X-Men '97 Review

It should have been a nostalgia exercise. Instead it is the best superhero television of its year, because the writers treat the original show's melodrama as a strength rather than an embarrassment. The voices return, the animation is a deliberate update of the old model sheets rather than a modernisation, and then the fifth episode destroys an entire nation on screen, killing named characters in a sequence of real horror that the show does not walk back.

Magneto is given the inheritance plot the films kept fumbling, arguing his case in a courtroom rather than a battle. Cyclops finally becomes a character worth defending, and the Jean and Madelyne story, which on the page is a notoriously convoluted mess, is made legible and painful. The action is dense and clearly staged. Weaknesses do exist: the pace is so compressed that major turns arrive with only a line of setup, the season finale splits the cast across time and space in a way that will confuse newcomers, and the abrupt dismissal of its creator hangs over the whole thing.