Cartoon Graveyard (Pryde of the X-Men)

Welcome everybody to the first Cartoon Graveyard at Pulp Tone. I’ve been writing these articles for a little while now over at Rayguns & Sixshooters and you can find the older ones there. This column will mostly be focusing on unaired cartoons as well as some canceled shows, now this is not set in stone as I will also be reviewing some of the direct to dvd offerings now available and cartoons box sets. So lets jump right in shall we?

Show: X-Men
Title: Pryde of the X-men
Production Company: Marvel Productions/Sunbow Productions
Year:1989

I remember walking through the Big Apple comic book convention in the late 1980’s and stopping in my tracks as I saw the X-men flickering on a small TV screen. I walked up and watched the Pryde of the X-men for a few minutes before the vendor shut it off and said the group that had gathered would need to buy it to see any more. Being a kid with a certain amount of money to spend at a comic convention I quickly decided the poor VHS copies he was selling were not worth the fifty dollar price tag.

X-Men in Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends

As hard as it is for some younger fans to comprehend at the time there was no mass marketing of comic characters and rarely any cartoons that featured them. As any devout X-Men fan will tell you we were left begging for scraps like the two appearances of the X-Men on Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends.

For awhile after that I regretted the choice I made as I didn’t see copies of the show at the conventions I attended over the years. But since I had heard mixed reviews from friends I wrote it off as a solid choice and went on with life. Then a few years ago through the wonder of the Internet I discovered a copy and finally got to see the failed X-men pilot.

The pilot was created using the same voice over lead in that Spider-Man AHAF had used with Stan Lee setting up the story. They had at the time what was a contemporary lineup that included Cyclops, Wolverine, Colossus, Nightcrawler, Storm, Dazzler, Professor X and the focus of the episode Kitty Pryde. Kitty has been a poorly used character over the years as much of her back story and relationships have been switched around in other media (I’m looking at you Rogue in the X-Men movies). This has left most current fans with no understanding of how huge the character was in the 80’s.

Having joined the X-Men immediately following the classic Dark Phoenix saga she was immensely popular and served to lighten the mood from what had been an incredible story run. But it worked and so did the character, sadly this does not translate into the cartoon. Instead Kitty comes across as whiny and something of a brat, and the poor characterizations don’t end there. For some reason Wolverine has an Australian accent (Supposedly a mix up due to dialogue) and in my opinion is portrayed as a bully. A strong current of tolerance is present but is handled unevenly and does more harm then good, by helping to add to Kitty’s woes as the lead character. Half the time you want her to shut up from being so annoying the other half you think she is a bigot for her treatment of Nightcrawler. Who himself comes across as stalking the young girl to try and be her friend instead of understanding her hesitation at his appearance.

The animation itself was rather good and the characters are all easily recognizable. Uniforms and names are all kept close enough their comic book equivalent that no true differences are noticeable. The brotherhood is present still using the Evil moniker that would eventually be dropped and the White Queen is shoehorned into the group. The Danger Room makes an appearance as does the X-Jet and Asteroid M.

The voice acting is mostly well done with Wolverine being the one major exception. And the racist General in the opening of the cartoon being over the top but this is a Saturday morning cartoon after all, other wise the voice actors did fine work.

It would have been interesting to see where they would have taken this version of the X-Men as this was still during Claremont’s long run on the book and the X universe had yet to be explored in any other medium. But it was not to be, due to poor reactions from the studio brass as they felt the show was to xenophobic for Saturday mornings and high costs of the animation the project was dropped.

And that is why we find it here in the Cartoon Graveyard.

Marc Fletcher is the author of Adam Zero: The Last Man of Earth from Ronin Studios and numerous comic book anthology pieces. He is also an avid animation fan and loves to write Cartoon Graveyard and his blog at Rayguns & Sixshooters, and is convinced when he dies he will be reincarnated as an animated character.