Marvel’s merry mutants are set to return to the small screen this year in X-Men ‘97, which is pretty great. But what’s better is that their return has the potential to set right the grossest of injustices and resolve a mystery that’s hung over Marvel’s animated canon for decades now.
The first teaser for X-Men ‘97 has finally hit the web, and (for the most part) fans around the world are excited to catch up with Wolverine, Storm, Beast, and all the other students from Xavier’s School for Gifted Children. Still, while the vast majority of the discussion online was rightly focused on Xavier’s superpowered students, my eye was drawn to something else.
In a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment at the start of the trailer, a copy of The Daily Bugle blows by the ‘camera.’ Now, this is exciting for two reasons. The first is that it’s a reference to Spider-Man, which is always a good thing in my book. Secondly, if you’re the type of Marvel obsessive who goes through trailers frame by frame, you can see on the front page that Peter Parker supplied the photos for the story.
To me, my… Spider-Man?
Now, to those who weren’t around in the ‘90s (which is a frighteningly large number of people these days), that may seem like a fun Easter egg and nothing more. But what if I told you that it has the potential to be so much more than that?
I want to take you back to 1998. It was a time when cereal still had the addictive quality of methamphetamines, there were only 151 Pokemon, and Marvel’s Spider-Man cartoon was telling one of the most ambitious stories ever put to television.
Yes, after five seasons of spectacular stories and amazing action, the ultimate Marvel character was involved in a reality-bending crossover with multiple Spider-Men and all the Avengers (yes, the ‘90s Spider-Man animated series did Spider-Verse and Endgame first).
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It was an incredible time to be a Spider-Man fan, and it all came to an end with Peter defeating Spider-Carnage (a version of Peter Parker bonded to the Carnage symbiote who was every bit as cool as he sounds) and setting off to save Mary Jane, who’d been lost somewhere in the multiverse.
The ending we deserve
Then disaster struck. The show was canceled before Peter could hit the jackpot and save MJ from wherever she was. So, for the last 26 years, we’ve had no idea what happened to Peter and MJ. Yes, I know the creators have revealed where they planned on taking the show – MJ was stuck in Victorian England, and Carnage was Jack the Ripper (yes, really). Still being told what would have happened isn’t the same as seeing Peter, who’d gone through so much, finally get his happy ending.
But what’s this got to do with the X-Men ‘97 trailer and Peter Parker’s Daily Bugle byline? Well, here’s the exciting thing: the old X-Men animated series and Spider-Man cartoons are set in the same universe. That means Peter canonically returns to his dimension at some point, presumably after finding his lost love. After all, we can’t see Peter swinging back to his Earth without rescuing MJ.
It’s a stretch, we know, but honestly, with a Spider-Man the animated series revival looking unlikely (Spidey cartoon licensing is a mess), this tiny Easter egg is probably the closest we’ll ever get to an onscreen resolution to a cliffhanger that’s hung over fans of the Web-Head for more than two decades. Who knows? Maybe when the X-Men return this March, we might get other references to the Wall-crawler that can finally put this mystery to bed.
