Week of Review - Generation X

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In 1991 ­X-Men volume 2 #1 came out and became the highest selling single issue of all time.  It was a huge milestone for Marvel comics as well as the entire decade, cementing the ‘90s as a time for comic book opulence and speculator driven sales.  More pertinently, it was the comic that launched the X-Men from a popular franchise into a moneymaking juggernaut that would dominate the next half of the decade.  Within a year Marvel had partnered with Fox to produce X-Men the animated series and its toy line, one of the most successful brand exercises in the entire superhero genre. 

Of course, this kind of success can’t last forever and by 1996 the X-Men were a lot less stable a franchise.  They were still producing hits, like that year’s Age of Apocalypse story, but the writing was very much on the wall for them and for Marvel, with bankruptcy right around the corner.  Still, they managed to produce one last hurrah for the X-Men franchise in 1996 with a live-action pilot film for a proposed X-Men TV show: Generation X. 

Generation X was based on a team of the same name created by Scott Lobdell, the writer who got in some trouble earlier this decade when his Red Hood and the Outlaws comic turned Starfire from character to sex prop.  Introduced in 1994, I’m not really sure what made this team such a must-have for Marvel or Fox, especially given how many members were un-adaptable at the time. 

The team was basically the ‘90s answer to the New Mutants- a group of teenage mutants in training now that the bigger name X-Men had grown up.  At the same time, though, the team also featured characters like Chamber, whose entire torso is made of energy, and Penance, a diamond-hard, red-skinned, razor-clawed silent mutant.  My point is that there were plenty of mutants on the team you just couldn’t adapt on a mid-'90s TV budget, which is why Generation X features a lot of new characters made-up for the show. 

The big reason I think they settled on Generation X as the team to adapt is that it featured Jubilee, who was still very popular from the animated series and serves as the main character of the film.  Actually, a lot of the movie’s opening sequence plays exactly like the pilot of the animated series with Jubilee accidentally using her mutant powers at a video arcade and coming under government scrutiny as a result.  Probably one of the biggest changes is that the film is actually MUCH darker than it actually realizes. 

The opening prologue establishes that in this world mutants have been stripped of their citizenry or any rights whatsoever and there’s a whole organization dedicated to rounding them up and sending them to camps.  That’s an incredibly dark opening sentiment and also eerily prescient of our current immigration system, but the show never mentions it again after the opening text crawl and Jubilee getting rescued from the cops by Banshee and Emma Frost- the head instructors of this universe’s Xavier Institute.

Speaking of the institute, in this world it’s not actually named after anyone- Xavier is the just the name of the place where it was built.  In fact, the film plays extremely fast and loose with all the X-Men mythos stuff it doesn’t have the time to explain, like how Cerebro works or why Emma Frost is doing any of this.  Maybe the plan was to explore that in subsequent episodes, they make oblique reference to a previous team of mutants Emma ran called the Hellions, a reference to her Hellfire Club in the comics, but I’ve no idea what their future plan was. 

Most of the story isn’t really about Emma Frost or Banshee for that matter, but rather the teens at the institute, with Jubilee and Angelo ‘Skin’ Espinosa as the new kids on the team.  The other Xavier students are an odd mix of pretty good and bland.  A lot of them play now like a who’s who of D-list X-Men who didn’t manage to last into the modern canon in a meaningful way.  Maybe folks like M or Mondo or even Skin were a big deal back in the ‘90s but I’ve read a ton of X-Men stuff from 2001-2012 and I can’t remember seeing any of them there outside of times when everyone showed up. 

The adaptation doesn’t do them any favors either- Mondo just looks like a guy rather than his weird material form and he’s basically just a ‘90s jock jerk.  His best friend, a new character named Refrax who’s basically “what if Cyclops had even less useful powers,” looks and acts like Vanilla Ice so they’re a pretty tiresome duo.  Skin is Hispanic so his entire character is all about gangs and other Latin street stereotypes about as complex as Rico Suave.  Even Banshee and Emma Frost are fairly embarrassing as Banshee actor Jeremy Ratchford clearly can’t carry his Irish accent and the writers can’t think of anything for Emma Frost to be but a PG-rated bondage queen. 

The one exception in all of this is Jubilee, played by Heather McComb.  McComb does a good job balancing the ‘90s mall-rat aesthetic with some more genuine humanity that’s really endearing.  She’s never really had a big breakout role but has consistently been the best part of the myriad of genre TV episodes she’s been in.  Of course, there’s also the uncomfortable fact that McComb is white and Jubilee is an Asian character. 

I don’t really know why they felt the need to whitewash Jubilee other than that she’s the star and, presumably, the idea that audiences won’t watch things without white leads was as popular a misconception then as it is now.  It’s a real shame because there’s nothing about McComb’s performance that felt like it had to be tied to Jubilee if they had just made up some new character it would’ve been fine.  It’s the kind of more earnest and engaging performance we’d see more of in Birds of Prey, the much more rewarding forgotten live-action superhero show. 

So far I’ve mainly focused on the heroes but rest assured Generation X has a villain in the form of the spectacularly miscast Matt Frewer.  Frewer’s star has faded in recent years as his main vehicle faded from memory but, back in the day, his part as Max Headroom was still pretty fresh in people’s minds.  It was definitely part of why he got cast here, though the bigger influence seems to be an attempt to recapture Jim Carrey’s Riddler from 1995’s Batman Forever.  Frewer plays a scientist who’s developed a machine that lets him enter the dream dimension and implant messages in people’s dreams, a power he uses for advertising. 

It’s a nakedly transparent rip-off of Riddler’s “TV brain drain” plot of Batman Forever and Frewer’s performance is hammy in all the worst ways.  He’s clearly going for Carrey but he just can’t manage it and he’s way more annoying than anything else.  It’s a real problem because the movie keeps shoving him right in your face and he’s never funny or engaging. The action isn't even good as the whole film is shot in this overly dusty and shiny aesthetic that looks terrible, like an old music video but 90 minutes long.  

I don’t really know what I was expecting with Generation X but I’m honestly kind of surprised how bad it actually was.  I know intellectually that this shouldn’t be surprising, it was the last hurrah of a company that declared bankruptcy later that year, but it’s still pretty disappointing.  I guess I was hoping for something more in the vein of the ‘90s Flash show or Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman- something dated and cheesy but in an endearing way.  

Generation X is certainly dated, in almost every sense of the word- design, dialogue, pacing (this thing feels like it lasts a thousand hours,) but there’s nothing endearing about it.  You’d be better off just reading some Generation X comics if you’re that desperate for more ‘90s mutant material- turns out this one was forgotten for a reason. 

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