With comic book heroes duking it out in the cineplex, it was only a matter of time before they started coming back to where they belong: television. More specifically, children’s television.
Oh, I know Iron Man and Spider- Man and the Incredible Hulk are all actually culturally significant metaphors for the eternal battle of the ego and the id, or the natural world and the industrial, or the spiritual and the physical. And I know we don’t call them comic books anymore — we call them graphic novels — and Comic-Con is bigger than Cannes. Whatever.
The point is the new “Wolverine and the X-Men” is now on Friday nights on Nickelodeon and it’s good to see a cartoon that remembers what cartoons are supposed to do — zap, slime and blow things up. It’s almost heartwarming to see feature characters who speak in short, declarative sentences that you can usually predict two beats beforehand, and who generally save the world.
Unlike most current cartoons, “Wolverine and the X-Men” does not involve children, which means that the smart-mouth answers are kept to a bare minimum. Likewise, there are no talking animals (well, unless you count the more fauna-esque mutants), very little sarcasm and virtually no highfalutin dissection of pop culture.
Instead, it is an old-fashioned animated action series that follows the adventures of the marvelous Marvel character Wolverine and all the mutants we have come to love and loathe through the X-Men comic books and the feature films that star them.
“Wolverine and the X-Men” seems to be a reworking of events that occurred in the third film, “X-Men: The Last Stand.” After a rather confusing sequence of opening scenes, we find that “now” is a year after a devastating explosion at Xavier Institute.
Professor Xavier and Jean Grey have disappeared in the explosion, the X-men have been flung to the four winds, and the world once again has turned against all mutants, forcing them to register, arresting them and generally treating them like whatever oppressed group of which you believe they are symbolic.
Meanwhile, more evil-minded mutants are protesting their treatment through much more violent means, intent on bringing the situation to a full-blown war.
So you see where things stand. Wolverine must gather the X-Men once again, figure out what happened to Professor X and Jean, defeat the bad mutants and convince the world that it is OK to be different.
There’s no better scenario for a cartoon hero, especially one as beset and complex as Wolverine, and although live-action computer-generated graphics are terrific, it’s hard to beat animation for a really good slam-bam, metal-flying, fireball- throwing superhero battle.
