X-Men - Death of a Fan
Originally published September 2018Welcome to Death of a Fan, a new feature on DagonDogs.com where I explore the various events and factors that mixed with my growing and maturing cynicism to kill the childish and naive part of me that used to (or still does) adore something. Happy, right? There will be a steady theme throughout many of these Death of a Fan articles that may lead to some broader topics, but for today, I'd like to start with what I would consider the first of my fan favorites that I left behind: X-Men.
What is X-Men?
This section is probably not necessary, but for those who don't know what X-Men is, I'll quickly spell it out.
Image: Marvel Comics
X-Men is a comic franchise spawned out of Marvel Comics. Like many comics, it tackled a lot of different social and political topics, with a constant strong focus on human rights and equality, but with superheroes with superpowers. It was about people who were just born different from the average human being. Unlike Spider-Man, who had to be bit by something radioactive, or Superman, who was an alien, the mutants of the X-Men franchise were just regular people, until they hit puberty and developed their mutant powers. Once they and the rest of the world knew they were mutants, they were then forced to experience the violent and vehement hatred of second-class citizenship that many black people faced in the Jim Crow era in America.
The X-Men themselves were a group of mutants with their own set of individual powers who would go out and fight crime and political injustice; they were superheroes in both a physical and metaphorical sense. Since kids weren't always keen on the political stories the comics tried to tell, the stories would fall back on some more wild adventures where the X-Men had to fight other mutants who had extremist views, or who had their own malicious intentions. Sometimes, they'd have to fight intergalactic beings from other dimensions, or from the future. Sometimes, they'd have to help out other Marvel heroes in series crossovers. Sometimes, they had to fight each other over personal differences, or because one character who had been useless for years suddenly became the most powerful destructive force in the universe; I'm looking at you, Jean Gray.
Image: 20th Century Fox
X-Men had a penchant for going off the rails in terms of adventures and challenges for the heroes to endure. The situations could get a little wild or difficult to follow. However, it still had a lot of characters who seemed unique and interesting, including those like Wolverine who became popular enough to branch out on his own. There was never a shortage of interesting heroes and villains in the series. As a result, the X-Men was one of the first Marvel franchises to be successful in both the video game and the movie realms of media. There are countless video games with the X-Men brand and at least a dozen that take place in the X-Men part of the Marvel universe that have been made in the past 20 years.
My Personal History with X-Men
Born in the ‘80s, and growing up during the ‘90s, almost every child in my elementary school knew the catchy theme song of the X-Men cartoon that played on Saturday mornings. If I started humming it in front of you, it would probably sound familiar, at the very least. X-Men were huge during the 90's, and comic book superheroes seemed to take off in popularity during those days. It was a boom that would eventually lead to a decline, but that massive overexposure was what drew me into so many different superhero franchises, making me a nerd of sorts.
These days, with superheroes being the biggest money-maker in Hollywood, the enthusiasm I had then would not be enough to make me a nerd today; I'd be just as commonly enthusiastic as everyone else. I was also very into Spider-Man, Venom, Spawn, and Star Wars, among other things that are all extremely popular among the general population. X-Men was never my favorite of those groups, but my entertainment with the X-Men toys, TV shows, and video games was more consistently satisfying.
One of the things that I got into because of my enthusiasm for X-Men comics was card collecting. I enjoyed buying card packs and putting them in three-ring binders to organize them and show them off to friends. I'd marvel at the artist renderings of my heroes or villains. I'd also obsessively read the details on the backs of the cards which included different statistics and biographies about the characters. It was actually my preferred method of learning about characters, instead of going through the trouble of buying a bunch of thin comics. I enjoyed it so much, the excitement I would get when I opened one of these little card-pack rip-offs would be palpable. Likewise, the disappointment I would have when I'd get another duplicate of a card was intense enough to make me just want to buy another. I'd often save up a lot of money over the course of a month and walk down to the comic store to binge on these card packs. This is probably yet another reason why the loot box controversy happening in video games is such a problem for children; it's the same exact formula for dopamine-induced frenzy over something relatively meaningless.
Nonetheless, when I think of X-Men, I can't help but think of all the cards I collected and all the time I spent in the local comic book store eyeing different collectors' items or playing the arcade games they had. The X-Men arcade game was never in the comic book store, but it was definitely the first one I'd go to if I was lucky enough to convince my parents to let me play in the arcade at the movie theater. The 4 to 6-player arcade game was a massive box with a huge screen, allowing you to play as a bunch of the different X-Men as they looked before the 90's cartoon took off. You could play as Colossus, Wolverine, Ice-Man, or Dazzler...there's gotta be some Dazzler fans out there, right? I'd often get stuck with a joystick that didn't control my favorite character, but the game was still fun and always seemed to have a group of people hanging around it.
Of the various superhero video games I had growing up, X-Men was a mixed bag when it came to quality. I regularly played the X-Men games on Sega Genesis. There was a Genesis game that had the X-Men and Spider-Man, which I thought would have been a great mix. Alas, it was a crummy experience with bad controls and terrible level design that added to the long list of licensed games that weren't very good. There were more notable games for the Genesis that focused on the X-Men. The first one, which was just titled X-Men, was a bit obtuse for an 8-year-old in certain ways. It was tough in some spots and mind-bendingly vague in others. Yet, it still managed to capture some of the fun of playing as the X-Men with their own sets of unique superpowers. The sequel, X-Men: Clone Wars, was a fun and exciting follow-up that improved on a lot of different mechanics. It was still a side-scroller. It was still a little confusing in certain ways. However, the gameplay and mechanics improved significantly, the characters were a lot more fun to use, and it felt like one of the first really good superhero games.
X-men games for the Sega Genesis
The X-Men were part of countless other video games over the years, but my exposure to them was much more limited. As I got more into fighting games, I kept running across the Capcom fighters that utilized the cast of the cartoon show to great effect. They started out with X-Men: Children of the Atom, but within a few years, it became the noteworthy Marvel vs Capcom series and more Marvel characters were able to join the fight. After that, the last X-Men branded game I played was X-Men Origins: Wolverine, a game that was far better than it had any right to be for the bad movie it was tied to. By then, however, my interest in them had already significantly diminished.
Death of a Fan
X-Men was never my favorite franchise, but it was still something for which I had a great interest, growing up. So, when the first live-action movie came out in 2000, I was pumped. And I wasn't disappointed. It ended up being a pretty decent action movie that seemed surprisingly faithful to the source material with some of the best casting ever done in a superhero movie. It did well enough with both the general public and fans that it ended up setting the stage for other superhero movies to follow—there was a period during the early 2000s when superhero movies were clearly following X-Men's lead, then you can see a notable shift in tone and style after Batman Begins came out.
Image: 20th Century Fox
The first X-Men movie wasn't amazing, but it was fun and successful enough to warrant a sequel. X2 was an improvement in a lot of different ways with more characters and more dynamic arcs between them. The first X-Men movie focused primarily on Wolverine, as one would expect for the most popular character, but all the characters in the sequel felt more fleshed out than before with the stakes of the conflict being a lot higher than last time. Not to mention, the action scenes were even more intense and exciting than before. My interest in X-Men wasn't as high by this point, but I was still happy to watch this movie over and over again. It was a great sequel that still felt consistent with its predecessor and its source material. Then X-Men: The Last Stand (X3) came out.
X3 was the beginning of the end. It proved that no matter how good a job the previous teams did at setting up a story or creating a list of characters who all have their own distinguished personalities, a Hollywood Mogul like Bret Ratner can still come and muck it up in the third movie just because he has his own vision. It didn't matter if the characters had established their own rapport and history with one another. If it didn't suit the plot of X3, then it was ignored. Suddenly, Professor Xavier is a rude asshole to Wolverine, and Magneto doesn't give a crap about Mystique, despite her loyalty that lasted the past two movies and despite the fact that Magneto was never a skin-deep villain.
Image: 20th Century Fox
There had been plenty of bad superhero movies before X3 that I had seen, so it's not like I didn't know superhero movies could be terrible. It was the fact that the first two had been so good that some schmuck, who had no reverence for the source material or just the last two movies that got it here, could steer such an established franchise so far off the rails for obvious toy-marketing and commercialism. Had I been a little older at the time, I might have noticed this more from the transition of Tim Burton to Joel Schumacker with the Batman movies.
I had so naively believed that since the X-Men already had a couple of good movies under their belt, it wouldn't take such a nosedive into crap. At least the Batman movies slowly transitioned downward and are still watchable, including the bad ones just because they're so over the top. X3 is just a bland superhero movie that could have replaced any of the characters with anyone else. It's so formulaic and typical that you wonder why anyone bothered. It's so bad that its story and conclusion were ultimately retconned by the X-Men movies that followed. Even Logan, my favorite movie from last year, takes place in a time period where the first movie happened but the third does not. Professor Xavier is still a jerk to Wolverine at times, but it's a more endearing and complicated relationship than they even barely attempted in X3.
Image: 20th Century Fox
You're probably thinking, "Okay, so one bad movie killed it all for you? Stop whining!" First, don't be rude. Second, it was two movies that made me toss my hands in the air and say "I don't care anymore." When the first two X-Men movies came out, I was a naive, impressionable teenager who still had a fair amount of optimism in my step. When X3 came out, I was in my twenties and starting to really finally realize how dumb it was to be so invested in these franchises. So when X-Men Origins: Wolverine came out a few years later, my expectations were already pretty dampened.
The reception to X3 should have been a clue to the filmmakers about their project. Yet, somehow, they managed to make another movie that proved the same point of having people making films who have no interest or reverence for what they're working on. The walking cliché factory that is X-Men Origins: Wolverine is arguably just as bad if not worse than X3. It has many of the same flaws and problems that made fans of the characters lose their minds. It's also really boring, and it features some of the worst CGI of the X-Men movie franchise. By the time I finished watching Origins, I decided that it wasn't worth being a fan anymore because if I stayed invested, I'd probably have a rage-filled aneurism. As I said, the game tie-in was a blast and scratched that itch, but I decided by that point that I'd have an easier time enjoying the crap that Hollywood pumped out if I didn't care so much.
Image: 20th Century Fox
Post-Mortem
Since my decision to leave my X-Men fandom behind, there have been 3 more X-Men branded movies, 2 Deadpool movies, and 2 Wolverine movies. I've only seen one of each and liked them all. Does it make me want to go see the others? Not really. It doesn't make me want to rekindle my fandom either. When something is good on the merits of simply being good, I will see what it has to offer. Likewise, if the only negative things I hear about it sound like whiny fanboys, I might still give it a shot. But when I see the X-Men brand on something these days, my interest neither peaks nor wavers. I just don't care.
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