She's Controlling the Jet

Pillow and Able have been witness to my joy that Disney XD is, for some reason, re-airing the all too-short lived X-Men Evolution cartoon from a few years ago. As a child I spent the majority of my Saturday mornings watching the cartoon lineup from 6AM until around noon when Momma Pet would wake up and take me to the mall or something. By the time Evolution began I had been sleeping in on weekends instead but the premise of teenaged mutants (encouraged probably by the success of teen mutants in the feature films) learning how to harness their powers while navigating the challenges of attending high school in upstate New York had me awake and transfixed like I was 8 all over again.

Evolution aired for 4 short seasons in total, the first two were mediocre and childish. Fun, but stupid. The show gets good, and, like, canonically good, after the teens are exposed to the world as mutants in the Season 2 finale. X-Men, in all of its forms, has always gone with the apartheid bent but Evolution features a post-milennial mentality about racism and social engineering that's quite apt. Everyone in their world (like ours) accepts that humanity can turn on a dime and genocide is not so much a shocking abhorration as something that reoccurs cyclically in spite of history.

Anyway, despite the shows on-point catologue knowledge of nerd-dom, the style leaves a lot to be desired. Compared to the bright colors and big hair of the 90's cartoon the X-Men in Evolution are dressed like aliens for combat (miserably, they never actually get to combat aliens like in other incarnations) and are also weirdly cautious about using their powers, presumably because Xavier, featured in Evolution as an overbearing and stangely boring headmaster, encourages them not to.