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  Previously on X-Men

  Previously on X-MEN

  The Making of an Animated Series

  By Eric Lewald

  Popular culture changed by a cartoon!

  (New York Times, Aug 21, 1994, Author’s collection)

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Eric Lewald

  Previously on X-Men

  The Making of an Animated Series

  By Eric Lewald

  Publisher: Jacobs Brown Media Group, LLC

  First edition hard cover, November 1, 2017

  ISBN: 978-0-9988663-2-1

  ISBN soft cover: 978-0-9988663-7-6

  ISBN digital: 978-0-9988663-8-3

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017944861

  Copyright ©2017 Eric Lewald

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Original Cover Design: Will Meugniot

  Back Cover Image: Saban International Services, Inc. promotional material.

  Neal Adams, artist (Author’s collection)

  Edited by Mark Alfred

  Hard cover edition

  Jacobs Brown Press

  An imprint of Jacobs Brown Media Group, LLC

  San Diego, Los Angeles, and Frazier Park, California

  www.JacobsBrownMediaGroup.com

  To my dad, Ernie, who taught me to love stories, and to my wife Julia, and sons Carter and Alec, who give me reason to want to tell them.

  Acknowledgments

  This book would not have been possible without the contributions of far more people than I can list here.

  First and foremost, thanks to those who made the X-Men comics, which in turn made our series possible. Without Jack Kirby and Stan Lee starting all this – and dozens of others like Roy Thomas, Neal Adams, Len Wein, Chris Claremont, and John Byrne building it into something beyond its origins – there would have been no opportunity for us to see if we could bring the world of the X-Men to television.

  Thanks to those who granted me interviews. This history would have been mighty thin without your perspectives.

  Thanks to the many hundreds of people who worked to craft X-MEN: TAS. This book and our website (xmentas.com) and our Twitter feed (@xmentas) are celebrations of your efforts.

  For transcribing 400 pages of muddy recordings, thanks go to my niece, Reveille (Rev) Wiederspahn (yes, the surname of Arthur’s boss in “The Tick vs. the Idea Men,” the animated Tick’s first episode; and of nerdy Eugene in X-MEN:TAS’s “The Juggernaut Returns”). Huge thanks to Debbie Campbell for filing thousands of series documents.

  For reading all these pages and making them better, thanks to: indispensable copy editor Mark Alfred, Carter Crocker, Mark Edens, Russ Wiederspahn, and especially Jeremy Cushner, whose pop-scholar sharpness of focus and obsession with detail helped make up for my own inexperience. Thanks as well to my agent, Jason Dravis, for his thoughtful support, and to Sondra Burrows and Steven Kates at Jacobs/Brown for believing in this book and seeing it through publication.

  For making me write the book in the first place and for keeping it and me honest, boundless thanks go to my wife Julia. This book would not exist without her.

  And finally, thanks to the many fans of X-MEN:TAS with whom I have spoken over the years. We television writers tend to craft our work alone, rarely connecting with the people who experience and enjoy our efforts. Hearing what the show has meant to you convinced me to write this book.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Introduction

  1. “GREENLIGHT!” Monday, February 17, 1992

  2. THE STRUGGLE TO GET THE X-MEN ON TELEVISION

  3. CREATING AN ANIMATED TELEVISION SERIES IN 1992

  A. Making a TV Series

  B. What We Had to Work With: The Various X-Men Comics

  C. A Creative Team Emerges

  D. A Vision Takes Shape: What We Wanted and Didn’t Want X-MEN:TAS to Be

  4. FOUNDATIONS: A Series Bible, a Pilot Script, and a 13-Episode Story Arc

  A. The Series Bible

  B. The Two-Part Pilot Script

  C. The 13-Episode Story Arc

  D. How We Picked Stories: Character

  E. Which X-Men to Focus On: The Team Takes Shape

  F. Which Villains?

  G. Which Character Design?

  H. Having Fun: The Wit and Wisdom of Beast & Larry’s Mutant Cameos

  5. WRITING X-MEN:TAS SCRIPTS: Organization, Documents, Schedules

  A. Our Scriptwriting Method

  B. Story Stages – Idea to Final Script

  C. Our Writing Schedule: Doing Them All at Once

  D. 1992 Technology

  E. First Crisis: The Memo

  F. Standing Firm

  6. ISSUES ARISE: Network Censors, Designs, and Casting

  A. Broadcast Standards and Practices (“BS&P”) Content Rules for Kids

  B. Drama, Jeopardy, Adversaries, and Killing Morph

  C. Second Crisis: A Character Design Standoff

  D. Third Crisis: Our Initial Try at Casting the Voices

  7. WE GET A CORE CAST: The X-Men Find Their Voices

  8. MORE ISSUES ARISE: Irrational Exuberance, Merchandising, and Stan

  A. The First Storyboard: Excitement, Pushing, and a Lesson

  B. Fourth Crisis: Merchandising Interference

  C. Fifth Crisis: How Can You Say “No” to Stan Lee?

  9. CREATING THE OPENING TITLES

  A. We Reluctantly Try Narration

  B. Larry and Will Do a Narration-Free Version

  C. Getting the Opening Titles Music Right

  D. How It All Came Together: A Shot Analysis

  10. FINISHING SEASON ONE

  A. A Humbling First Season

  B. Trusting Yourself: Television Animation Takes a Long Time

  C. Between Seasons: Writers and Artists Laid Off

  D. Sixth Crisis:First Animated Footage

  E. Seventh Crisis: The Tale of Three Storms

  F. When Will X-MEN:TAS Air? Forget September

  G. Margaret Makes Lemonade

  H. January 1993: A Number-One Hit Is Born

  11. A SECOND SEASON: New Challenges

  A. Success!

  B. Leaping Back In

  C. Between-Season Adjustments: Scott and Jean’s Baby, Sinister, and Morph

  D. Professor X and Magneto in the Savage Land: Stories Not Connected, But Connected

  E. Staff Losses as We Muddle Through

  12. BIG EPISODE ORDER – 26 Becomes 65

  A. Wonderful Commitment, Daunting Task, Some Epic Stories

  B. Fourteen “Phoenix” Books Become Five “Phoenix” Episodes

  C. Wrapping Up the Series with a Bang – Or Not: “Beyond Good and Evil”

  13. ELEVEN FINAL EPISODES AND SOME MEMORIES

  A. Half-orders Stretch Us to 76 Episodes

  B. Some Good Stories: Len Wein and Cap

  C. The Episode You’ll Never See

  D. Thunderbird Becomes Changeling Becomes Morph

  E. Deathstrike’s Breasts

  F. Out-of-Order Episode Presentation

  G. Crossing Over with Spidey

  H. The Series Finale: My Heavy Hand

  14. “NIGHTCRAWLER” – AN EPISODE START-TO-FINISH

  A. The Idea

  B. The Premise

  C. The Outline

  D. The Script

  E. Notes We Got That Were Addressed, or Resisted

  F. The Storyboard

  G. Conclusion

  15. FILMOGRAPHY: The 76 Episodes

  16. THE LITERARY QUOTES OF BEAST, OUR RESIDENT PHILOSOPHER

  17. TALKS WITH THE CAST!

  18. TALKS WITH THE CREW!

  19. TALKS WITH THE WRITERS!

  20. TALKS WITH THE EXECUTIVES!

  21. A TELEVISION CRITIC REMEMBERS

  22. FAN TESTIMONIALS

  EPILOGUE: The After Effects of a Surprise Worldwide Hit

  A. The Creative Team

  B. Superhero TV Animation

  C. Marvel

  D. Live-Action Movies and the X-Men “Brand”

  E. A Pop-Culture Revolution

  F. Finally, “Previously”

  INTRODUCTION

  Heartbroken Wolverine. Wistful Rogue. Caring Jean Grey and idealistic Professor X. Steadfast Cyclops and curious Beast. Eager Jubilee, rakish Gambit, and mischievous Morph. Brooding Magneto. How did these characters find their way into our hearts? They almost didn’t! This book is a history of how

  X-Men: The Animated Series (1992-97) came to be. It will introduce you to the people that worked so hard to make it the beloved show that it is.

  I did not come to the project as an “X-pert.” I simply love stories and storytelling. Movies, books, TV shows, comics, old song lyrics: I succumb to them all. My European father used to read me bloody Greek and Norse myths at bedtime, mixed in with Lewis Carroll. During high school, I memorized the original Star Trek over TV-tray suppers. I programmed films at college. Hollywood beckoned. (Where else do they pay you to tell stories?) And that’s how I found myself getting “the phone call” offering me a job working on a show about Mutants.

  My friends and I write stories, draw pictures, and playact for a living. For that alone we are thankful. But creative careers are wildly uncertain: There are years of hard work in between fleeting moments of success. It is especi
ally gratifying when it can be said of a project, “It went right.” And with X-MEN: The Animated Series (X-MEN:TAS) it did.

  How did it happen? Every creative project starts out aiming to be an unqualified success. Every novel, movie, television series, play, or song is begun with the fervent hope that people will “get it,” will understand why it is special. Otherwise why bother?

  Luck was a big factor. In football terms, X-MEN:TAS got some lucky bounces; the players were hungry for a win; the coaching staff innovated; the team jelled. Still why, out of the varied efforts of tens of thousands of talented people in our business, does one project catch lightning in a bottle? Weirder still, why are these achievements almost never replicable?

  These questions have occurred to me lately as I sit on popular-culture convention panels discussing X-MEN:TAS. It succeeded in every way. It was a runaway popular hit from the start, sometimes drawing larger audiences than all the other TV networks combined. Critics raved. Fans dropped everything or raced home, never wanting to miss an episode. Fox Kids Network leapt from lowly upstart half-network to Number One. Twenty years later people remember the series as “their favorite animated show ever.” The critics at pop-culture website IGN have rated it among the top fifteen animated series of all time. In 25 years, it hasn’t “dated.” Episode viewings have numbered in the billions. It has paved the way for a series of nine consecutive worldwide hit motion pictures. People still dress up as the characters.

  Most of the creative people who contributed to the series, myself included, have had 30- or 40-year careers and have worked on dozens of projects. Many of us have worked together on other projects, some quite successful. And since our series’ initial run there have been other X-Men television projects. Yet nothing has had the resonance for us that X-MEN:TAS has. In trying to understand why, I have interviewed every person in any sort of position, creative and executive, that had an impact on its production. Perhaps they would have answers about what was special about their experiences.

  Many hands went into the creation of the 76 half-hour episodes produced over five years. The Fox Television Network was in charge – it was “their show.” Saban Entertainment managed the production. Graz Entertainment physically produced it – with help from their subcontractors, like AKOM studios, in Korea. And, as everyone now knows, X-Men is a Marvel Comics property, based on characters created over the at-the-time 25-year run of the books.

  My official credits were “Developed for Television By” and “Executive Story Editor.” Today I would be called the “series showrunner,” though that is a term I dislike since so many people “run” so many parts of a television series. I worked directly with most of the people interviewed here and indirectly with all of them. I took creative supervision from Fox, was paid by Saban, delivered written material to Graz’s artists, and looked to Marvel’s wise counsel for questions of storytelling and X-Men authenticity.

  If you are a fan of the series, the X-MEN:TAS team hopes our reminiscences will add to your appreciation. If you have an interest in the collaborative creative process, we hope our experiences, good and bad, will be instructive.

  ERIC LEWALD

  Glendale, California 2017

  1.

  “GREENLIGHT!”

  Monday, February 17, 1992

  The X-Men Get a TV Show!

  This DVD cover came 17 years later

  THE DAY IT ALL STARTED

  The big meeting was set at the top floor of the modest Saban building in Toluca Lake, California, a small, older neighborhood in northern Los Angeles, tucked strategically near Disney, Warner Brothers, and Universal Studios. Bob Hope and Bing Crosby used to live nearby. It was a Monday morning in February, the 17th, in the year 1992. Everyone would be there, seated around Saban’s massive rectangular conference table: Fox TV Network executives, Marvel Comics people, artists, producers, animators, marketers, financiers – everyone it takes to get a four-million-dollar TV project off the ground. Even comics legend Stan Lee, then 69 and not active in the books for many years, would join us.

  Finally, after decades of failed attempts, the X-Men comic books would become an animated series. The commitment, the “greenlight,” had been given, and I had been chosen to be in charge of the writing.

  There were two small problems. I had never run a major network television show start to finish, and I barely knew who the X-Men were. Fox Network executive Sidney Iwanter (EYE-wan-ter), an old friend, had offered me the job the night before the meeting. I had had twelve hours to prepare (and no internet to browse).

  The meeting was hosted by Haim Saban. At the time the soon-to-be billionaire was the head of a scrappy little media company, Saban Entertainment, that paid the bills with clever deals involving music rights and second-rate material that no one I knew had ever worked on. But he had a knack for getting shows on TV. Haim had put together the winning package for what he knew to be the dream project of the new president of Fox Kids Television, Margaret Loesch (pronounced “Lesh”).

  X-MEN:TAS was Margaret’s baby. While working as an animation producer she had tried for years to get one of the three major TV networks (NBC, CBS, ABC) to buy an animated X-Men series. Now Margaret was the head of the kids division of Fox, a new, up-and-coming, fourth TV network, so it was her call: X-MEN:TAS was a go. Above all the people in Saban’s conference room, today was her day.

  There was great excitement among the twenty-plus people around the huge table that filled the room. It was clear to me that months of discussions had built to this point. People were bursting with ideas and opinions about what our X-Men show would have to be. Marvel Comics needed the series to complement and reinforce the plans for their books for the upcoming year. The animation producers (Jim and Stephanie Graziano, heads of Graz Entertainment) needed scripts quickly – there were less than seven months remaining until the series’ first air date in September (nine was more the normal minimum), so production was already behind. The team behind Warner Brothers’ Batman:TAS series, now under development, had over a year of preparation time before they started animating; we would have a few weeks.

  Who would make up the superhero team? Over three decades, various X-Men had come and gone. How would it look? What would the tone be? How about music? Which villains would we showcase? How would we avoid the mistakes of the previous failed attempts at translating Marvel Comics properties to the screen? Younger? Older? Tougher? Funnier? Everyone had an interest, a need, and an opinion.

  I sat and listened. Amid the cacophony, a quiet, steady, concise, focused voice of reason seemed to emerge at crucial moments. It was as if this guy knew everything about the world we were about to leap into, had considered each issue carefully and had an answer. It was Will Meugniot (MINN-ee-oh), the producer-director-designer chosen by Margaret Loesch and Graz to supervise the production. He knew the books as well as the Marvel Comics people; he knew the needs of production as well as the animators; he had the trust of most of the players; and best of all, he knew what had gone wrong with Marvel adaptations before and was determined not to let it happen again. Most large collaborations become struggles for control; if this one did, I wanted Will as an ally.

  As the meeting wound down, all eyes turned to me. Each group needed to see a series bible (twenty to a hundred pages describing the show, its characters, its storytelling style, its world, its vision) and a story “arc” that laid out the entire 13-episode season, so that the hundreds of craftsmen who would soon be working could, well, get to work. I’d have two weeks. Quicker would be better.

  Somehow I was more excited than scared, which is what I should have been. X-Men: The Animated Series had begun.

  2.

  THE STRUGGLE TO GET THE X-MEN ON TELEVISION

  Our fearless leader: Fox Children’s Network

  President Margaret Loesch

  (courtesy of Margaret Loesch)

  EARNING THE OPPORTUNITY

  All I knew on that special February day in 1992 was that I had a job. I had no idea that others had been struggling to get the X-Men onto TV for years. Hard as it is to imagine today – movies, more series, and billions in profits later – in 1992 almost nobody in Hollywood believed that an X-Men TV series could possibly work. (Shows what people know.)