X-Men cartoon developers clashed with Marvel over series direction

Creative forces behind X-Men: The Animated Series fought Marvel over big details which had huge implications for the show and the first episode.

X-Men: The Animated Series is one of the most influential comic book-based TV shows ever. As with many classic programs, there were headaches and fights behind the scenes that shaped what the series would become.

The duo developing the show Eric and Julia Lewald had a vision for the show they had to fight Marvel to maintain. They revealed to Polygon that Marvel and their studio arm wanted to throw in as many characters, particularly villains, as possible right out the gate.

That wouldn’t do with the Lewalds who were focused on introducing mutants to the masses and building their audience. Eric revealed:

"“There hadn’t been any Marvel movies at the time, and we were told 80 to 90 percent of our audience wouldn’t know who X-Men were or what a mutant was because only a couple million people knew the comic book… We needed eight or nine million people to have a good show.”"

Making the two-part pilot, “Night of the Sentinels,” was hard enough because it meant that they had to introduce viewers to the ensemble of heroes and set up that world so that viewers could “deal with what [they were] seeing”.

Julia Lewald would chime in, adding that they didn’t know if they were getting more than 13 episodes but the writing team was interested in plotting a story about complex real-world issues even if Marvel “didn’t think it’d work.” She revealed that it could have “developed quickly into just bad mutant versus good mutant.”