-Men: The Animated Series Disney Plus was the first to receive this message.. We’ve updated and republished it for the 30th anniversary of the acclaimed Marvel cartoon.

In the early ’90s, Fox Kids needed attention. The nascent Saturday morning programming block was part of the youngest network on TV, and Margaret Loesch, head of the children’s division, knew a risk could net a high cultural reward. She gave her greenlight X-Men: The Animated Series.

A Marvel comic book series with a sophisticated sensibility sounds like a no brainer by today’s logic, but in 1991, there were reservations. While most comic book shows are light-hearted and borderline funny, the latest Marvel cartoon is serious. The Incredible HulkThe show had been on the air almost 10 years. Eric Lewald and Julia Lewald (his wife and co-author) tell Polygon that no one from TV animation had ever been allowed to write serious stories such as those found in The Pages of. X-Men, which in the early ’90s were selling like crazy. “The networks would just say: Are you kidding? Reduce it. It should be younger. Put in a goofy dog,” Eric says.

Loesch and Sidney Iwanter were both aware that an action-packed show featuring flashy animations and real storytelling would be a hit with the audience. It was a good decision. X-Men: The Animated Series debuted on Oct. 31, 1992 with a two-parter, “Night of the Sentinels,” before rolling out in earnest in January 1993, as a pairing with Fox’s Batman: The Animated Series. It was the #1 Saturday morning show for children 2-11 years old and remained a staple of Saturday morning entertainment for five seasons. Marvel execs have since acknowledged that “XTAS” mainstreamed the X-Men into a property worthy of the big screen in the 2000s.

All of it X-Men: The Animated SeriesAvailable to Discover on Disney Plus and in a Second Series X-Men ’97We asked our pair for their top episodes, and we got to know what was involved in creating this unique cartoon.

This interview has been edited in order to maintain clarity and concision.

“The Night of the Sentinels,” season 1

Image: Marvel

Eric Sewald The first two-parter, the pilot: There hadn’t been any Marvel movies at the time, and we were told 80 to 90 percent of our audience wouldn’t know who X-Men were or what a mutant was because only a couple million people knew the comic book. For a show to be successful, it would have required eight to nine million viewers. Therefore, the mission of the pilot was not only to tell an engaging story but also introduce the world and its characters. You have to get to know them and you have to deal with what you’re seeing. That was a hard task.

Julia Sewald: A little side note on that: When you and your head writer sat down to plot this out, because you didn’t know you were going to get more than 13 episodes, you guys just thought, and all of us thought, “13 episodes and we’re out.” Because they didn’t think it’d work. It was decided to make Sentinels, human hate and mutant-of the-week fighting Big Bad against mutant-ofthe-week. This could have quickly evolved into bad mutant versus good.

Eric: We tried this episode but it was impossible [Marvel] said, “You should completely redo it. You’ve got to put in Magneto and Apocalypse.” We said, “No, it’s animation, and Wolverine is our number one character, and we need him to be able to slash something.” He wasn’t allowed to slash creatures on Saturday morning. So you couldn’t do an animated show without the Sentinels. These Sentinels are crucial. Their actions were a great example of human suppression. They also represented human fear about mutants. That led to a major fight with Marvel. This lasted approximately a week. We were able to win.

We attempted to prevent [creating characters]We tried to include as many Marvel characters as possible. We knew we wanted to kill somebody in the first episode, and in the first draft of the script it was Thunderbird, who was in X-Men in the mid-’70s. But he was our only Native American in the show, so we didn’t know if we wanted to kill him. We decided to make up an interesting character and instead of creating a fictional one, we searched through X-Men lore for someone that had died or offered his sacrifice to the X-Men. Charles Xavier was saved by Changeling. So we put him in, and were doing storyboards, but someone said, “There’s a DC character named Changeling!” We could get lawsuits. Marvel’s version was first, but they didn’t want to risk it. Thus, we created the Drawing of Changeling. We also altered his name to Morph.

“Red Dawn,” season 2

Image: Marvel

Julia: Credit to be given [series director]Larry Houston in action.

Eric:The first 65 episodes were directed by him. He also was responsible for the choreography and storyboard. There were limits. Once, an X-Men pounded someone. In the first episode, Wolverine was grieving so much that he punched Cyclops because he had left Morph behind. Besides that, you never saw an X-Men’s fist connect with another human’s body. We had limitations in what we could do and we wanted to bring out the emotion. There was a discussion, and I can’t remember the episode, but a couple of supervillains were just leveling a city while they were fighting and it happened a week after the LA riots. So we got that note: “You’ve got to tone the carnage down because this is just going to be too upsetting.” The episode wasn’t going to come out for nine months, but real life did intrude on some of those decisions.

With [Omega Red in “Red Dawn”], there’s something about his tentacles that are really nasty, and yet we were allowed to do it because … when censors get into stuff, they don’t want you to do imitative behavior, so that’s why they don’t like you to use realistic guns or knives. The strange thing about tentacles is that they are not humans. It was an evil, creepy creature that was irredeemably wicked. This was quite another. He wasn’t like some of our more layered characters where there’s something else to him. He was born to kill and was bitter.

“Beauty & the Beast,” season 2

Image: Marvel

Julia: The episode “Beauty & the Beast” has a special place in [Beast voice actor] George Buza’s heart because he’s falling in love with a blind girl. He gives her back his sight. She still loves him, but the Friends of Humanity are driving them apart because they’re evil. Wolverine is forced to rely on his instincts of being a wild animal to attempt to join Friends of Humanity. It’s a really fun role reversal.

I got to write on “Days of Future Past,” and taking a comic property that itself is iconic and being able to translate it into a different medium with different characters … yet it worked for a lot of people, well, I’m proud of that one. But god, I just In love “Beauty & the Beast”

Eric: When we were brainstorming for the second season, Julia came up with the idea for “Beauty & the Beast” and we got our dear friend Stephanie Mathison to write the script. This was somewhat self-indulgent. [laughs].

“The Phoenix Saga,” season 3

Image: Marvel

Eric: The Phoenix Saga, which had five sections and more than 100 minutes of story was a huge success. This was an entire feature. This was a huge part of the book, 68 issues. It was everywhere. The book was trimmed down and simplified a lot.

Julia: Phoenix, by that time was an iconic character you loved and cared about. But as far as how the story of the Phoenix saga itself had an impact on people, it wasn’t because it was just dropped as a one off in the middle of nothing. It took two years to learn who and how these people reacted, what they did, and how they act.

Eric: In the wonderful Chris Claremont books, he was famous for having like six or seven different plots going at once — accelerating some, decelerating some, all overlapping. It’s a hard thing to juggle, which is cool when you’re a comic book reader and have like a year and a half to ponder. But when we’re trying to tell this simplified story, I think what made it work for us was focusing on who it was Happening to. It’s happeningJean. To whom does this mean most? Scott understands that the word means most. So we’re going to see this through Scott’s eyes.

Two parallel events were happening at the same time: Scott, Jean, and Professor Xavier. This galactic crisis was coming together and we tried to tell a story through these two couples and keep it at this personal level so that, with all the spectacles going on, if you’re having a hard time keeping track of who’s battling who and who’s blowing up what and who’s getting absorbed and eating what planet, you have these two basic things. Scott can save Jean? Can Xavier, being driven crazy by something that’s contacting him, resolve that and help Lilandra solve this large problem? These two issues were what we focused on and everything else was viewed through the same lenses. It was what held the story together, I believe.

Julia and I were able to enjoy the Phoenix Saga because Mark and Michael Edens are our college writing buddies. We all loved the Star Trek original series. We’re that old. We were able, however, to see space aliens in humanoid terms, just like other characters. We just thought, “OK, these are just different characters that they’re meeting each week. Like Kirk and Spock used to meet each week.” So that was a big advantage.

Julia: Larry Houston also loved Star Trek and you can find their Star Trek spaceships in the past.

“Longshot,” season 3

Image: Marvel

Julia: Mojo truly creeps me. I don’t like the whole concept of being held captive under those circumstances, it’s very Twilight Zone.

Eric: And it’s very different from the rest of the series, which is odd. Here is the Star Trek Original Episodes reference point. There were 79 episodes, two of which were about Harry Mudd. They were totally different from all the other series. I think what happened was the first one, everybody loved the first one, which is what happened with Mojo after “Mojovision” back in the second season. Marvel said, “You’ve got to do another, you’ve got to do another Mojo.” OK, so we did another one. It’s a great thing, but some people don’t like it.

“Sanctuary,” season 4

Image: Marvel

Eric: We were incredibly fortunate to have the Magneto-Xavier relationship. We loved the fact that these two guys loved each other, were each other’s best friends, and respected each other, but were polar opposites who had different visions for what the world needed to be.

Julia: And they both believed that they weren’t being the bad guy for the sake of being the bad guy. Each had their own philosophies, which made them who they are.

Eric: Yeah, so we loved using Magneto because he’s such a sympathetic villain. One of the better episodes was Sanctuary, the two-parter where he gets Asteroid M, the separatist world that he’s been yearning for. He gets what he thinks is going to be utopia and it looks like it’s going to work, and then someone betrays him and it falls apart, as all utopias do. This guy deserves your sympathy. It looks like he’s worked everything out and he’s your supervillain. And the whole thing in the second season when we had them together in the Savage Land — our lead hero and our lead villain spend nine episodes saving each other’s lives. That’s not usual for Saturday morning.

“Nightcrawler,” season 4

Image: Marvel

Julia: The fans were enormous. [writer] Len Uhley’s work on the episode that introduced Nightcrawler. This episode dealt with religion in a manner that I feel, even today, we can’t. It’s respectful. It’s not pounding it down your throat that you have to be religious or that it’s wrong if you aren’t. It’s just an examination that still astonishes me.

Eric: This one was a long process that took several weeks. Avery Coburn, our censor was a good friend of mine. She was incredible.

Julia: If it weren’t for her, there wouldn’t be an X-Men anyway. Morph wouldn’t have died.

Eric: This one woman, who actually liked the comics and loved storytelling, supported us when we’d bring stuff to her. “Can we kill somebody off? Can we have a story about God?” The breath would go in. “Okay, let’s talk.” And, and we’d go back and forth about what the limits would be, but she would trust us to be sympathetic and not gratuitous and to be thoughtful about these things.

Julia: With Nightcrawler, it was clear that his faith in God is a major part of his existence. Sidney Iwanter, the Fox executive at the time who was the one who was on top of every script, said, “We’re going to do this story.” And Sidney, to his credit, said push it, push it, push it. “We have to make this about Something.”

“One Man’s Worth,” season 4

Image: Marvel

Eric: As the writer’s manager, it was difficult to maintain the same direction. Charles Xavier was a person I felt great empathy for. Also, I loved the movie It’s a Wonderful Life, and the Star Trek episode “City on the Edge of Forever.” They’re both stories about if one person wasn’t there, how would it change the world?

And so I came up the idea for “One Man’s Worth” and, where somebody goes back in time and kills Xavier and suddenly the world’s completely different because he wasn’t there to build the X-Men. It was the ideal story. ThisThis is the reason why the X-Men are here.

Julia: What I love about the “One Man’s Worth” two-parter is in the horrible universe where Xavier has been killed and there are no X-Men, we see Storm with her mohawk and she’s married to Wolverine and, like, of course they’re supposed to be together. As a couple, they make perfect sense! And then you come back to our world and OK, it’s been saved and Xavier lives, but the fact that they have to sacrifice that … those moments in that episode just kill me.

Eric: These stories were created over five years. We had to work hard to find the right story for us. And the other two thirds, we do the best we can, they’re good. Some of them are a little weaker, but there were at least a dozen, were we said: “We got it right this time.” I discovered “One Man’s Worth” was one because Bob Harris, our advisor at Marvel, and who was in charge of all the X-Men books, said that a little over a year later, Marvel built the Age of Apocalypse series off of that idea. We’d taken all these cool stories from them and used them in our show. It was amazing that they took a story that we had created for the show, and 18 months later would create a series of six to seven books from it.

“Beyond Good and Evil,” season 4

Image: Marvel

Eric: In order to continue the series in syndication, you had to obtain 65 episodes. We were deceived into thinking that 65 episodes would be enough. X-MenFox also had this impression. We were going to go out with the big four-part “Beyond Good and Evil” where all the psychics get together and time is threatened. Sidney Iwanter, Fox’s executive producer, approached me to say that they needed to make a big splash. The episode ends with a twist. Four to five of X-Men should leave, and four to five or five others who fought during the fight will be joining the new X-team.

Julia: Then wrap it.

Eric:It was all set up. We’d written all four scripts. Half of the boards had been completed. The storyboards had been half finished by the time Storm, Jean, and Scott left. Bishop, Psylocke and Archangel were to remain and join the new X-Men. Then we were told, “Oops, we need more episodes with the original team, so don’t have them leave.” So they ordered six more episodes, and then ordered five more. The 11 remaining episodes came as an afterthought. Saban was just about to buy Fox Kids.

“Old Soldiers,” season 5

Image: Marvel

Eric: They are all leaving. We were instructed to complete the 11 remaining episodes. “Write them the best you can. Who knows who’s going to be drawing them? Who knows who’s going to be animating them? All we know is that the budgets are being cut and finish up, please.” And that was that.

Julia: But I’ll still stand by an episode like “Old Soldiers.”

Eric: Wolverine was a simple character to write. The stories were passed around to make sure everyone got one. He’s so soft. Many of his former lovers are still with him. His heart’s been broken so many times. The Captain America episode shows him returning to the graves of the man he believed betrayed his in World War II. It was last season so the animation was a lot cheaper because they’d cut back the budgets, but he’s remembering this adventure he had in 1945 with Captain America and he’s an old man and he’s feeling it and there were, there was some serious stuff going on inside him on that one.

They were very restrictive about who you could show and who you couldn’t. And back in the ’90s, just keeping the rights straight, as Marvel was going bankrupt, was difficult.

Julia: We weren’t allowed to say, “Hey, let’s do a crossover with Spider-Man.” Spider-Man could do that with X-Men, but X-Men couldn’t do that with Spider-Man. It’s like, wait, what? Or Omega Red, we’ve been going through some old files here and found a letter from whatever year: “You have permission for one episode of Omega Red and if I see him in something else, we’re coming out.” OK!

But “Old Soldier” was written by the late great Len Wein, who was Wolverine’s co-creator. This episode is extra special because we got him to do it.