"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."