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Fate Of The Future is a fun take on Marvel's most popular franchise, Wolverine & the X-Men. The episodes are fun and creative with time travel and exotic locales, though sometimes deadly serious, and features a front and center Wolverine. Still, this X-Men incarnation seems aimed squarely at actual kids, unlike Batman: the Animated Series, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. A big complaint of mine was that these episodes of the show depended heavily on previous continuity that I am ignorant of.

But if you love Wolverine, you'll find plenty of him here.

First Impressions

I didn't understand what was going on in Fate Of The Future right from the get-go. I knew I was coming into the middle of a series, but they packaged the DVD as a stand-alone story and I thought it was going to be part one, two, three and four of one story. But where I really found myself was in the middle of thick X-men continuity from previous episodes. Furthermore, the episodes were mostly stand-alone. I had to learn more background with each episode. For instance, Nightcrawler was in a prison at a mutant haven when the story started. A "previously on" introduction would have been helpful. Or maybe you should start with watching Volume One, Heroes Return Trilogy, which I haven't seen.

But for the most part, the stories were fun and took the X-Men VERY seriously, unlike when I was a kid and in a Fantastic Four cartoon, they replaced the Human Torch with a fricking robot. I know now that it was due to some stupid copyright thing, but the 8-year-old inside of me is still angry about it.

Current 8-year-olds must be delighted with how the X-Men concept is treated as sacred.

What's an X-Men?

The X-Men isn't a difficult concept to introduce: People who are born with special abilities or physical differences that make them feared and hated by humanity. Some X-Men shoot optic blasts, some heal very quickly, some look like fish. But it was really difficult to jump into actually watching the X-Men. I know in the comic, out of nowhere, they'll start addressing continuity problems from the '80s without any kind of primer. This cartoon behaved in a similar fashion, where suddenly something I didn't know about was very important ("But I'm his DAUGHTER!") It's better if you already know the cartoon's storyline.

Wolverine has been niced-up a bit and seems to be the leader of the X-Men. I know that it's a cartoon and that because kids watch it, Wolverine can't kill anyone, but it was weird seeing a sensitive Wolverine spouting gooey pop psychology. On the other hand, he did slice things up with his claws and got in many, many fights. The other characters seemed just like their comics-counterparts with a creepy Mojo, righteous Prof X, and all-over-the-map Mystique. I think Professor X was in a dystopian future where mutants were in real danger of extinction. Trips to a dystopian future are to the X-Men as grocery shopping is to me; they go at least once a week, sometimes more. Wolverine and the X-Men has a lot of fun with Nightcrawler being a swashbuckling hero.

The Episodes

Each story in each episode was fun, well-conceived, if perhaps a little too reliant on the well-trod comics trope of "Let's get the hell out of here!" In the first episode, Wolverine returns to Weapon X and learns a lot about his past, including that his name is James (we learned that after about thirty years in the comics), he once dated Mystique and that some guy, who I never did figure out who it was, wasn't dead. We had another story featuring a very grown-up, fun, confident Kitty Pryde in a dystopian future breaking into a sentinel factory with Forge and Wolverine, resulting in all kinds of trouble, some funny.

My favorite story concerned The Scarlet Witch and Nightcrawler being hunted for sport on closed-circuit TV. I love anything where anyone is hunted for sport. (Note to aspiring super-villains, if you have a show where super heroes are hunted for sport, make sure that you, the producer and director, are hundreds of miles from the action. That's what satellites are for!)

The fourth story was back to sentinels, Wolverine and a lot of fighting.

The DVD

The animation of Wolverine and the X-Men: Fate of the Future was stylish and better than I expected. The digital animation has a lot of detail and looks a lot better than my beloved Thundarr the Barbarian looked back in the '80s. This is kind of true of the Justice League series too; everyone is so exaggeratedly beefed up that they look funny out of costume.

I get it that kids don't care as much about continuity as I do. So if you're buying this for a kid, they'll probably love it.

But (and I hate to be this guy) if there's one thing that history has taught us, you'll probably be able to get the whole season for a lot less than it would cost to buy these individually. I counsel patience to adults who are currently unfamiliar with the show. If you have all the other episodes of Wolverine and the X-Men, this will fit in nicely in your collection.



Disclosure: A review copy was provided by the publisher. For more information, please see our Ethics Policy.