Hitting television on 20th March, 2024 with a 100% RT rating, X-Men ’97 returned to the screen with the essence of X-Men: The Animated Series. Although it’s been decades since the Animated Series went off the air, the recently released show makes it look like yesterday. Despite being plagued with controversies, the new show became a major success on television.
According to reports, from the last-minute firing of the creator of X-Men ’97 to facing backlash from the Latin-American community, the recently released animated show made notorious headlines. Although X-Men ’97 feels like a rare revival, it’s time to check out what exactly went wrong, which pushed the series towards criticism.
X-Men ’97 Replaced the Entire Cast in Latin-American Spanish Dub
Released as a comforting and rare revival of the X-Men: The Animated Series, X-Men ’97 served as a proper continuation of the original. With a big upgrade to the animation and featuring spectacular action scenes, the recently released show put a lot of effort into the production and left no scope for complaint.
However, despite being an incredible revival, X-Men ’97 seemingly disappointed the Latin-American community. According to reports from SlashFilm, people who grew up watching the Latin-American Spanish dub of X-Men: The Animated Series, found the latest show as a grave disappointment.
Not for the storyline or animation, but X-Men ’97 is facing criticism because of changing the entire dub cast. While the previous Animated Series kept the original English-language voice cast 100% intact, only changing a few by necessity, X-Men ’97 simply replaced the entire cast for the Spanish dub.
Unnecessary Change of Character Names in X-Men ’97
Although this dubbing issue might be shrugged off as a petty thing, for a show being promoted as a big piece of nostalgia, it feels disrespectful to disregard a big element of the original. Meanwhile, another thing that pushed X-Men ’97 towards further criticism is changes to the localization.
The original X-Men: The Animated Series showcased a notable element, where they translated a few character names into Spanish. In the original, Wolverine became Guepardo, Rogue was called Titania, and the team itself changed from X-Men to Equis-Men. Translating names wasn’t uncommon in Latin-American dubs for even characters outside the X-Men franchise, like DC Comics’ Richard Grayson became Ricardo Tapia in Spanish. But surprisingly, what X-Men ’97 did seems outrageous.
While it is considered important to add changes to localization, X-Men ’97, which is being promoted as a continuation and a love letter, not a reboot, disappointed fans by changing the names of the characters to their English form. While Cyclops, Storm, and Gambit remain Cíclope, Tormenta, and Gambito, respectively, everyone else gets their Anglo-Saxon name back, including Wolverine and Rogue.
Although this change of names back to their English form, even for the Spanish dub, makes sense for the sake of continuity, it still seemingly disappointed the Latin-American fans. The localization of names usually serve as a time capsule for new audiences as well as a nostalgic bait for the old fans. But this particular change of localization in X-Men ’97 is now affecting the show as it failed to understand their audience base.
X-Men ’97 is streaming on Disney+.
