Ranking Every Marvel Animated TV Series From Worst To Best

2. X-Men

The show that pretty much kickstarted the entire nineties animated renaissance (three words I can guarantee you'll never see in that order again), X-Men not only boasted the best opening titles for a TV show ever (come at me, Friends), it genuinely pushed boundaries, tackling the overly-convoluted continuity of the X-Men comic books and doing it all without omitting some of its darkest storylines.

Sure, the show hasn't aged particularly well in places, and the dialogue can be a bit hammy as well (who knew that a mall baby actually ate chilli fries?), but it's still the most quintessential interpretation of Marvel's most uncanny group of heroes. At five seasons long, it's also one of the longest-running superhero shows of all time, as well as being one of the most faithful.

Fans will remember the series' third season most fondly, as it adapted Chris Claremont and John Byrne's infamous 'Dark Phoenix Saga' beat for beat - a massive feat for a Saturday show to achieve. Further still, the series lives on today off the page as well as on it, with Marvel having published X-Men '92 just the other year. It's got quite the legacy, and, like many of the other shows on this list, I can attest to its success in introducing these characters to a whole new generation. I very much doubt that the X-Men would be as popular as they are today if it hadn't been for this show.

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Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.