X-Men (TV series)

"Cal Dodd: I'll never forget one day with Norm Spencer, who was Cyclops. Norm and I decided that when you could get an extra part in an episode, it was great, because when you can get another line as another character, you got an extra half of what they paid for Wolverine. So there was always competition. There's an episode where Wolverine is playing pool and a bunch of punks came in. For one of the voices, the director said, "Does anyone do Jack Nicholson?" Of course Norm puts his hand up right away. And I just looked at him and said, "Really?" So they let him read. Then I said, "Can I read this line, too?" I don't remember the line, but it was like, [doing a Nicholson voice], "I wonder if this is as good as it gets." Norm just went, "bugger off!" I do a great Jack Nicholson and no one knew that. I got the line."

"Q: What was it like saying goodbye to this show?"

"Eric Lewald: Haim Saban didn't own any of the property. He was getting a fee. Whether we spent $1 million making an episode or $200,000, he was getting a certain fee. If the budget went up, it came out of his pocket. So, from the beginning, he was looking to economize. Fox wanted the shows to be glorious and Marvel wanted them to be glorious. Saban was going, "I know you want a great show, but I'm not going to lose money on this thing. Let's keep costs down." For years, his reaction to just about any creative decision was, "What's that going to cost?""

"Will Meugniot: There was merchandise threat that almost shut down the production. They had made a deal with a fast food franchise to do some X-Men giveaway toys in Australia. And whoever had negotiated the deal had promised the Australian food franchisee that those toys would appear in the show. They were some of the most God awful designs possible. So I said no, and the situation festered for a few days. At home one night I got a call from Jim Graziano, who was the head of Graz, the production company I was working for. Jim just said, "Look, Marvel is threatening to pull the show from us if you don't cave on this." He goes, "If you think it's important, we'll back you. But think very carefully, because there will probably be consequences." I said, "We can't cave on this, or we are going to have to cave on everything." And Jim backed me and it was a really tense few days and we prevailed."

""X-Men" is different from most animated action adventure shows you may have seen or written. It is more about the lives of our characters -- heroes and villains alike -- than ingenious plots or non-stop, death-defying physical jeopardy. It's not important whether or not a bad guy succeeds in blowing up the Pentagon. What matters most is how Wolverine deals with the pain of losing a friend while trying to stop it. Use plot to showcase character, not the other way around. Which is not to say that "X-Men" will lack action, pace, or intensity. We want these shows to move fast and be dense with dramatic crises. Action scenes will play like "Terminator 2" on speed. But more often than not the crisis is personal, not physical. Think of the famous Star Trek scene where Kirk has to let the woman he loves get killed for the sake of future lives. There was matchless dramatic tension created by a man watching a woman slowly walking across a street. The drama was inside the character. "X-Men" is a show of grey areas. We understand most of our villains, even sympathize with some. X-Men victories tend to be mixed blessings and are never achieved without a loss of some kind. "Good guys" fight each other, have bad days, and are capable of being petty and intolerant. One might even leave the X-Men in disgust and join the enemy. Through it all, however, our X-Men distinguish themselves by maintaining their values of friendship, loyalty, and personal sacrifice. Whatever the cost, they must do what must be done."

"We always get crap out here when we're doing shows, 'This is for boys. Don't have any girl characters.' Margaret was probably the main reason. It was her show. Storm and Rogue's toys didn't sell as well. [Usually] they would tell you no matter how good Storm is in the episode, the toys will sell half as many as the male characters. But it was a time when there were no toys selling well for Marvel. We didn't have the pressure from the toy companies."

"The robots’ destructive power also made it easy for X-Men: The Animated Series to sidestep broadcast censors. “Thank God for Sentinels, in terms of action, what action we can have,” Julia Lewald says. “If action’s going to be big, it’s going to involve Sentinels getting bits torn off and thrown about. You couldn’t do that with living things on the shows.” There were times when the networked tugged on the show’s reigns; When the writing process found itself rubbing shoulders with the L.A. riots, Fox made requests to scale back any script containing city-in-flames set pieces (despite the animation process taking nine months). Eric Lewald adds, “The rules for Saturday morning are so restrictive that to make something intense, with a lot at stake, and people who really wanted to slaughter each other … it was a real balancing act.”"

"Eric: There were no trades. I didn't know about the Phoenix Saga. There was no book compilation of it. The way I handled it, was through the help of Mark Edens and Michael Edens, my two writing partners since college who were a third of the writing staff on the show (20 credits, much more uncredited). They sat down with Julia and me at our dining room table, sometimes with producer-director Larry Houston on the phone (Larry knows the characters inside and out - great guy) and we figured the first season out. We went through all the characters and their relationships. For villains, we focused on sentinels because they were animation friendly and destroyable. Being a kid’s show, we couldn't even scratch actual people."

"Eric: We had to introduce them, which is hard to imagine now. We had to introduce what a mutant is to an audience between the ages of 4- and 40-year-olds. Why are the people together? What's their problem? Why X-Men? What are they fighting for? Why aren't these other mutants with them? Why are some mutants against them? That's why we chose to focus them on fighting intolerant people and having more human problems than the books, which were much more fighting against super-villain of the week. We were learning it too. We’d highlight what it meant to be a mutant and why they'd chosen to be X-Men and through doing that we kept putting them up against more bad people than bad mutants."

"Eric: To be honest, Stan wasn't that involved. Marvel told me he hadn’t been involved in the books for 20 years. This was 1992. The books had changed a lot in two decades. Most of the X-Men were different (thanks, Len Wein, and Chris and John). Still, Stan wanted to be more involved, and he was close friends with Margaret Loesch, whose baby this was. Stan loves to be involved creatively. He wants to be part of everything. He's an indefatigable, voracious guy. He never stops. He's 93 (94?) now, and he hasn’t slowed down. He's intense. The problem with us was that when he had done the book in 1963 with Kirby, it was about "extraordinary youngsters!" To us, that was like a Pat Boone record, when we were trying to do metal / rock. I was told that he never liked the direction that the books had gone since 1975, and since we liked the newer books, he fought us on the tone and direction of the show."

"Eric: There had been dozens of X-Men team members by 1992. Which of them do you pick? People don't understand that some of that evolved as we wrote it. Beast wasn't going to be part of the team. The reason we put him in prison in the beginning was so that we wouldn't see him for seven or eight episodes and there would be a reason for it. And, by the time we got to the end of the first 13, we loved writing for him so much; he became part of the team."

"Eric: The money and the interest and the people all seemed to balance. As the years went on, from the late 90's into the early 2000's, for whatever reason, the money for shows kept going down. Even X-Men was a low to moderate budget show, half of what Batman was. It was still expensive compared to many of the modern simpler animated shows. To make X-Men look as good as it did took a lot of effort. More and more people stopped doing ambitious shows. We tried to pitch ambitious shows. Production companies would look at the scripts and say, screw this, we're just going to have a couple of close ups and be out of the scene. The money went down. Now it's become more affordable and people are making more spectacular animated shows again. So, there's money again for quality action-adventure shows."

"Lewald: We were completely aware of how different X-Men:TAS was regarding women. First, the series existed because Fox Kids Network president Margaret Loesch willed it into being. Second, everyone on the creative side had been working in the TV animation business for years, and we were tired of putting up with its many stupid, constraining rules, one of which was that in “boys’ adventure” series, the audience is almost all boys and they won’t watch female heroes. No one was consciously trying to make stories featuring the female characters, we simply were trying to tell the most intense stories we could – and it happened that half of these featured the women. We could have tried making the team eight guys and a girl (as other TV networks probably would have insisted), but that just weakens the stories, limits variety, and is just plain stupid. Looking back, it seems that few series have followed our lead on this. Even the X-Men movies, which I respect and enjoy, have seemed to had trouble featuring the women as action heroes central to the stories. Storm and Rogue were our two most powerful X-Men: not in the movies."

"Dar: I’d be remiss if we didn’t discuss writer Len Wein who recently passed away and not only helped redefine the X-Men but also created everyone’s favorite Canadian mutant, WOLVERINE! What kind of influence did he have on the animated series?"

"Eric & Julia Lewald: While we’re proud of many of the episodes, I think adapting “Days of Future Past” and “The Phoenix Saga” for television were among the biggest challenges, since X-Men fans had preconceived ideas about these classics. The pilot story, “Night of the Sentinels,” was a real challenge, since we had to introduce this strange world to an audience, 90% of whom knew nothing about it. “Nightcrawler” dealt with faith in a way we’d never seen on Saturday Morning TV. And “One Man’s Worth,” my favorite of our dozens of original stories, was so satisfying that Marvel used it later as the basis for “Age of Apocalypse.”"

"AiPT!: I’m curious about Jean Grey’s role on the series. While her Phoenix storylines dominated season 3, she was less prominent in the show’s early episodes. Was there a reason why she took a backseat to other characters early on in the series?"

"Q: I read that you guys were fighting executives about dumbing down and goofing up X-Men: TAS. Can you recall more vividly some of the more ridiculous requests you got, and how you had to defend your vision?"