Hacker Cinema
X-Men
1992 · TV series · 5 seasons
Created by Eric Lewald
KidsScience FictionFantasyAnimationActionAdventure
The X-Men are an elite team of mutants, genetically gifted human beings with superpowers, sworn to fight for mutant rights against hostile Government agencies, whilst at the same time protecting mankind from mutant supremacist Magneto who seeks to destroy the human race in return for the atrocities committed against mutant kind.
4 positive6 neutralfrom 10 commenters
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10 comments on Hacker News
> Popular shows of 80-90s avoided trauma and ambiguity. Everything was simple and morally clear.
Popular western shows did; I've started watching the Gundam series, the first set started in '79 and while superficially it looks like your generic saturday morning cartoon, it starts off with trauma (many people killed) and while the villains are obviously evil - genocide, nazi ideologies ("sieg zeon"), etc - they also get more character development than what the protagonists get. The villains are the underdogs, only 1/30th the size of the "federation", and the good guys have a new set of superweapons that seems to win and kill their people on every occasion. There's two episodes where a "villain" character is introduced as a lover, ambitious military man, etc, then gets killed, his would-be wife killing herself in the next episode.
Anyway, that's just recent experience, I'm sure if you revisit some of the 80's / 90's shows you'd see more trauma / ambiguity too. I'm thinking of the X-Men series for example.
>Netflix’s issue is not the quality of content - it’s their business model. They are borrowing billions to create content with the only way to recoup the cost is mostly by subscription revenue. Their initial rationale was that they were building a content library that would have value. But, they admitted during the last conference call that subscriber growth was slow expectations because they didn’t have any new big releases. No one is going to are about “House of Cards” in five years.
I think you are contradicting yourself here. If the quality was good they wouldn't have mentioned not having big releases as being the reason why their subscriber growth was slow.
>Compare that to Disney’s library. People still care about Disney’s animated movies from the 30s and even adults are nostalgic about the 90s X-men animated TV show and the original Star Wars from the 70s.
I think you are arguing in favor of what I was saying?
>Besides, Disney makes billions from their content from theatrical releases, video on demand, network and cable TV, theme parks, toy sales, etc.
Yes, and for some strange reason Disney trades at 2x the market cap of netflix with 17x p/e while netflix trades at 88x p/e. Either Disney is severely undervalued or Netflix is severely overvalued (or both).
Netflix’s issue is not the quality of content - it’s their business model. They are borrowing billions to create content with the only way to recoup the cost is mostly by subscription revenue. Their initial rationale was that they were building a content library that would have value. But, they admitted during the last conference call that subscriber growth was slow expectations because they didn’t have any new big releases. No one is going to are about “House of Cards” in five years.
Compare that to Disney’s library. People still care about Disney’s animated movies from the 30s and even adults are nostalgic about the 90s X-men animated TV show and the original Star Wars from the 70s.
Besides, Disney makes billions from their content from theatrical releases, video on demand, network and cable TV, theme parks, toy sales, etc.
This was huge in Brazil, too, at the time. Though with some setbacks, when aired in open/FTA networks. For example, the multi-part episodes were cut down (i.e. destroyed) as a single episode -- we only discovered they were actually two episodes a couple of years later, when cable tv got popular and the show aired on Fox Kids without the mutilations.
Also there were some translation mistakes (specially in the first episodes). However, the brazilian voice actors were amazing and extremely memorable -- Brazil had an incredible pool of voice actors in the 80's and 90's. It was so memorable that the same voice actors who did the animated series were used to produce the dubbed versions of the movies a decade+ later, a rare gift given to fans in these lands.
As for the comics, they were also a few years behind US. Uncanny X-Men #262 was published when the show first aired. So as kids coming from the show to the comics, we were also pretty confused about uniforms and team members.
The cinematic universe isn't a high bar to clear, but these stories were really mature compared to other children's TV shows then and since.
Killing a major character in basically the first episode was, highly unusual.
And forcing the other X-Men to deal with that loss in subsequent episodes, isn't something you see in children's TV EVER.
Even when they finally brought back Morph (This is a comic book show, no one can die forever), he wasn't really the same. Everything didn't go back to being ok, he was permanently damaged and had PTSD from the experience and was unable to join the X-Men.
As a 6 year old who had family members with PTSD, this cartoon connected with me like nothing else would until I was a teenager and able to read real literature.
> For a generation of kids like me the definitive story of X-Men wasn't the comics or the movies, it was this TV show
I can still hum the theme song.
Interesting that the famous 6-stick X-Men arcade game, also released in 1992, used the character designs from the failed 1989 pilot episode rather than the 1992 animated series. I remember thinking how weird it was that the video game characters were wearing the wrong costumes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Men_(1992_video_game)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Men:_Pryde_of_the_X-Men
"Previously on X-men", Who else hears the voice of cyclops?
I can't be the only one to have pieced together the story of "days of future past" in a non-linear fashion because you keep missing episodes due to Saturday school?
For a generation of kids like me the definitive story of X-Men wasn't the comics or the movies, it was this TV show. The complexity and the maturity of the stories in the series might even go beyond the current Marvel cinematic universe.
TV shows I can half listen to (X-Men)
Movies I've seen a million times (How to Train Your Dragon, The Matrix, etc)
Music with lyrics I've heard a million times
Electronica