Previously on Remembering the X-Men: Animated Series…we talked to Eric Lewald, the lead story editor on the series about how the episodes went into production from the writer’s perspective. We have also been talking to Sidney Iwanter, the Fox network executive about what went on behind-the-scenes. From the two previous articles (here and here), you should have a good idea about the production of the show.  Now it’s time to talk about the cast.

Finally, for the first time on DVD, X-Men: The Animated Series comes roaring to the format in all of its glory in season sets (dubbed volumes). You can almost hear Shuki Levy’s score now, the pulsating theme song that is so memorable even a decade after the last episode aired. To mark this special event, Killer Film takes a look back at the ground-breaking series, through the words of it’s creators, writers, and voice talent in Remembering the X-Men: The Animated Series. This is part three as told by Rogue herself, Lenore Zann, with the Fox network executive Sidney Iwanter.

Casting the X-Men

Early on, there were issues with the cast that were originally brought in to voice the X-Men, as Sidney Iwanter explains: “It was awful. During the script read, it sounded like it was done by a group of amateurs from high school. I did something I had never done before, and have never done since, I fired everybody.”

After Sidney Iwanter demanded a new cast for the series, Karen Goora, the casting director for the series, offered to try the Toronto Theater Community. Second only to the New York Theater Community in terms of quality actors and actresses, Sidney marveled at the idea. “These people are actors and these are stories worthy of actors, not personalities. They are going to emote, stretch the dialogue,” says Sidney of the actors they were hiring. “We started getting some major theater actors, Shakespearean trained from England type of actors. That’s how we got this team together; Cedric Smith (Professor X) and David Hemblen (Magneto), these guys are Shakespearean actors! Who would’ve thought of using guys like that? When I saw Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen doing Xavier and Magneto in the films, I said, wonder where they got that idea?”

“Do you know what Cal Dodd did before X-Men?” questioned Sidney Iwanter. “He was a jazz singer! What does Hugh Jackman do? He’s a singer and dancer on Broadway! It’s like we found these people, who didn’t  just  have good voices, but had depth in their resume. That’s totally different than what you have today. Studios are always hiring top dog actors. You can listen to the show when you close your eyes, and you can hear the acting; the turmoil, the humor, the terror. It just wasn’t a bunch of deep voiced guys and sweet women that just spoke words. The recording sessions became acting sessions.”

It’s me, Suga, Rogue!

The character of Rogue debuted in Avengers Annual #10 (1981) as a villain, although a few years later an appearance in Uncanny X-Men changed this minor character into one of the more popular female X-Men. Her character was so popular, Bryan Singer used her in his films like Jubilee was used here in this series. I think we can chalk her popularity up to Lenore Zann, who voiced the character in all five seasons of X-Men: The Animated Series.

Lenore Zann on how she was approached and cast as Rogue: “Well, I played a lot in movies and television. My agent back in 1992, and I played a lot of southern characters with a southern accent like that, called me and said “Look, Lenore, I don’t know if you’re interested, but there’s this animated series casting for a character that needs a sexy, husky, voice, who has a southern accent. As far as I’m concerned you’re perfect.”

I’d never done animation before and the auditions were such and such times, and I couldn’t make it because I had something else. So I missed the first few auditions, and in fact I missed the next two to three sets of auditions, because  I was mostly doing TV and theater; I was just busy every single time, and my agent called me back a month later and said “they’re having final callbacks for this thing and they have not found the voice they’re looking for and that’s because you’re the one. I just know in my heart that you’re the one for this character. So please could you just go?” So I said “okay.”

I went that time and I walked into the booth to read with the producer Sid (Iwanter). I had this little paragraph and the microphone was on and I said: “You know, I remember when I was 13. Had me a boyfriend, so I kissed him. Poor boy was in a coma for three days. I’d absorb their strength right into me. I don’t know Beast, what makes us the way we are anyway?” That’s all I said, and silence. Then someone went “where the did she come from! That’s what we’ve been looking for!” They went ballistic in L.A., and they basically hired me on the spot. That’s how I got the part.”

Rogue has a unique set of powers, but ones that keep her at a distance. “Those are the roles I play. She’s strong, she’s independent, she’s sexy, but she’s also lonely and she has an Achilles Heel in which she can never be touched,” explains Lenore Zann on Rogue’s set of challenges with her powers. “Therefore, she can never really fall in love or be attached to somebody, so she’s always alone. There’s elements like that in all of the characters I have ever played. I played Marilyn Monroe at the age of 19, plucked out of oblivion and put on stage in a rock opera. It made me a huge star at the time, it was on the front page of every newspaper. You know, here’s this little girl from Nova Scotia and being Monroe,  I just blew everyone’s socks off. When I put on the wig and the make-up, I did not study anyone of her movies, I was 19 and didn’t really know quite who she was at the time. It was 1980 when I did the role, and she wasn’t as big as she is today.”

One of the key traits to her character is the flirtatiousness of Rogue with Gambit. Lenore talks fondly of this relationship, and her friendship with Chris Potter, who voiced Gambit for almost all of the character’s appearances. “We were all together for the whole series, we were in the room together. So it was like a radio play and of course, in the scripts there is a definite attraction between Gambit and Rogue. In fact, I think Gambit is madly in love with Rogue.  One episode he tries to kiss her and it almost kills him. There’s that time when Mr. Sinister captures them and puts them on an island, and takes away their powers. For the first time, they have a night together, I think they were chained to the wall or something, and it leaves it like dot dot dot, you know, so that they can actually touch each other and he won’t die. It doesn’t leave it to the imagination what they did that night.”

“In the room, we were all totally into our characters and just having fun,” remembers Lenore. “The hardest role for them to cast was Storm. In the first few weeks of our first season they must’ve went through five different actresses. They kept getting fired, and we were all nervous. With Chris (Potter), it was getting that accent. At first they wanted a strong accent, and when he did it, he did it well, but they said it was too much, bring it down, bring it down. It became very, very subtle.”

“All of us became extremely close. We remain friends to this day, even though we’re all over the place,” says Lenore of her cast mates.

It’ll be the first time there’s a superhero elected in office!

Lenore Zann is currently into politics and will be elected into office at the time of this writing. A defender of the arts, despite her current success in politics, the show and the character of Rogue will always be with her. “I’m still getting tons and tons of fan mail. I get a lot of mail from people in the war, like this one guy who loved, loved, loved Rogue, she is his favorite character. They have all the videos to watch as they wait to be called into duty and asked please write back to me and asked for an autograph. I really hope they can come home safe and Rogue is thinking of them. That makes a big difference to them.”

“The story is universal that anyone can relate to, just like with these shows now, like X-Men, Iron Man, Watchmen, these are universal questions and stories, people relate to on a very deep, primal level. That’s why personally I think they remain so popular,” Lenore concludes. “People just recognize my voice. People are more excited for those characters, from comics and cartoons, than they are about movie stars!” laughs Lenore.

In case anyone of you were wondering, she sounds exactly like Rogue.

To be concluded….

Come back for part four, the last one of this multi-part look at Remembering the X-Men: Animated Series as Jubilee herself, Alyson Court joins us! Feel free to contact me at jon@killerfilm.com for any questions or leave a comment!

Finally, for the first time on DVD, X-Men: The Animated Series comes roaring to the format in all of its glory in season sets (dubbed volumes). You can almost hear Shuki Levy’s score now, the pulsating theme tune that is so memorable even a decade after the last episode aired. To mark this special event, Killer Film takes a look back at the ground-breaking series, through the words of it’s creators, writers, and voice talent in, Remembering the X-Men: The Animated Series. This is part one as told by the Fox network executive Sidney Iwanter and Supervising Producer of the show, Scott Thomas.

Pryde of the X-Men

It late 1989, the X-Men started off as a one off pilot episode, trying to get the Fox network interested in the property, called Pryde of the X-Men. Focusing on Kitty Pryde, the episode was well animated, but a flop in every other regard. It felt like a collection of bits, edited together like a superhero introduction montage. Wolverine was vastly butchered as they cast him having an Australian accent. Sidney Iwanter, a Fox Kids network executive at the time recalls this pilot: “It was crap! I remember making a real smart ass remark about that, and that was a Marvel production in 1987, in one of my interviews. It was like every conceivable mistake that could be done to the X-Men series, was right there in that show. I’m not talking about the animation compared to ours, that’s a financial problem, but storytelling-how you developed the characters, like the slip-shot approach to who Wolverine was. I think they gave him an Australian accent! It was the worst kind of slopping storytelling. Why in the name of God would you do a show around Kitty Pryde?! I don’t understand that, I mean who the f**k is Kitty Pryde! She’s not one of the major X-Men! It was a simple show; it was a throwaway. They used it as a pilot to get the network interested. The network looked at it and said, what’s the point? We don’t get it, who cares.”

The majority of fans felt the same way, despite it airing a few times before being released on VHS.

“I’ve looked at that, and I was slack-jawed!” he confesses. “This was Marvel and what the hell were they trying to do? I knew what they were trying to do, they were being safe. They were trying to take Moby Dick, and turn it into the most generic fishing story! When I got hired and my boss said, ‘What would you do?’ Remember, I was never a comic book geek. I would read them every so often, but I was not somebody who knew what was going on, on panel 62, issue 312. I was a normal reader of comic books as a kid, then moved away to the graphic novel later on. But a fanatic I wasn’t. However, I was aware of the history of the X-Men, like many of the story lines, but I was also aware of how complex and sophisticated these characters had become. Remember, the X-Men started in 1961, and so as they grew, their world grew, and more characters came to developed within the universe, the stories became very sophisticated especially with the Claremont stuff. You can’t do X-Men properly until you really, really, do them as sophisticated as ever been seen on a Saturday morning.”

Even though the property failed to excite the network, Sidney was well aware of how to get it right. Luckily, Marvel was listening.

We are talking about 76 of the best action/adventure shows for kid’s programming!

Sidney Iwanter had an idea of how to get this property the respect he knew it deserved, as well as the fans. “You have to ask yourself: what was it about these episodes that made you want to sit down in front of the TV on a Saturday morning? I’ve given a couple of interviews on this in the last couple of years, and I’ve been in this game for a long time, I just turned 60, and I’m one of these geeks. When you look at these shows from your age, you see the type of sophisticated writing- forget the animation, the animation was what it was, and that was due primarily to budget. They didn’t have the same resources as Warner Bros for Batman: The Animated Series, who spent $500,000-$600,000 per episode, that’s the reason they look as good as they do.”

Scott Thomas, the supervising producer for the series adds this about the animation quality control of the show: “You know, it was later with this studio, a good Korean studio, but I don’t think the problem was there with them. The cost of the episodes were getting more expensive, so they were experimenting with looking at a studio in China, the Philippines, and Vietnam. They would all do one minute tests. It’s amazing to see the differences in each studio. Some would have good animation, but the characters would be completely different. It just would be to much of a change so we stuck it out with the studio we had, but they were experimenting with different avenues.”

“I was the network executive for Fox for Batman, Beetlejuice, Spider-Man, Silver Surfer eventually, and X-Men,” says Sidney Iwanter, “all of the shows the kids watched in the 90s. I remember when I first got into this business, the Hanna Barbara from the 60s, and I knew the guys who did Scooby Doo, and I examined the scripts and they’re  okay, it’s Scooby Doo. But when they do action/adventure shows, they were very linear storytelling. It was like reading spark notes all the time.”

Recreating X-Men

“So I thought to myself: why do they have to be this simple?” remembered Sidney Iwanter. “Somebody once asked me who my influences were. My answer was this: it was not animators, when it came to this kind of world, mainly because I can’t draw. I liked cartoons and all of that, but I was always intrigued by story. Why do some shows work and others don’t, whether it be live-action or animation? It always boiled down, not to the visuals, it was story. Go back to Scooby Doo. It’s visuals weren’t anything to write home about; sure you got a cute dog, goofy characters, but there’s nothing really about those characters that are life affirming. The stories were very simple, but were always very show eccentric. You really couldn’t have any new format. Scooby always had to get scared, Shaggy and Scooby, there was a format that worked. In an action/adventure shows, that’s not that easy to do. You can’t really do formulaic writing because what happens is that you know exactly what happens. In comedies, that works. When Scooby opens a door and gets scared it works. Okay, fine, we laugh.”

Iwanter continues: “You can’t do that in action/adventure. You’re not going for humor, you’re going for drama, suspense, and mystery. In the 1980s, I spent a lot of my time watching prime time shows, even though I was in children’s programming. The shows that I saw that moved television way beyond anything prior to the 60s and 70s, were Hill Street Blues. I looked at Hill Street Blues and I saw “holy mother mackerel! This is sophisticated storytelling, multi-dimensional characters, didn’t end at end the of each episode, as they continued. It had the level of characterization that I had never seen before on prime time programming in this country. I thought: ‘I wonder if you could do the same thing in kids programming?’ You would have story and character arcs, sophisticated dialogue that didn’t sound generic or without meat behind it. Wonder if you could do characters with depth. If you remember the G.I. Joe, the Transformers, stuff like that, those were very, very, linear, straightforward stories. Did you know anything about these characters before hand or after? No, not really. Those G.I. Joe’s were G.I. Joe’s, you know, sometimes they would delve into something or another, but there wasn’t meat behind those characters.”

“We did stuff here that had never, ever been done on a Saturday. Fox had just started in 1990, one of the first networks who got into the market since the 50s. I kept saying to people, how do we make this not to look like G.I. Joe? Let’s go back to the stuff I’d seen in Hill Street Blues. Everyone thought I was nuts, crazy. Multilayer story arcs, that remained open week to week, character development that dealt way beyond the superficial, you know?”

The kids aren’t stupid!

“From Saturday morning to Saturday morning, how are you going to keep kids interested? You’re going to have to remember what happened the week before. It was a totally different kind of world back then. Why don’t we do what they did on prime time, like the previously on? If I remember correctly, I don’t think anything on Saturday morning prior did that. I got a lot of blow-back on that idea. They said, you can’t do that, kids aren’t going to follow that, no matter how sophisticated the ‘previously ons’ are. I don’t believe kids are that stupid. I have never underestimated my audience,” remarks Sidney Iwanter.

“If its edited properly,” says Sidney, “then I’ll give you a one minute recap that will bring everyone up to speed. If adults can figures this out, then kids can figure it out. So that’s what we did. They hit the high points of the previous episodes, really edited well. Also, I wasn’t afraid to get melodramatic. There was a love gist between Wolverine, Cyclops, and Jean Grey. I had people question why I was getting involved with that. ‘Why would an 8 year old want to see that? They are going to turn this off!’ You don’t understand kids I said, this has nothing to do with girls having koodies, this is exactly what life is about. Kids see this all the time, whether its their parents or siblings liking each other. We’re hardwired for this stuff, hardwired from the womb. You can have this stuff as long as it’s between fight sequences. No matter how powerful the X-Men are, let’s face it: they’re f**ked!”

“People don’t like them although they’re saving the world, they go to jail, their social lives suck and with all that power they have, they somehow can’t settle anything in their own lives. That was the key. Seven or eight year old kids are powerless. No matter how much power the X-Men had, they too were powerless. Not to be feared, not to be alone. We were tapping into the basic nature of being a kid. That was the genius of the creation of the X-Men; when you developed you’re powers it was at puberty. The world gets more confusing. Society is forcing limitations, but you’re branching out socially and intellectually. Okay, that’s exactly what we did with these characters. No matter how much power Cyclops has, he still cannot get the girl of his dreams.

Wolverine is more than insubordinate. Here’s a guy who is really pissed off. His life didn’t go the way he thought. Even Beast would’ve loved to be a simple professor. Giving Beast a form of intellectualism when he spoke was a character trait. I said to Eric (Lewald, the story editor for the show) you put into his mouth stuff as if he lives by a Thesaurus. So in the middle of fights he would quote philosophers as if they were throwaway lines. It’s a personality quirk. I wanted to make sure none of these characters talked alike. Even thinking as logically as that, was break through,” confesses Sidney Iwanter.

“Sidney (Iwanter) was really involved with this series,” remembers Scott Thomas. “We’d have fights with the censors, sometimes our villains and characters were rather risqué, for Saturday morning, so we had to go back and change that, which was always funny to me. Each episode was different, and we would get a memo saying what was way too risqué, you know and changed it. Little things like you couldn’t have a devil’s tail on this character, you know all kinds of different things.”

“If it wasn’t for the writing this show would be as forgettable as anything in the 80s,” Sidney Iwanter proclaims. “It all boils down to how good the writing was on these characters. For what we were trying to do, and we couldn’t do this without Eric Lewald and his team of writers, the reason for the shows success was the writing.”

To be continued….

Come back soon for part two of this multi-part look at Remembering the X-Men: Animated Series as Eric Lewald joins us, along with Sidney Iwanter and Scott Thomas again, as they give us a detailed look at the writing of the shows episodes and the casting of the X-Men. Future parts will include the voice talent and their fond memories, so don’t miss out on those! Feel free to contact me at jon@killerfilm.com for any questions or leave a comment!