The X factor: The stars of the new animated X-Men Marvel series line up.
Marco Vittur
SHOWRUNNER BEAU DEMAYO didn’t need to rewatch X-Men: The Animated Series when he started work on its sequel; he’d binged it all during the pandemic. “I don’t know if there would be an MCU without this show,” he says of the popular Saturday-morning series which ran from 1992. “It’s the grandfather of everything we see today.”
With the memory fresh in his mind, DeMayo went out to the desert in Joshua Tree National Park and thought about the essential elements they needed to retain for the new show. The relationships between the characters; the fact that they had faced adult problems in a kids’ cartoon, from race to the AIDS crisis; the exciting powers that could be combined in cool new ways: these were key. Speaking with Empire, DeMayo and supervising producer Jake Castorena introduce the (old) new MVPs of the MCU.