Remember the ‘90s? The X-Men certainly do, and for good reason. In the world of comics, after Chris Claremont’s foundational run on the characters unceremoniously came to an end at the beginning of the decade, X-Books found themselves even more ascendant than ever, and X-Men: The Animated Series catapulted mutantkind to even greater heights of awareness. The ‘90s were truly the X-Men’s time, and with X-Men ‘97, Marvel really, really, really hopes you’ll make it their time again.
We’ve not seen all that much of the new series in action, but what we have seen is laid out under reams of ‘90s-evoking nostalgic aesthetics. The trailer is introduced on a CRTV playing clips from the original show, and episode titles were revealed on a splashy faux-TV Guide magazine cover, not like they’re just things you’ll see on Disney+ in a few weeks. It makes sense, given the show is a direct continuation of the events of the original series, not a modern transposition. It’s a period piece, one placed at the heart of one of the most influential periods of the X-Men’s entire history.
It’s perhaps fitting then, that now ‘97 continues that trend with the most ‘90s, and one of the most important pieces of X-Men history in that period: the legendary trading card sets. Jim Lee’s Uncanny X-Men trading card collection was arguably almost as huge as the original animated series for bringing Marvel’s mutants to a wide audience beyond the already wildly successful comics of the era. Not just a repository of Lee’s immediately iconic renditions of mutantdom, they were also a living encyclopedia of factoids and knowhow for the biggest and smallest characters in the X-Sphere—practically a kid’s own answer to Cerebro, or at least a Marvel wiki before wikis actually existed.
Click through to see ‘97‘s riff on a piece of X-history—and don’t forget the show streams on Disney+ starting March 20.
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