I just want to take a second right up here at the top of my review to be grateful for this moment. To be living in a time where Marvel saw the value in their X-Men animated series from the ‘90s and brought it back to life, returned many of the original voice cast, and tried to keep the structure of the series intact. This was the show I grew up with. The Saturday morning cartoon I fell in love with, and the X-Men became my superheroes of choice. Other people elevate Batman, Superman, Spider-Man, Hulk, or any number of heroes across Marvel, DC, and other comic book publishers, but for me, life could not start on a Saturday until after X-Men. I watched the whole run. Later, as an adult, I watched it again when I saw it available on Hulu. I had a host of X-Men action figures, and still do. I collected X-Men trading cards instead of baseball cards. I absolutely have Wolverine’s cowl around here somewhere from Halloween. I have multiple X-Men shirts and even a Wolverine-specific shirt. Technically, Deadpool is part of this universe too, and I’ve got a couple of Deadpool products. Basically, when everyone else nerds out about their various franchises, this is the one for me.

I wasn’t just reading X-Men comics. I was reading X-Factor, X-Force, Generation X, and X-Men 2099, a version of the X-Men people just don’t talk about much anymore, but probably should. I wonder if it will ever have a resurrection of sorts, or if it’s going to become the Saved by the Bell: The New Class of pop culture. Then came the live-action films, directed at first by Bryan Singer, which was like Christmas morning to me. I was fortunate enough to be working in theaters at the time, and I managed to collect the entire suite of promotional buttons featuring all the different characters from the first film, as well as the second film, which added the new characters. I have posters for most of the X-Men films. I own every X-Men film on DVD, every Wolverine film, and Deadpool. I’ve played the video games. I enjoyed playing various X-Men characters in the somewhat short-lived Marvel Heroes. Basically, wherever I can get my X-Men fix, I do. So I’m ecstatic that Marvel and Disney are continuing this series, with a third season already complete and a fourth season being worked on. But how did Season 2 go?

After some of the major revelations of Season 1, we jump straight into an Apocalypse-centric plot, now with Cable being a major character in the timeline. We start with our X-Men spread across time, and they have to figure out how to come back together and repair some of the damage done to them in Season 1. There’s an entire episode dedicated to fixing Wolverine’s broken claws, a storyline taken from the comics and used in Season 1, leaving Wolverine with his bone claws and without adamantium. They introduce a bunch of new characters, some of whom fold into the main group, and we also lose a couple of major players this season. That’s not my job to spoil for you, but there are definite repercussions to eliminating the characters they did, especially considering I’ve heard the creators talk about wanting to do as many seasons as possible. However, they also make a pretty bold return choice for a character who was eliminated in Season 1, and I suppose if they’re going to play with timelines, characters can exit and re-enter depending on abilities, powers, and whatever the story needs.

One of the things I really love about X-Men ‘97 is that instead of keeping the opening credits stagnant, they reflect the episode. As the roster changes and we’re focusing on different X-Men, those X-Men tend to be featured in the opening credits. For episodes specifically focusing on X-Factor and X-Force, those characters take center stage instead. We deal with Apocalypse throughout the season, but that doesn’t mean he’s the lone villain. There’s Graydon Creed, the son of Sabretooth and Mystique, a politician running on the promise of putting mutants in their place as a mutant hater, and there’s something very parallel to the world we live in that I see in Graydon Creed. We get Sentinels and robot fights along the way. We deal with the Acolytes, a pro-mutant group that seems to have taken Colossus under their spell, leading some of the team into the Savage Land to rescue someone they would probably rather not have to rescue. But because they’re the heroes, they do what’s right, not necessarily what their personal feelings would lead them to do. There’s also an episode that reintroduces the Brood, bringing them back onto the chessboard for our X-Men to possibly face in the future. Even Mystique makes a brief appearance, setting her up for Season 3, in addition to appearances by Sabretooth and Lady Deathstrike.

A lot of Season 2 deals with this battle over containing mutants and what kind of rights they should have. There’s this sentiment that X-Factor, which is being used by the government and led by Havok, is an unfortunate tool being used to arrest mutants and put them away, the very people they should be trying to protect and defend. X-Force, led by Cable, seems determined to follow his journey toward one goal and one mission: destroy Apocalypse. Then there are the X-Men, who move from Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters to X-Corp on Genosha, moving out of the direct reach of Val Cooper and the American government as Val disagrees with Charles Xavier’s position on protecting mutants. So a lot of the battles aren’t just heroes against villains. They’re heroes against heroes. X-Men fighting X-Force. X-Men fighting X-Factor. We’re watching the changing tides as characters who start the season outside the X-Men eventually end up on their side, while others drift between the different teams. Jubilee and Sunspot help flesh out some of that story, although compared to Season 1, Sunspot has far less to do. Cable, however, is a huge contributor to the plot as we get to see his relationship develop with Scott and Jean, both in his own timeline and the current timeline, allowing them to see how their son grew up in a dystopian future and who he has become as a man.

As someone who read the comics, I do think they’re overplaying Cable’s telekinetic abilities a little bit here. From everything I remember, he’s never been as powerful as his mother, so I think he’s using telekinesis a bit too much for my taste, as is Psylocke. She has more of a psionic ability, which she often uses to create her swords, but here she ends up being far more telekinetic and able to use her powers much like Jean Grey. There’s a particular scene where the X-Jet is in trouble and they’re trying to keep it afloat, and somehow Jean Grey, who has already had the Phoenix Force move through her by this point in the original animated series, doesn’t seem to have the strength and energy to keep the X-Jet afloat on her own. Instead, they’ve decided to nerf her in favor of boosting the telekinetic abilities of Cable and Psylocke. It’s not as interesting as you would assume it is. Morph, meanwhile, is still a pretty constant presence and gets plenty of fun little transformations along the way. He accompanies Wolverine on the journey to get his adamantium claws back and shapeshifts into multiple heroes during that adventure, including Spider-Man and Silver Samurai. In the season finale, he even takes the form of Doctor Octopus.

Nightcrawler has a pretty prominent role as well, especially for someone who wasn’t part of the main X-Men team in the ‘90s series and largely sat on the periphery. His story is pretty front and center compared to some of the other X-Men who take a back seat this season. Rogue also features prominently as the season eventually comes back around to Gambit, bringing up a lot of feelings and emotions on her part. Charles Xavier remains ever-present, and even Beast feels like he has plenty to do. They bring Polaris into the X-Men roster after her time with X-Factor, and Lorna gets plenty of screen time. Bishop also feels like a lead this season. To a lesser extent, if you’re a fan of Storm, Forge, Jubilee, Sunspot, Magneto, Colossus, Sabretooth, Lady Deathstrike, Cain, Psylocke, Archangel, Wolfsbane, Siryn, Havok, Strong Guy, Multiple Man, or Maverick, then you’ll be some version of happy or disappointed depending on how much you expected them to be in the season. For some characters like Strong Guy, it was just cool to see him get recognized with any screen time at all. Others like Siryn basically fly in and fly away with little to no recognition beyond the fact that they were clocked by the audio description track.

I enjoyed the plot development, and the season finale certainly has an emotional string tugging at my heart that absolutely wrecked me. It’s hard for me to figure out where to grade this because, again, this is my opportunity to finally put pen to paper for something that has been such a huge part of who I am, who I was, and my fandom. I wonder how many critics who grew up on Star Wars eventually had to deal with actually writing a review of Star Wars, the thing that helped get them into film in the first place. Everybody has their different likes and dislikes and the things they get behind the most. So if my score seems a little high for you, I think I’ve explained why that might be. At the same time, I’m incredibly disappointed in Disney’s decision to cut costs and remove human narration from the equation. Deluxe, who I consider to be a leader in this industry, was diminished by Disney’s budget reduction eliminating the human narrator from the package, something Season 1 had. I was honestly surprised to see this happen to X-Men ‘97. I’ve seen text-to-speech start to trickle around, but it always seemed to stay on fare that wasn’t top-tier. Even this summer when Disney put it on Deli Boys, another show that originally had a human narrator in its first season before replacing that person with synthetic narration in Season 2, I thought Disney probably didn’t bank on Deli Boys the same way they do Star Wars, Marvel, Disney Princesses, or Pixar. Surely they’d always pay premium for those. Then, just a few weeks later, here comes X-Men ’97.

This is Marvel Animation. X-Men is one of Disney’s largest and most reliable brands, something that creates merchandise opportunities, increases sales, and brings people into parks to experience Marvel attractions. I’ve heard Disney executives talk about how a film’s success isn’t always measured exclusively through its box office because these franchises can boost theme park attendance, merchandise sales, and engagement with the larger brand. So why on Earth did Disney not find the money in the budget for human audio description on X-Men ‘97? Why did we lose it here? It’s not even that this show started with text-to-speech. It had human narration, and now it doesn’t. It’s because these companies don’t want to court us. We’re a problematic demographic for them because we require accessibility in order to enjoy what they provide, and for Disney that means more than audio description on television series and films. It means accessibility at the parks. It means accessibility across subsidiaries making everything from video games and theme park rides to live stage shows while still holding brands like ESPN and National Geographic. Disney has this enormous reach, and accessibility is something they seem perfectly happy to celebrate when they can talk about what they’re doing right, while continuing to release content without audio description or failing to carry existing tracks over to Disney+ in a timely manner.

If Disney really cared about audio description, it would want the highest quality. Walt Disney, when he wasn’t busy with some of his more problematic connections to certain parts of history, would probably be appalled by the way his brand has been allowed to be cheapened by people actively choosing to make something at a lower quality. Disney is already creatively stuck with a slew of live-action remakes of its own material for reasons still unbeknownst to most of us, but now it seems perfectly fine cutting at the very fabric that has made Disney such a reliable brand for generations of families. When Disney is cutting accessibility, premiering content aimed at families without audio description that could be watched by blind children, or replacing a human narrator with a synthetic voice on something as high-profile as X-Men ‘97, it’s sending a pretty clear message to the blind and low-vision community: you weren’t worth it. The troubling thing is that I think this is going to become the norm. I don’t think Disney is going to back down simply because I made this review. Disney will continue pushing synthetic voice, eventually eliminating human narration entirely, and then because we’re supposed to be excited just to get the breadcrumbs, they’ll start eliminating other human aspects of the audio description process until there are almost none left.

X-Men ‘97 is all about dystopian futures, so why can’t we talk about ours and where we’re headed, and how the future of our accessibility seems destined to eventually be determined by code and algorithms? This track had problems. Deluxe knows that because I already yelled at them in an email about it. Some were fixed. Some were not. It wasn’t the best-written thing they’ve ever produced, and considering I regard Deluxe as a leader in the industry, this was beneath them. But what are they supposed to do? Turn it down and create a rift between Deluxe and Disney because of a refusal to participate? It must be incredibly weird to be a company that employs human audio description performers, take a project like this that should have gone to a human narrator, and have to tell the person who narrated Season 1 that they can’t continue because Disney didn’t give them the money to do that. I have a feeling Deluxe is going to have a lot more of these uncomfortable conversations in the future as work for audio description performers becomes more and more scarce, and the company that once led the industry continues taking projects not because they’re creatively fulfilling, but because it has to keep the lights on. I’m not accusing Deluxe of selling out because other companies are in exactly the same spot. In the short term, these houses may believe that allowing one human performer to be removed helps preserve jobs for everyone else. But when studios realize they can cut those other humans out too, they’ll do it. If a track costs $10,000 to $15,000 and they can shave that down every time by removing another human being who needs a paycheck, they’ll do it because AI and synthetic voices don’t ask to be paid.

Disney isn’t about quality right now. It’s about the bare minimum, and that’s what I believe it has done here. Luckily for them, I love X-Men, so I’m not going to let this affect my score because I would probably watch this show if it was narrated by Bobcat Goldthwait. But that doesn’t mean that, as a longtime X-Men fan who has celebrated the progress every step along the way, I’m not hurt by the expansion of synthetic voice into the thing I love most. X-Men ’97 is a fantastic series, but for a show that is constantly asking what it means to be human and what relieves us of our humanity, the irony that Disney has opted to pay only for a synthetic voice is not lost on me.

Fresh: 9.0/10