Patreon Pin Up 4/8/24: Madelyn Pryor

Guess who finally watched X-Men '97 over the weekend? I haven't looked into what the overall public reaction to this latest effort has been, but to me watching this show was like being wrapped in a fuzzy nostalgia blanket. I haven't picked up an X-Men comic in years and my personal superhero movie burnout has progressed to the stage where if a new one doesn't have "Spider Man" in the title I don't even look up from my coffee. But I am an enthusiastic walking encyclopedia for everything from this show's specific era of X-Men.

It's amazing how fast it all came back. I found myself dredging up memories from the comics, video games, and even trading cards of the time. The new animation isn't a style I know how to accurately describe. It's somewhere between 2D and 3D. It looks like Archer but with way more money thrown at it. It doesn't look like the original X-Men cartoon, but it evokes the aesthetic of it well. Much of the old vocal cast is back, they got the banger of a theme song, and the outcry on social media about Rogue's "butt nerf" turned out to be unfounded, I feel. For a Disney product, this show is strikingly horny.

Which leads to Madelyne Pryor here. For all the lore mastery I was just touting a few sentences ago, I had no clue who the hell she was. Man, what a fun villain. Just a sexy, scenery-chewing monster. So much so that (veery mild spoiler incoming...beware...good? Good.) I wish they hadn't wrapped her up so quickly. Seriously, why wasn't she the main antagonist of the entire season?

I could go on about the little things I like. Cyclops being presented as a badass for once, the fact that it's an X-Men anything that isn't just all about Wolverine, but I think I have enough paragraphs here. If you want to tell me what Madelyne's deal was in the comics or why I might not have heard of her, please do. And if you want to talk 90's X-Men in general, I'm your guy.