When Nostalgia Grows UP
X-Men ’97 models a more adult nostalgia when it carries on the legacy of an earlier show without giving in to despair—or looking at the past through rose-colored glasses.
By Jake Casale
I have a tricky relationship with nostalgia. The word tends to send me floating down a turbid river of ambivalence. On the one hand, I think it’s lovely that some people have the capacity to look on the past with fondness and longing, that they have experienced goodness that remains unqualified by sadness or pain, whether the experience itself was really that untarnished in the moment or has simply been rendered so through memory’s protective plasticity. I can even recall times where I’ve touched something of this nigh-blissful state of pining for the circumstances and gifts of yesteryear.
But more often, I find that these fledgling stirrings get quickly punctuated by more somber visitors—remembering visions of the world that were revealed to be naive, a feeling of hope that proved itself unfulfilled, the comfort of a safety that slowly—or suddenly—metamorphosed into something brittle that cracked under pressure. My particular breed of nostalgia never seems to handle the past too kindly, never mind its inconsistent posture toward the present and future, so I remain puzzled when it comes up in conversation with connotations of positivity, especially when deployed as a personality descriptor (“Oh, he/she is so nostalgic!”)
But, for better or worse, one area where I find nostalgia comes to me a bit more smoothly is when I reflect on the stories that have influenced me deeply over the years, especially the ones that I’ve had an ongoing relationship with since childhood. Starting in elementary school, I became an avid comics reader, and I have never been able to shake the hobby despite the confused and occasionally disapproving looks it draws from some of my more pointedly erudite friends. And though I feel fondness toward many creators and characters in the comic space, the love and tenderness I hold for the X-Men stands above the rest.
The X-Men have always revolved around an ethical ideal that is unflinching in its acknowledgement of injustice, while also issuing a subversive call to self-sacrificial action.
To help map the terrain of this love, let me offer some brief context on the world of the X-Men: before the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Avengers infiltrated their way into megaplexes everywhere, the X-Men were Marvel’s most recognizable superhero team. Its members are all mutants: people born with special powers and abilities, ranging from flight to elemental manipulation to telepathy. Stan Lee, one of the architects of the Marvel universe, was actually inspired to create mutant characters by the most relatable of exigencies, exhaustion. Tired of inventing origin stories for superheroes, Stan took a shortcut—some of them were just born that way. But what started as a light concession to creative bankruptcy proved to be the soil from which Marvel’s richest metaphor eventually rose.
Mutants, looked upon with suspicion, prejudice, and sometimes outright hostility by normal humans, can stand in as a flexible storytelling vehicle for a wide range of minority experiences. Any sense of otherness, of not fitting in, finds hints (or something louder) of resonance with the X-Men’s fight for acceptance. And a fight it most certainly is; the team operates in service of their mentor, Charles Xavier’s, dream of peaceful coexistence between mutants and humans, often in opposition to other mutant and human factions that believe that some combination of conflict, domination, and extermination is the only relational future available to the two groups.
In this way, the X-Men have always revolved around an ethical ideal that is unflinching in its acknowledgement of injustice, while also issuing a subversive call to self-sacrificial action: work for the good of those who hate and fear you. This theme was embedded in the stories from the beginning, but the relatively youth-oriented writing style that characterized the explosion of Marvel superhero comics in the early 1960s didn’t lend itself to deep exploration of these ideas. Yet as the medium of comics matured during the 1970s, leading to a grimmer and grittier edge to superhero storytelling that coalesced throughout the 1980s, the X-Men franchise saw the stakes of its core metaphor progressively sharpen.
The acclaimed 1982 God Loves, Man Kills graphic novel (later the inspiration for the second live-action X-Men film in 2003) explored an organized religious movement of bloody hate crime against mutants. Several stories dealt with government efforts to regulate, contain, or otherwise “handle” mutant activity, including a significant arc that saw the X-Men’s then-leader Storm attacked with an experimental weapon designed to permanently suppress mutant abilities, leaving her maimed and powerless—a state from which she nonetheless continued to effectively lead the team. Still darker motifs of eugenics found expression in storylines like 1986’s consequential “Mutant Massacre,” where the (subtly named) mutant villain Sinister dispatches a hit squad to wipe out a sub-community of mutants he deems genetic dead-ends. The X-Men’s efforts to protect this community are mostly unsuccessful and leave nearly half the team too grievously injured to continue serving the cause.
Nostalgia is a powerful amber in which to freeze any part of your heart—of course it would be exploited by entertainment executives to buff up their bottom line.
I point to these examples not to paint an overly-brutal view of X-Men stories—they also do lighter things like play baseball, fight over meal prep, and take Doctor Who-style jaunts to kooky otherworld dimensions. I only mean to highlight that the source material explores the implications of its themes with weight and seriousness, a sensitive and honest touch that spoke to many readers who struggled to see themselves in most popular media of the day.
So there came a curious tension when, in the early 1990s, the X-Men went through their first robust adaptation to a medium outside comics: children’s television. Margaret Loesch, the head of Fox Children’s Network at the time, advocated strongly for the franchise’s potential as a serialized television show, despite conventional wisdom that children would not care for the long-form storytelling nor the social and cultural commentary inherent to the brand. Yet when episodes began airing, piles of fan mail (and later, the ratings) told the opposite story: the show was a smash hit. X-Men: The Animated Series remained a staple of the Fox Kids lineup for five years and is credited with both shoving the franchise into mainstream consciousness and also (along with Batman: The Animated Series) paving the way for the eventual rise of superheroes on the big screen.
However runaway the show’s success might have been, however, it did not come without acquiescing to the strictures of the new medium and its regulators. The network had specific rules governing the type of content that could make it into shows marketed for children, particularly around violence. None of the main characters could die; indeed, no one could die onscreen. If someone was knocked to the ground in combat, they had to be shown stirring. Guns could not be depicted firing bullets; instead, they rather comically expel lasers of various colors. Blood was a big no-no. Wolverine, the team’s most famous and marketable character, whose most distinguishing features are his metal claws that have little function other than stabbing things, was only allowed to use them against robots—never humans.
Yet despite these constraints, the series managed to capture and distill the essence of what makes X-Men stories special. It shone when spotlighting the tragedy and resilience of a character like Rogue, a woman with the mutant ability to drain anyone’s life force through skin-to-skin contact. Rogue cannot turn this ability off, so she must avoid touching other living beings—except in service of defending the vulnerable from attack. Rogue’s isolation from a vital aspect of being human that others take for granted is heartbreaking; in the wrong hands, such mature subject matter could fall flat, but the show’s ability to render characters like her legibly and with deep sympathy is a huge reason why it became a beloved part of childhoods all over the nation. It remained esteemed in re-runs long after its conclusion, even as the animation and the larger-than-life soap operatics in plot and writing started to creak with age.
The X-Men went on to star in several live-action films and a couple more television shows, but The Animated Series continued to be seen as the gold standard in many a fan’s eyes. So I’ll admit, when (more than twenty years after the show went off the air) Disney announced in 2021 that they were pursuing a revival called X-Men ’97 to air on their new streaming service, I was skeptical. I chalked it up to nothing more than a cash grab that would be, at best, fine. After all, nostalgia is a powerful amber in which to freeze any part of your heart—of course it would be exploited by entertainment executives to buff up their bottom line.
The revival asks us to consider our own first encounters with the bone-deep reality of tragedy and loss too horrible, too nonsensical to fit into the world as we previously understood it.
But when I watched ’97 earlier this year, instead of a soulless facsimile, I was ushered into a profound, self-aware meditation on the power and limits of nostalgia, one that is made all the more impressive because it knows exactly where the viewer’s expectations are and how to undo them.
’97 is a continuation of the original show’s story, picking up soon after the series finale left off. In that finale, Charles Xavier suffers a grievous injury, and the X-Men allow him to be taken to outer space (don’t ask) in a last-ditch effort to save his life. They are left on their own, setting up an uncertain status quo for the revival. The team’s fabric is in question as Scott Summers and Jean Grey, married couple and long-tenured team leaders, are expecting a child and considering stepping down to raise him. Amidst this, everyone is baffled to learn that Xavier’s will entrusts the X-Men to Erik Lensherr, his former close friend who developed an antagonistic stance on human-mutant relations and became the team’s longest-standing adversary, Magneto. It doesn’t take long before hijinks ensue and the endearing melodrama kicks in. Will Magneto actually turn a new leaf and—wait, he’s put on a rush trial at the UN while under assault by mercenaries with power-stealing tech?! Will Scott and Jean live happily ever—wait, Jean’s a clone and her mad scientist creator wants the baby because he’ll be The Most Powerful Mutant of All Time?! Will Rogue and her on-off boyfriend Gambit finally commit and—wait, Rogue had a secret past fling with Magneto that no one knew about because reasons and she can TOUCH HIM because REASONS?! It all recreates the familiar, kinetic spirit of watching the show as a kid in the ‘90s. There are upgrades, to be sure—much sleeker animation, a killer score, and a bit more intensity in both the show’s action sequences and its acknowledgement of the steamier side of romantic relationships. But none of these changes feel like an evolutionary leap forward. It’s all great fun, a well-done vehicle of reminiscence, and seemingly content to be just that.
Then we reach the midpoint of the season, and the story reveals its hand. In the fifth episode (“Remember It”), Magneto, Rogue, and Gambit (embroiled in an angsty love triangle) head to the island of Genosha, recently established as a mutant-majority nation. Genosha appears to be a significant win in the mutant community’s long labor to secure respect, rights, and guarantees of protection from the human authorities of the world. The joy and relief are palpable as the three X-Men, and the audience, spend time exploring Genosha’s capital city and the vibrant culture on display. This texture plays as the serene backdrop to the ongoing melodrama of whether Magneto will lead the new nation, with a healthy dose of love triangle drama, until the last 10 minutes. As night falls and the city throws a gala celebrating Genosha’s admission to the UN, a massive explosion rips through the scene as the island falls under attack from a giant, grotesque robot. In this moment, the entire atmosphere shifts to a visceral and horrifying spectacle that seems ripped from a war film. The robot cuts down both faceless bystanders and supporting characters with names and histories. Blood and bodies are in full view of the audience and the X-Men. As Magneto, Rogue, and Gambit regroup, their personal baggage becomes nearly immaterial in the face of the terrorist attack that just undid the hard-won dream of mutant paradise. And in the ensuing struggle, one of them doesn’t make it out alive. The safety of The Animated Series is gone.
It’s difficult to convey without the experience of watching both shows, but ’97‘s narrative decision to destroy Genosha is not an exercise in using wanton violence to crudely signal that the new show is somehow the “mature” one. Rather, it captures a universal milestone in the process of growing up: encountering the reality of a broken world. By placing the destruction of Genosha as the hinge point of the season, the revival asks us to consider our own first encounters with the bone-deep reality of tragedy and loss too horrible, too nonsensical to fit into the world as we previously understood it. These moments of shattering are refracted in the looks of shock and fear on the rest of the X-Men’s faces, back in the United States, as they stare at screens showing news coverage of the smoldering island nation, the fragility of human bodies and communities introduced to this world that used to be safely, cleanly regulated by the standards of Fox Kids. Is the world really this hostile to our dream?, their eyes seem to say.
Threads of the aftermath mirror how disruption can poison nostalgia; a few of the X-Men lose faith in the dream altogether, choosing to follow Magneto’s revived rhetoric that mutants must rise up and protect themselves against humans by any means necessary. The question on the table for the X-Men is, Was the dream of peaceful coexistence no more than a product of naïveté? In this pregnant moment, will it give way to something harsher, an inevitable concession to that brutality as somehow more substantively real than the hope of something better?
I don’t find the kind of nostalgia that idolizes the simplicity of childhood to be attractive or helpful; it simply doesn’t have space to hold the tensions of reality, and I value reality too much.
Beau DeMayo, the showrunner of X-Men ‘97’s first season, has been transparent online that the Genosha massacre was chosen to represent the journey that the original show’s audience took to grow up—the exigencies of 9/11, multiple financial crises, the COVID-19 pandemic, and ongoing violence enacted against minority communities in America. Of course, no generation is a monolith, but each has its own particular constellation of shared questions, sparked by a set of common-enough coming-of-age experiences. And watching ‘97 play out, I felt a sense of being acknowledged, as if the show was a letter written personally to me. I know you have held things close to your heart—hopes, ideas about what life would be. I also know you have suffered loss; it has not yet all turned out as you hoped. How have you responded?
It’s probably not a spoiler to say that X-Men ‘97, while it complicates the team’s ethical ideal and presents the best apologetic yet for Magneto’s stance, doesn’t fully yield to nihilism. Struggling valiantly against both Bastion, the orchestrator of the massacre, and a vengeful Magneto, they ultimately prevail. This victory does not come without haunting concessions—a returned Xavier invades and shatters Magneto’s mind in order to halt the latter’s retribution against humanity, an act of violence that cuts against the core of Xavier’s ideals, hitherto always bent toward peace and reconciliation. Cyclops stands as a counterpoint when he offers a hand of mercy to Bastion, a quiet endorsement of healing over retribution (though the villain doesn’t accept it).
Perhaps future seasons of ‘97 will come down more strongly on one side or the other, but the tension highlights the agency we exercise in how we respond to darkness. While the devastation of “Remember It” has shaped much of the discourse around ‘97, Cyclops’s move to choose the dream, faltering though it may be in light of the tragedies suffered, stands to me as the choice of highest integrity among those the show offers. That gesture toward hope echoes what I have heard in my own wrestling with God over the tricky business of nostalgia—The things you held close are real and worth it. It may cost much more than you imagined to get there, but there is a kernel of something real, of the deepest good, in what you longed for. Keep reaching for it.
Indeed, I wonder if the answer lies not in outright rejecting the dreams of childhood, but in embracing how they have been challenged, refined, transformed, and ultimately made clearer through encountering the reality of brokenness, from moving through innocence lost. At this stage in my life, I have a language for my yearnings that would have been completely foreign to my younger self. My worldview has been tested, my faith deepened, and my visions of the good, true, and beautiful have been made fuller (and quite a bit more radical) through the joy and pain that only comes from taking more than a few steps on the pilgrimage of life. But at the same time, there is still a continuity between my dreams then and my dreams now, in essence if not always in shape. I don’t find the kind of nostalgia that idolizes the simplicity of childhood to be attractive or helpful; it simply doesn’t have space to hold the tensions of reality, and I value reality too much. But my particular bias of being dismissive, even suspicious, toward my younger self and his hopes—perhaps that is equally unhelpful. Rightly tuned, nostalgia can be a reminder of my capacity to desire, imagine, and even labor toward the good, a gentle corrective to the beckoning of cynicism. Even more steadying is the knowledge that this capacity is not something I sustain by my own will, but that rather is held and animated by a hand far sturdier than mine. For all of my particular wounds and defeats, the dreams woven into me, breathed with the life of the One who is making all things new, can still be worth choosing.
Jake Casale lives in Boston, Massachusetts. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 2017 and has worked on public health/health systems strengthening efforts both domestically and abroad. He currently works as an analyst for digital health company Cohere Health.
