Obligatory disclaimer – real life sucks, lately our entire family life feels like a bloody house of cards, (in a bad way), so let us talk about this week’s episode of X-Men ’97 instead.
Regrettably, it is a weaker one. On one side, we
have a reboot of the ‘Mojoverse’ episode from the original X-Men series: back
then, Mojo kidnapped six of the adult X-Men, (not Jubilee), and forced them to
act out live video games, with their lives hanging in the balance, until they
burst free (with some local help) and went back home. (Mojo was not a regular
character/villain in this TV-verse). Here, we have basically the same thing,
but just with Jubilee/Roberto, and a computer-graphic-version of Jubilee
instead…
…My problem with Jubilee and Roberto is that their
relationship is… not so much forced, as rushed: in various other previous
Marvel incarnations, (live-action, comics, cartoons), Roberto was often
competent at worst and formidable at best. Here, however, he seems to be
nothing more than Jubilee’s love interest… not that Jubilee herself is doing
much better.
The problem with a big cast is that not all of the
main characters get the same amount of exposition, especially if they are all
on screen at the same time. Some shows try to fix it by alternating characters:
i.e. one episode features – mostly – characters a, b, and e, while on another it
is c and d, and on the third – it is d, e, and f – the sort of thing. The X-Men
cartoon, on the other hand, tended to show most of them en masse – Cyclops and
Jean, Gambit and Rogue, Wolverine and Storm, (the) Beast and professor X shared
their onscreen adventures episode after episode… Jubilee was mostly pushed out…
she all but disappeared, (technically speaking), in the later seasons, because she
was not contributing anything to the plot, not really… Now, however, she is
back, and it is again not clear as to what she is contributing to the overall
plot specifically, and ditto for Morph – in the original series he was more of
an episodic character, a former teammate, an unwilling enemy, an ally to the
X-Men, but not part of the team. Now, however, he is back, possibly depicting
sexual minorities in the show…and also allowing the showrunners to depict the
various mutant characters without actually bringing him into the show just yet.
Speak of the new characters? In the other half of
the episode, we also get to meet the Adversary; he was an occasional foe/antagonist
of the mutants in the comics; he often clashed… with Forge and his team. Here,
their relationships is less clear-cut, and Storm appears to maybe be caught in
the middle.
This brings us to the following feature of X-Men ‘97:
the scriptwriters just took several old comic plotline and are trying to adapt
them to the silver screen. Sometimes it works out, (such as the first two
episodes of the new season), sometimes, (as in the last week’s and this week’s
episodes), it does not – not really. AoS, it can be noted, did something
similar, especially in the later seasons – it recycled and rebooted its’ original
plotlines in order to keep itself going… and now it is gone, and MCU is
pretending that it never existed at all – no S.H.I.E.L.D., but also – no S.W.O.R.D.,
and the state of S.A.B.R.E. is also in flux – but this has nothing to do with
the X-Men franchise. Instead, just as AoS recycled its’ old ideas, the X-Men ’97
is recycling Marvel’s old X-Men ideas, from comics than from other media, but
regardless… The original X-Men cartoon was somehow better than this…
Is there anything else? No, not really. The new
Godzilla/Kong movie is out, and it is a good one, but it deserves a discussion
of its’ own, so for now, this is it. See you all soon instead!
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