‘X-Men ’97’ Executive Producer Brad Winderbaum On Revisiting That Saturday Morning Cartoon Feeling

I remember the beloved original run of the 1990s X-Men: The Animated Series.

I had, of course, aged out of it by the end of its run, but I do remember liking and respecting what the creative team was able to pull off when the series dropped on the air in 1992. See, back then, super heroes — Avengers, mutants, and everything in-between — were all relegated to comic books. Multiple attempts at launching respectable film or television projects all fizzled. It wasn’t until 2000’s X-Men that Hollywood finally understood how to tell these stories, how to make them relevant to a mass audience, and how to keep those who loved the original comics engaged without feeling their beloved property had been mishandled.

After leaving television in 1997, the X-Men: The Animated Series stayed in the hearts of millions of viewers, long before social media allowed for groups to coalesce around similar loves. Once comic cons started popping up everywhere, the creative minds at Marvel Studios finally realized the extent of adoration for the series.

And Disney+’s X-Men ’97 was born.

Executive producer Brad Winderbaum has a long history with Marvel Studios and has worked on multiple film and television projects for decades. Most recently, he brought animated Marvel adventures to Disney+ starting with 2021’s What If…? and now X-Men ’97. He and the creative team all understood the importance of remaining true to the soul of the original X-Men series while still crafting something that explored new territories and, most importantly, matured with the times.

Here’s how they did it.

Awards Daily: First of all, I have to say, I’m a huge fan of X-Men ’97, and nothing against the creative team, I wasn’t expecting to love it as much as I do. It’s definitely taken on a much more mature, much older vibe than what I remember the original series. Was that your intention?

Brad Winderbaum: One of our guiding principles when making the show was to try to give the audience the same feelings they had when they watched the original series. I was maybe in the sixth grade when the show came out, maybe younger. So much of it was was new to me. It was the first serialized thing I’d ever seen. It was the first time I’d ever seen a character die on screen in this really dramatic fashion. It was my gateway into comics. It was my gateway into a lot of big ideas. All the social ideas that are inherent to the X-Men that those characters wrestle with are fully on display in that original series.

When we were reviving it 30 years later, we needed to bring a little bit more maturity to the material, I think, in order to capture those same emotions. It still feels like a Saturday morning cartoon, that was the stylistic idea. That was the idea in the scripting of it, in the way the dialogue sounds and the voice recordings, in the look and feel of the show. The thematics are still inherently X-Men, but the drama did have to be turned up a little bit in order to emulate that feeling that many of us had as kids watching the show.

Awards Daily: There had to be this idea that you wanted to keep a toe in the spirit of the original series, but you wanted to also create something that is your own. You needed to satisfy your own creativity but also honor those hundreds of millions of fans of the original series.

Brad Winderbaum: It wasn’t so much a toe as it was that we wanted to just dive into the pool of the original show. We wanted to just submerge ourselves in those waters. That’s why we brought on the original creators as consultants. They were very involved. They were looking at our material. They were giving us advice along the way both from a story perspective and an artistic perspective. We learned about the limitations that they were under while making the original show, and we tried to emulate those limitations.

It was always our intention from day one that we were not trying to create something new. Actually, we were trying to create something old. We were trying to the best of our ability with modern tools to recreate that show from the ’90s. Obviously, the tools have changed. There’s a massive technological shift in 30 years, and the audience has grown more sophisticated. There’s a million reasons to try to change the method. There’s a million pitfalls you can fall into to modernize it. We were targeting authenticity, something that really was a continuation of that OG series. Everything new about it is just, I think, the influence from the culture, the influence on the technology that you just can’t get away from.

Awards Daily: As an executive producer on the series, can you tell me what the collaborative process was like working with your directors like Jake Castorena and with the writing team?

Brad Winderbaum: What If was my first animated project I’ve ever produced, and it opened the door to being able to pitch whatever wild animated ideas I wanted to the studio. The first thing I pitched to Kevin [Feige] was a revival of X-Men: The Animated Series. He saw it right away. We were looking at that original show and are going to try to bring it back to life 30 years later. When I started meeting with writers and directors and producers on the show to partner with, Beau [DeMayo] just got it right off the bat. He had a vision for the show that was just like the original series, born from the source material — the Claremont runs and a little bit of Grant Morrison thrown in there too. He also brought this idea to the table about a loss of innocence. That’s when the Genosha idea began to brew and that we would have this midseason pivot where the characters have to change after the events of the fifth episode. A

Jake, from a stylistic point of view and a character point of view, really led the charge in just driving everyone back towards — those ’90s designs, that aesthetic, the way the camera moves in flat space, the way the characters aren’t angular like anime. They’re actually curved. Essentially, he drove us to embrace an aesthetic that we’ve been running from for the last 25 years. To be honest, it was great. There was a great group of writers working under Beau. There were great directors working under Jake. My executive in charge of animation, Dana Vasquez-Eberhardt, was an amazing partner.

There’s not a single person on this show that didn’t love the X-Men. We all have X-Men in our DNA. For every one of us, it was very influential to us as kids and in our journey as filmmakers. So there’s so much love for these characters that there were just ideas coming out of every direction all the time. So many of them found their way on-screen from the gags to the story elements to the cameos. I think we did a pretty good job.

Awards Daily: So it’s clear from talking to you that you have a deep, abiding love for this material. Was there a particular moment from the comics that you were exceptionally proud to bring into the series?

Brad Winderbaum: There are actually a few, but the trial of Magneto is a particularly great episode. The other thing about the X-Men is that it really is a concept that teaches empathy. Every character comes from a different walk of life. They have different experiences that led them to the X-Men. It is a show that teaches you to put yourself in other people’s shoes, even your enemies, with this great metaphor of society’s rejection of mutants that holds up a mirror to our world in so many ways. The thing that X-Men always smartly goes back to is there’s no true right or wrong. There’s no such thing as a pure idea. It’s really about listening to each other and being able to empathize with each other. That’s really the key to peace. It’s the key to victory. When that doesn’t happen, that’s when the characters fight. There is something about Charles [Xavier’s] vision of coexistence that is tied to redemption and second chances. So many of the characters — Magneto, Rogue, Cable, and Wolverine — are characters that have a real darkness in their past, but they are embraced by that team. They’re given a second chance as X-Men.

Awards Daily: Last question for you: going into this series, there were so many fans that were holding their breath to make sure that that Disney and others were going to do this right. How has the extraordinarily positive reaction to the series impacted you?

Brad Winderbaum: There were times when we were working on this where me and the rest of the crew and all of the amazing creative people that worked on the show would have these moments where we, as fans, just couldn’t believe what we were doing. That we’d have the audacity to try, and we felt like we were succeeding. That came with hope and fear that the audience would see the same thing we saw. The fact that they did was what you hope for when you make anything. Because we were fans and coming from a place of a real true love for the material, I think that shines through. It’s not just that people have responded well to the show and love the show, but people feel real ownership over the material because we all kind of lived through it together. It was a communal experience when we were kids 30 years ago, and it’s confirmation that we’re not alone. There are other people like us that loved it too.

X-Men ’97 streams exclusively on Disney+.