X-Men ’97 Director Praises New Showrunner

X-Men ’97 director Emi/Emmett Younemura had some praise for incoming showrunner Matthew Chauncey. ScreenRant interviewed the creative as work continues on Season of the Disney+ favorite. Recently, the show made some news as What If…?‘s scribe joined X-Men ’97 for Season 3. While a lot of the work for Season 2 had already been mapped out by former showrunner Beau DeMayo, some fans had already begun worrying about the future of the project after Season 2. (Marvel promptly signed up for more X-Men ’97 after fan response to the show and internal optimism about the direction of the animation division.) Younemura wants to let it be known, the show is in good hands and they’re already doing work.

“Oh, he’s lovely. I absolutely love working with him,” Younemura began. “He hasn’t even been on super long, and he’s already a super sweet, incredibly talented writer, so we’re already having a blast over here, and I’m really excited for fans to kind of see what he helps bring to the table because it’s amazing, he’s a genius.”

Keeping X-Men ’97 On Track

Of course, any big changes has the fan base hoping that the tone set forth in Season 1 will carry through to Season 2 into the next. ComicBook’s Phase Zero podcast talked to Jake Castorena, supervising director on X-Men ’97, about the more mature elements that this series has managed to get away with. For the director, He argues that these changes and themes were present in X-Men: The Animated Series, all the way back in the ’90s. So logically, the ground was already paved for them to continue that work there.

“But with that said, and what I appreciate about our crew and what we did, we have to give ourselves false parameters in every aspect,” Castorena detailed. “We would love to put all these bells and whistles on the show’s style, but that’s a little too advanced for what the original series probably would have had. So we ask, ‘Can we do this in a way they would have had to tackle it back then?’”

“For example, we have a way that we’re working on water right now,” the director added. “One of our vendors gave us an effects pass, and it was like, ‘Oh, that’s too clean. To do a painted card and then a two-frame cycle, that’s just too advanced.’ Then, we tried a low-tech approach, and it was like, ‘Wow, this really works.’ These kinds of false parameters only helped us to better achieve the feeling of the original show.”

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