X-Men

Join Wolverine, Cyclops, Storm, Rogue, Gambit, Beast and Jubilee for more human/mutant conflict. The X-Men’s world is a difficult one, a combative, contentious world full of anxiety and distrust. It’s modern day Earth, but an Earth seemingly overcome by the darker forces of the 20th century. Human mutations have begun to occur and these mutant humans have spectacular powers which frighten normal humans. No one chooses to be a mutant. It is a genetic accident of birth that lies dormant until the individual reaches puberty. Then the amazing powers emerge leaving the mutant with three choices: Attempt to live quietly with the stigma and the harassment that their powers attract; strike out angrily at the world, often as part of rogue mutant gangs; or work to try to find a way to change the human/mutant conflict. This third path is the path of the X-Men., Wolverine, Cyclops, Storm, Rogue, Gambit, Beast and Jubilee are super-powered heroes – hated and feared by a world they have sworn to protect from evil., Professor Xavier trains mutants to control their super powers and become accepted members of society. His team is called the X-Men, and they are among Marvel Comics’ best loved crime-fighters., In the Marvel Comics universe, mutants, people with genetically endowed superpowers, are a persecuted by a hateful and fearful populous. One shelter from this is Professor Xavier’s Academy for Gifted Children. But the school has a secret function as a training centre for mutants to control their abilities so they can function in regular society., Animated adventures with mutant superheroes Wolverine, Rogue, Gambit, Beast and Jubilee, who are all students of the telepathic Charles Xavier., Created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in 1963, X-Men was one of the least successful comic books in the Marvel, and as such was dropped in 1970. Five years later the property was revitalized by Marvel artists David Cockrum and Chris Claremont, and this time it took off like a house afire. It has been suggested that the X-Men characters, all mutant teenagers whose awesome superpowers did not prevent them from being shunned by Society, had finally struck a chord with those young readers who regarded themselves as being “cast-offs” as well. The comic book’s sales skyrocketed in the 1980s and 1990s, the era in which the disenfranchised “Generation X” first made themselves heard in the marketplace. In 1988, an attempt was made to bring X-Men to television with a half-hour animated pilot which was shown as part of the Marvel Action Universe syndicated cartoon anthology. Alas, “Pryde of the X-Men” did not graduate to a weekly series, perhaps because it was too hectic and cluttered to register with those viewers unfamiliar with the X-Men canon. Finally in 1992, X-Men went to series courtesy of the Fox Network. The center figure for this weekly, half-hour series was wheelchair-bound telepathic therapist Charles Xavier, aka “Professor X”, who organized a group of youthful mutants into a superhuman crimefighting machine. The principal X-Men characters were Cyclops, aka Slim Summers, whose eyes were repositories for high-powered solar energy; Storm, formerly African princess Orono Monroe, who had the ability to control the elements; Wolverine, who while a Canadian secret agent named Logan had been injected with “Weapon X”, which gave him metal claws, an impenetrable skin, and a nasty temper: Colossus, aka Peter Rasputin, a 7-foot-tall Russian farm boy; the gorillalike The Beast, whose hideous face and body obscured the fact that he was actually brilliant science student Hank McCoy; Rogue, a backwoods girl with the ability to absorb the strength of others; Gambit, a Cajun lad who could “alter” the environment; Jubilee, actually a Chinese-American girl named Jubilation Lee, who had a habit of making things explode around her; and the tragic Morph, whose negative experiences as one of the X-Men had rendered him schizophrenic. The principal antagonists consisted of various “renegade” mutants whose purpose in life was to destroy mankind, and a covert group called the Mutant Registration Program, who while posing as the “protectors” of the outcast X-Men had designed a fleet of robots called the Sentinels, programmed to kill all mutants. Heavily laden with sociological subtexts and hidden meanings, X-Men nonetheless never forgot that its principal aim was to entertain its viewers, even those who’d never been fans of the original comic book. A coproduction of Marvel, Saban, and Graz Entertainment, X-Men was seen on Fox’s Saturday-morning schedule from October 24, 1992 to September 20, 1997, firmly establishing the network as the undisputed front-runner in the field of weekend children’s programming. After a round of Fox reruns in 1997-98, the series went into syndication, then in 2000 was revived in “retro” form as X-Men: Evolution., Cartoon featuring Wolverine, Cyclops, Storm, Rogue, Gambit, Beast and Jubilee, super-powered heroes who are hated and feared by a world they have sworn to protect from evil., A ’90s update of Marvel Comics’ mutant superheroes.