Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
X-Men: The Animated Series premiered 25 years ago today. The slick superhero cartoon introduced an entire generation of unsuspecting kids to the joys of serialized storytelling, and it also converted a bunch of us into total nerds. Technically I was already a nerd before I watched “Night of the Sentinels,” but X-Men: The Animated Series is what pushed me into the world of comic book fandom. It’s what made me a lifelong devotee of the genre. While other kids might have been sucked in by the robots, explosions, and superpower-ed melées, I was captivated by four incredible women.
Storm, Rogue, Jean Grey, and Jubilee were equal partners on the X-Men. They were just as important to the fight as Cyclops, Wolverine, Beast, and Gambit. Moreover, they got along as friends and allies. Their friendship gave a pint-sized version of me my first look at what a bawdy Brit group called the Spice Girls would soon coin “Girl Power.” That is, X-Men: The Animated Series proved that women could be strong, they could be smart, they could be beautiful, they could be different, and they could still all be friends.
I didn’t need an education on feminism from my Saturday morning cartoons. My single mother and three older sisters had that stuff covered. But what I did want was to see these ideals brought to “life” outside just my imagination. As I remember it, the majority of the kids’ programming was distinctly divided along gender lines. You could get a show with more than one female lead, but that show would be something along the lines of Jem. If you were more interested in action and adventure than singing and romance, well, you’d have to watch a show designed primarily for “boys.” Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was a huge in my elementary school, but it offered only one female character for me to latch onto: the beautiful reporter April O’Neil. Needless to say, she was not a teenager, nor a mutant, nor a ninja, nor a turtle. She was a human woman whose curiosity would get her into scrapes. (Which, honestly, made her boring. I wanted to see a lady with some throwing stars or something. Come on!) Most action-based cartoons followed this formula. The woman was the love interest or the girl was the plucky side-kick. Or sometimes, if you had two girls, they’d be cast as “Daphnes” or “Velmas,” “Bettys” or “Veronicas.” That is, one was the pretty love interest and the other the sweet, dependable nerd. Even the diversity-conscious Captain Planet and the Planeteers kind of veered into this formula with Lenka and Gi.
But X-Men: The Animated Series was different. For the first time, I wasn’t presented with one, or maybe two visions of what a woman could offer to a team. The X-Men were essentially equally divided along gender lines and all four women on the team were three-dimensionally drawn, uniquely powerful, emotionally tortured, and capable of defending themselves without the help of a male teammate. Not only that, but the opening credits opened with two of them soaring over the show’s title a split second before we see a dude hero jump into frame. For the first time, I had a variety of choice in what kind of heroine I wanted to champion. It wasn’t “pretty girl” or “smart girl” or just “the girl.” I could pick my favorite from four extremely different heroines.
There’s a lot of talk about the importance of representation in pop culture and why it matters for kids to see characters they can directly relate to saving the day. X-Men gave me that, but it also showed me men and women who were completely unlike the ones I knew. I’m obviously not just talking about mutants. I didn’t know a southern spitfire like Rogue or a glamorous African queen like Storm. I didn’t know anyone Creole like Gambit, either. When I think about the diversity that X-Men offered, I don’t just think about the benefits of seeing women with the kind emotional complexity I recognized from real life in my comic book TV, I think about the message that the team as a whole sent. You see, unlike other superhero stories that centered on one special hero, X-Men wasn’t about one savior tapped to save the world. It was about a team of misfits working together towards a common goal — and that goal was tolerance.
