More than 25 years after it went off the air, Marvel Studios today revealed the first trailer for new episodes of X-Men: The Animated Series — now titled X-Men ’97 — and in doing so, introduced a new logo for Marvel Animation, a specialty arm of the studio which will work on animated projects like X-Men (and probably later seasons of What If…?). The Marvel Animation imprint is the latest Marvel niche to get its own branding, with both Werewolf By Night and the Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special screening under the “Special Presentation” banner, and other projects will be coming up under a “Marvel Spotlight” banner, which started with Echo. Those projects are supposedly less beholden to the larger MCU continuity.
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As you might expect, the Marvel Animation logo is going to denote a pretty specific kind of production. That one is easier to distinguish from the rest of the stories than any other.
You can see the logo below.
X-Men ’97 features the voices of original X-Men: The Animated Series cast members Cal Dodd, Lenore Zann, George Buza, Alison Sealy-Smith, Chris Potter, Catherine Disher, Adrian Hough, Alyson Court, and Christopher Britton, the X-Men team includes Wolverine (Dodd), Storm (Smith), Rogue (Zann), Beast (Buza), Cyclops (Ray Chase), Jean Grey (Jennifer Hale), Jubilee (Holly Chou), Bishop, and Morph.
“This is the first X-Men title produced by Marvel Studios,” Brad Winderbaum, Marvel Studios’ Head of Streaming, Television, and Animation, back when the series was announced. “What an amazing first step to reintroduce audiences to the X-Men with a look at one of the most pinnacle eras of the X-Men comics, which was the ’90s.”
Will it play into anything else, or remain stand-alone? Only time will tell. Last year, we started to wonder: is Hugh Jackman‘s Wolverine really finally putting on his comics-accurate costume for the first time in his 20+ year history? Or is the version of Wolverine seen in yesterday’s set photos actually a live-action counterpart to the version from X-Men: The Animated Series? In a movie that seems likely to be a parody of the current wave of multiverse-driven movies, it wouldn’t be hard to believe that Deadpool would try to riff on Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse by incorporating animated versions. Certainly, it could be fun to see them cross over with Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur or something like that.
Beau DeMayo (Marvel’s Moon Knight, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds) serves as head writer and executive producer on X-Men ’97. The creative team includes supervising director Jake Castorena (Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) and supervising producer Charley Feldman (The Owl House); X-Men: The Animated Series producers and showrunners Eric and Julia Lewald, plus original series director Larry Houston, return as consultants.
Marvel Studios’ X-Men ’97 season 1 is streaming March 20 on Disney+.
