X-Men: The Animated Series
To a generation of Saturday-morning kids, this was the real X-Men: five seasons on Fox Kids, one impossibly urgent guitar theme, and stories lifted straight from the comics. Wolverine, Rogue, and Gambit were household names years before Hollywood caught up.
Marvel had already tried an animated X-Men series once — the 1989 pilot Pryde of the X-Men wasn't picked up — but the second attempt landed. Premiering October 31, 1992 on Fox's Fox Kids block, produced by Marvel Entertainment and Saban Entertainment and animated principally by the AKOM studio, the show borrowed its lineup almost wholesale from Jim Lee's early-90s comics: Cyclops, Wolverine, Rogue, Storm, Beast, Gambit, Jubilee, Jean Grey, and Professor X, plus Morph, a character created for the series, based on the comics' Changeling.
It earned top ratings from its first season and kept them, garnering unusually high Nielsen numbers for a Saturday-morning cartoon and reaching a viewership of over 23 million households. Part of the appeal was that it didn't talk down to anyone — the series drew praise for adapting storyline after storyline from the comics, prejudice allegories and all, and Ron Wasserman's driving theme music told you within five seconds that this was not a gag cartoon. Haim Saban later credited the show's success with helping him sell Fox his next project: Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.
The series ran five seasons and 76 episodes — every one directed by Larry Houston — before ending on September 20, 1997. It shared a fictional universe with the Spider-Man animated series that followed it, and for the kids who watched both, the two shows were the Marvel universe. Disney came to own the series, and the revival X-Men '97 — picking up where the original left off — premiered March 20, 2024 on Disney+ to critical acclaim, a quarter-century-later vindication of how well the original held up.
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