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In which Miles and Elisabeth X-Plain Pryde of the X-Men; Magneto is somehow even worse at branding than Mystique; the X-Universe is in desperate need of responsible adults; Wolverine hates kids; everybody’s mean to Lockheed; and the Sentinels represent your feelings.
X-PLAINED:
- Wolverine’s Australian accent
- Pryde of the X-Men
- X-Men / Muppet Babies analogues
- The Brotherhood of Mutant Terrorists
- How not to comfort scared teenagers
- The X-Cessible X-Men
- The Mutant Power Circuit
- Terrible parenting
- A MacGuffin
- A Really Dubious Evil Plot
- Several Additional MacGuffins
- THE POWER!
- One of many reasons to be nice to animals
- Space
- The X-Men Arcade Game
- Ground Kontrol
- X-Men: Madness in Murderworld
- The Uncanny X-Men (game)
- Metaphorical sentinels
- Mysterious lizards
- Video game mechanics vs. superhero ethics
- Pryde of the X-Men vs the ’90s animated series vs. X-Men: Evolution
- Alternate animated series hooks
NEXT WEEK: The Brood go to a revival meeting
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On the combined topic of voice actors, Pryde of the X-Men, and a relation to Optimus Prime, Nightcrawler in Pryde of is played by the legendary voice actor Frank Welker, who you may know from his time as both Megatron and Soundwave (and also like, half of the cartoon voices in the 80s really, dude’s been crazy prolific and is still working). Just a fun tidbit. 🙂
Also, equally surprised at how quality this pilot was. Particularly the animation. This was solid stuff for the time. Minus Aussie Wolverine I’m bummed we didn’t get more.
Is that really Welker? I always thought it was Neil Ross. Huh, TIL.
I actually had to edit the cold open right before we recorded it to reflect the fact that the Internet is about evenly split as to whether it was Welker or Ross who voiced Wolverine. There’s gotta be a definitive answer somewhere..?
If I ever see Ross at a con again, I will ask him. My 80s voice actor sense has me near positive he played Logan, but Nightcrawler I’m less sure of.
We don’t actually drink Fosters. The company just has a good marketing campaign in America. I’m not one for beer, but I’ve never even seen another person with Fosters. In my experience, Victoria Bitter is more the drink of choice.
Thanks so much for doing this, and for using the theme song. This was my first exposure to the X-Men, and I was absolutely obsessed with it. It’s really interesting to see them kind of force the X-Men and BOM into a weird amalgam of GI Joe and the Superfriends/LOD. The Prestige Formatcell comic adaptation is awful, though.
Just want to note that when you mention Kitty as Skeeter and Ilyanna as Scooter (with the implied subtext) that Skeeter and Scooter are not only siblings, but twins, so any subtext you might have would be more of the… Ultimate Wanda and Pietro/Game of Thrones variety. EEK!
Heh, whoops. Good point.
X-men! X-Men! IT’S TODAY!
I grew up with a VHS of this and the 90s series. I remember vaguely knowing that Wolverine was Canadian, but being young enough that I thought Canadians just sounded like that. I had my bachelor party at Ground Kontrol and made the roomsmen play that X-Men game with me. It was glorious!
I’m just going to pretend Canadians sound like that from now on. I have to say, I’ve only seen clips, but every time I hear Wolverine, I feel like I’m watching a video someone dubbed over as a prank.
“Sum totality of his berserker rage” is the best thing ever.
What I love is how they sort of mashup time periods. Pryde of the X-men uses the Cockrum era X-Men, but the almost 1990s Dazzler. The 1990s X-Men Animated takes the 1980s stories and place it in the 1990s. The “School X-Men” transposes the older X-Men into the original “school” X-Men stories.
I would love for them with a new animated hook that sort of does this, but with the New Mutants. Take like Husk, Dust, Prodigy, Anole, Armor, Pixie, Warlock and Everett. The X-Men are missing in space. The Hellfire Club is using this to capture the next generation of Mutants for their overlords, the Phallanx. Warlock comes to the Xavier institute after escaping the Phallanx with Anole, Everett, and Husk.
Xavier and Dr. Celia Reyes help this New Mutants and together (and with much arm pulling) they end up taking on the Phallanx and saving the rest of the New Mutants.
Eventually, we have the X-Men coming back from space. This X-Men group is Storm, Bishop, Wolverine, Cannonball, British Betsy Braddock, Xorn and Havok. And they’re all there to battle Charles Xavier, who has a Brood Queen egg inside of him. After this is sorted out, we have these New X-Men go up against the Hellfire Club (with Shinobi Shaw, Selina Blaze, Fitzroy, Selene…basically the Upstarts) and the charges that they were able to escort away called the Hellions (Quentin Quire, Tattoo, Lady Edgerton, Bedlam, Icarus, Tarot, and Magma).
I have been waiting for you to cover ‘Pryde of the X-Men’. This episode was wonderful. I’m glad it forced me to rewatch the cartoon. I judged its memory too harshly. The animation in particular is really spectacular. Right before I turned on the podcast I thought “I hope they use the song from ‘Pryde…’ instead of the 90s intro, and you didn’t disappoint. That arcade game is the best. I find it funny when people don’t know its origin. Glad you’re spreading knowledge of it.
If Fox wants to do a live-action X-universe series, then “Madrox Investigations” is an obvious candidate. It’s a detective setup, so easily fits the case-of-the-week procedural format that 75% of TV shows must be. Pick and chose from the various lineups according to what effects budget is available. Jaime, Layla, Guido, Rahne, and Lorna (depowered to TV scale) would work. Add Rictor or Siryn if budget allows.
If peace on earth breaks out, and the Fox/Disney hatchet gets buried, bring in Doc Samson in a recurring supporting role.
HA, I did not see this coming! You guys are amazing for dedicating an episode to Pryde of the X-Men AND the arcade game! My sister and I were big fans of both! I don’t remember if we ever beat the last level…
What a delightful show!
Lots of laughter to fill my very thankful ears.
I wish you’d played a snippet of the soundtrack to the X-MEN game.
That thing is earwormy as hell.
The X-Men: Madness In Murderworld game that you mention is actually playable online at archive.org’s giant collection of DOS games. It’s basically impossible and super boring — I’ve never figured out how to make it past the first few screens.
Way more interesting is the sequel, the X-Men: Fall of the Mutants PC game (also at archive.org). It’s still not great in terms of actual fun potential but kind of amazing as an artifact. It features a giant roster of playable characters, and includes rare appearances by semi-obscure/rarely featured characters like Rachel Summers, British Psylocke, Longshot, Archangel and Shadowcat. (I don’t think Longshot or Rachel have ever made another appearance in a video game.)
The game makes a valiant effort to stay true to the characters’ powers, given the technological limitations of the time — which is kinda refreshing but also makes some characters much, much more effective than others. If I’d had it as a kid I suspect I probably would have gotten bored of it fast, but it’s still pretty fun to mess around with. It’s sort of a very very rudimentary predecessor to much later games like X-Men: Legends.
(I think nothing in my life has ever been more disappointing than the X-Men Nintendo game.)
I have a lot of respect for what Madness was TRYING to do–mix King’s Quest style exploration and puzzle solving with fight scenes more in line with an action game or even a fighter–but it fails on basically every level.
The X-Men arcade game is a quarter eater, but they went too far trying to fix that on the Xbox Live port. They just straight up gave you infinite lives to play with. As soon as someone realizes that, they just start spamming their mutant power because it doesn’t matter if they die (Colossus becomes super annoying at this point). More advanced players start committing suicide when they get too low on health to use their power as that is faster than waiting for an enemy to kill them.
The port really needed a finite lives options, albeit a high one.
The TMNT ports avoided this problem, though Turtles in Time features a shitty 3D redesign.
As a head’s up: The X-Men arcade game is available on the app store to play on iPads.
I think there were also action figures based on Pryde of the X-Men. I remember owning a Cyclops figure in that costume that came with a weird accessory that went over his arms. I think it was supposed to be some kind of blaster, which doesn’t make much sense since not only is it Cyclops but the figure also had light up optic visors. I was always confused why he didn’t look like he did on the 90’s cartoon.
The X-Men Arcade Game has a certain level of local infamy in the east coast convention scene. There is a video game and music convention called MagFest that’s held in the DC area. They have a game room that features a ton of arcade machines on freeplay. A couple years ago they got the big X-Men cabinets and whenever someone would use Colossus’s mutant power they would do the yell. Then other people watching the game started echoing the yell. Eventually it got to the point that anyone who heard the yell would respond, to the point you can hear it from outside of the gaming hall. It’s gotten to the point that the convention has had to put no yelling signs (which feature Colossus’s yell sprite with an x over it) to keep it from spreading outside of the con at the venue.
As someone who has gone to Magfest for several years the effect is equally impressive and annoying (cause now people will do the yell randomly and people will still respond). That said, it was kinda cool the one time Nobou Uematsu (yes that Nobou Uematsu) did the roar on stage.
Nobuo Uematsu and the Colossus Yell existing in the same sentence? Oh, man. That’s beautiful.
Oh, man, I want to go to MagFest SO bad.
This year’s is coming up next week!
Yeah, but it’s far away and expensive. =(
Perhaps because I didn’t see it as a kid and had nostalgic filters on, but I didn’t enjoy the show nearly as much. I guess a main reason is I don’t like completely scenery-chewing evil Magneto. I couldn’t get past Australian Wolverine, and i know it was rather standard 80s kid cartoon level but the story was a bit too dumped down for my tastes. Still, it was pretty to look at and I didn’t regret watching it, so there is that.
“Madness in Murderworld” is pretty much the reason I became an X-fan! Not because of the game itself, where I could never seem to get past the first few screens, but because of the materials they packaged with it. I’d seen the X-Men on “Spider-Man & His Amazing Friends,” and already thought they were pretty awesome. Especially Cyclops, no joke. But the game not only came with a unique comic setting up the story, but the manual had detailed character bios and a complete multi-page summary of the major X-Men stories from 1963-89. It was basically like Wikipedia before wikis existed. I was hooked.
Thank you very much for this episode. I didn’t discover Pryde of the X-Men until about the same time the first X-Men Legends videogame was released. X-Men Legends borrowed some of it’s plot from there. That game’s quasi-Ultimate X-Men version of Magneto becomes powerful enough with his machine on Asteroid M to successfully blot out the Sun by surrounding Earth with asteroids.
The coverage of the X-Men beat’em up by Konami was much appreciated. The port of the game by Backbone Entertainment to XBox Live Arcade and Playstation Network actually allows you to choose between the different ROMs used by the various configurations of the game. The biggest difference in gameplay (other than choosing between 4 and 6 player versions) is that choosing a Japanese ROM lets you use an “energy orb” to use a mutant power rather than sacrificing health.
Miles was surprised Colossus released energy when returning to human form in the beat’em up, but this has happened to Colossus at least once: during Fatal Attractions. In Excalibur #71, after his head wound is healed, Colossus finally returns to human form after being metal for a long time. In the context of Fatal Attractions, that’s at least since Illyana’s funeral in Uncanny X-Men #304. I don’t recall anything like this being mentioned happening to Colossus in your summaries of his recovery after the Mutant Massacre, so perhaps his powers were inconsistently written. I could be wrong, but I had the impression Colossus would build up “energy” in his metal form. If he didn’t, then perhaps this was inspired by Konami’s X-Men arcade game, which predated the crossover.
I wasn’t clear. With the Japanese ROM option, you use an energy orb *before* you have to sacrifice health to use a mutant power. This gives the characters greater staying power than in the USA ROM, since orbs can also be found during online games.