‘X-Men ’97’: Larry Houston, Eric Lewald & Julia Lewald On Season 2, X-Force, And The ’90s Animation Boom [Interview]

Few animated revivals are carrying as much inherited weight as “X-Men ’97.” The original “X-Men: The Animated Series” defined Saturday mornings for a generation and served as a gateway into Marvel, the X-Men, and serialized superhero storytelling that treated its characters with real emotional stakes. When the revival arrived, it did more than reprise a brand. It honored the old show’s shape and carried its mutant melodrama forward.

Season 2 of “X-Men ’97” picks up after the massive cliffhanger of Season 1, with the team scattered across time, Apocalypse looming over multiple timelines, and familiar mutant alliances shifting as X-Force, X-Factor, Polaris, Colossus, Nightcrawler, and more enter the picture. The new season premiered July 1 on Disney+ with its first three episodes, followed by new episodes weekly.

READ MORE: Marvel’s Hit ‘X-Men ’97’ Series Already Has Season 4 Commitment Ahead Of Season 2 Debut In July

Ahead of the season, executive producers Larry Houston, Eric Lewald, and Julia Lewald spoke with The Playlist about how their roles have changed from the original ’90s series to “X-Men ’97,” reimagining the classic opening titles for X-Force, why the series still begins with character rather than spectacle, and which older animated shows they’d love to see revived next.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Congratulations on Season 2. The first four episodes are excellent.
Eric Lewald: Well, I’m glad you love them. And I hate to tell you, but it just keeps getting better.

Julia Lewald: Thank you for that.

Larry Houston: Thank you. It’s been heartwarming and so satisfying to see the X-Men back on air, from Season 1 to Season 2. It just looks so great. I called Jake [Castorena] and said, “Jake, I’m so envious because I didn’t have any money. You’ve got tons of money to make everything look so fantastic.” Especially the Cyclops thing, where he’s fighting and moving around with his eye beams and doing the landing sequence. That was all, Jake, and it’s like, man.

You were all around for the original series, and now you’re executive producers on “X-Men ’97.” In animation, that title can mean many different things. How has your role changed from the original show to Season 1 of “X-Men ’97” to Season 2?
Julia Lewald: Institutional memory. That’s the term I learned from corporations. It helps to have some folks who can say, “Oh, yeah, no, it was red. It wasn’t green.” Those kinds of small things were handy, like scholars.

Eric Lewald: Back in the day, on the original show, being hired as the developer, showrunner, executive story editor, whatever they called it, animation gets those titles crazy wrong. I was responsible for the stories. I can draw, but other people were responsible for the designs, the direction, and all sorts of things. But from the beginning of the show bible through 76 episodes, every one of those words was something I was responsible for with my bosses. That’s a heavy commitment. It’s a 60-hour-a-week job, no holidays, because they don’t build holidays into the schedule. Our schedules were tight. Our budgets were tight. It’s like turning out a weekly magazine rather than kicking back and doing a book. We have budget and schedule envy from the new show.

Julia Lewald: There was no writers’ room. You were doing the writing.

Eric Lewald: We worked at home. We worked with individual writers. There wasn’t a writers’ room. But with “X-Men ’97,” they called us and said, “We’re doing that thing you probably thought was going to happen. We’re going to do an extension of your show,” which was very gratifying to us. They weren’t going to do something strangely different. They called it “first eyes” on the stuff they did. It was advising. “Here’s a script. Here’s an animatic. Here are some designs. Is this cool for you? Do you think there’s something better? Do you have problems?” So it was very much that they did all the work and we were advising, which is light work compared to what they did and what we did before.

Larry Houston: When Eric, Julia, and I got brought on as consultants for “X-Men ’97,” we were more like the very first audience. The shows were pretty close to being done, and we could give them our reactions, what we thought of this or that, how things were going, what we thought could be changed or adapted. Now we’ve all been elevated to executive producers, so we’re higher up in the food chain. We’re actually involved with plots, initial storylines, guest stars, and direction way before it becomes full scripts and animatics. That’s the difference.

Eric Lewald: This season, we’re just a notch more involved. After the first season, everybody loved what happened with it, and we were so thrilled with how good it was, because these things usually don’t work out. Remakes are usually terrible. Then they asked us to be more involved, to get in a little earlier in the process with the showrunner, the stories, and the details. It’s just been one notch up.

I was obviously an X-Men kid in the ’90s, but I also grew up on “Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers,” “Darkwing Duck,” “Iron Man,” “Gargoyles,” and all this stuff that’s in your back catalog. This is a real Saturday-morning cereal-bowl moment for me. Looking back at that era of animation, what do you think those shows were able to do that people may have underestimated at the time?
Eric Lewald: I think they got ambitious. If you look back at some of the Hanna-Barbera stuff, which I grew up on, it’s really very primitive. The budgets were tight, and it wasn’t set up for the kind of spectacle that X-Men comics had. It’s like doing an epic movie on a low TV budget. In the ’90s, people got ambitious. It wasn’t just “Super Friends” sitting around talking to each other. It was, “Okay, let’s show an actual fight. Let’s show actual drama. Let’s show worlds colliding.” It was a time when money and ambition were there.

Then we gradually saw, well, the money is going down. Kids are playing video games now. They’re not watching as much TV. The numbers are going down. So it was a golden age, and it was great timing for us to be there. For about five or 10 years, there was backing and interest in being more ambitious with TV animation, which had previously just been a babysitter.

Julia Lewald: Back at “X-Men: The Animated Series,” Eric was hired to develop the show for TV and craft the first 13 stories. And that was it. That’s all he was hired to do.

Eric Lewald: And we were all let go.

Julia Lewald: We were all let go when it was over, because they didn’t think it would be a hit. Margaret Loesch, the president of Fox Kids, did. She put her job on the line. But we didn’t know. Then the show hits.

Eric Lewald: At the end of that season, we knew Scott and Jean were in love. So we thought, “What are we going to do in Season 2? They just agreed to marry each other. Let’s start Season 2 with her seven months pregnant, fighting bad guys, and going to have a double-mutant baby.” Marvel at the time said, “We’ve been thinking about stuff like that for a while, maybe in the future, but right now, could you hold off on that?” Then comes “X-Men ’97.” What are we faced with? She’s seven months pregnant. So, 30 years later, the old best thoughts turned out great for us.

Larry, in Season 2, there’s a Veruca Salt needle drop in the second episode. Is that you all sitting around throwing out songs, or is that more about what’s actually affordable?
Larry Houston: That’s a matter of whether they can afford it. That’s the bottom line, because everything is like, “Well, if they don’t charge an exorbitant amount of money, you can use it.”

Otherwise, it’s “what can we get for cheap?”
Larry Houston: Yeah.

One thing that shot me right in the nostalgia bone was the X-Force version of the opening titles. Fans are going to love that. Where did that idea start, and how fun was it to reimagine that opening for X-Force?
Larry Houston: It was a group talk when we talked about it. I directed the new opening titles myself, working with Jake, and we came up with the imagery for how to do this new opening. It’s one thing when you’re drawing it in animatics and designing everything, but when we actually saw the animation come back, we went, “Oh, this is going to be good.”

At Tribeca, the audience saw it on the big screen for the first time, and they just lit up. It was kind of like “Avengers: Endgame.” The audience was like, “Wow.” I’m a fanboy. I’ve been reading comics since I was in elementary school, so I know that elation and excitement you get when you see something close to your childhood dreams on the big screen.

This season goes deep into the comics: Apocalypse, X-Force, X-Factor, Polaris, Jubilee getting a lot to do, and more. When you’re adapting decades of comics, do you start with the images fans remember, or with the emotion?
Larry Houston: You start with the character. Like Polaris, where does she start? Where are we going to end up with her character? How does that work? Because she’s part of one of these X-teams, it’s even better. Now we can explore relationships and how different X-Force is from X-Men and X-Factor, and how all three of these teams interact, fight, or whatever with each other.

For us, it’s less about plot and more about character. That was one of the strengths of the original series, when Eric and Julia Lewald and our team were putting together our show. We said, “We want stories based upon characters.” Not just “Here’s a nuclear bomb that’s going to go off.” That’s standard stuff in comic books. But relationships- Scott and Xavier, Scott and Jean Grey, Rogue and Gambit- that’s the stuff that makes you want to keep watching the show because you get invested in these characters. It makes the stories more fun. Everything starts with character first.

Fans really embraced season 1. What’s been the most rewarding part of watching “X-Men ’97” connect not only with people who watched the original series in the ’90s but also with fans discovering it for the first time?
Larry Houston: It’s hard to put into words how satisfying it feels to me personally that the decisions I made back in the ’90s about how to adapt Marvel properties, and to do so with care and respect for the original IP, are still well received. With “X-Men ’97,” they’re still out there, and they still love the show. Julia found online that when they announced the X-Men would be on Disney+, it was the number one reason people were excited. It’s so gratifying to know the audience is there, that they enjoy the characters as they did as kids, and that “X-Men ’97” can take the ball forward from where we left off.

Season 3 is already in production, so without getting you thrown into spoiler prison, are there any visual ideas, characters, or corners of X-Men mythology you’re especially excited to push in future seasons?
Larry Houston: Yes, and they’re exploring, without saying what, after “X-Men ’97,” there are 25 or 28 years of other stories that didn’t exist when we did our show. They’re exploring that in the next episodes and next season. I think fans of the books will totally enjoy how the team is adapting those stories, putting them in the series, and making them part of the whole. Until you see it, I can’t talk about it. I can only give you generalities.

There are so many characters orbiting X-Men at any given time. Is there anyone you’re happy the new show gets to explore more than the original did?
Larry Houston: They do get a chance to explore more of Nightcrawler and Colossus, which we only touched on in our original series. We had four women and four men, so Iceman, Nightcrawler, and Colossus had to go, and they became guest stars. Now, in the new series, they get to explore them a lot more. Especially Nightcrawler. I think people will enjoy that.

Have you ever gotten deep into a story and had the larger Marvel machine say, “No, we’re going to do that somewhere else, so you can’t do it here?”
Larry Houston: That happened in the original series, but not in the new one. In the original series, from Season 1 to Season 2, the writers wanted to explore Jean Grey’s pregnancy. The writers in New York said, “You’re not doing that right now.” New York definitely didn’t want it to happen. They had plans to marry them later on, so don’t do it. Not yet.

Now that “X-Men” has returned so successfully, is there another show from your back catalog that you’d love to see dusted off and given the ’97 treatment?
Eric Lewald: There are two in my head. One of them is “Exo-Squad,” which was done at Universal. We did the final season, but the wrap-up never got produced. This writer still has the original 13 scripts in his file cabinet.

Julia Lewald: They exist.

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Eric Lewald: Then “Mummies Alive!,” which we did at DIC. Let’s talk about a lower budget, but a wonderful young artist named Seth Kearsley designed that all and did almost all the storyboards. He was unbelievable. He was 23 at the time. So he made our DIC budgets actually look like human budgets. Those are the two shows I think would be fun to try again. Maybe the world is ready for a 2027 version of this.

“X-Men ’97” Season 2 is now streaming on Disney+, with new episodes weekly.

Mike DeAngelo

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