X-Men '97's SDCC Panel: Original Cast Returns, Apocalypse Secrets, and a Season 3 Tease

“We know we’ve been living in your heads rent-free for 30 years, but we’re hoping to give you a lot more years of enjoyment,” Lenore Zann, the voice of Rogue since 1992, told a packed room at San Diego Comic-Con. Marvel Animation brought together a family reunion for its “Marvel Comics to Screen: X-Men ’97” panel this year. Moderated by Devan Coggan, the panel gathered original series voice actors Lenore Zann (Rogue) and Cal Dodd (Wolverine), original writers Julia Lewald and Eric Lewald, original director Larry Houston, and Marvel Comics’ C.B. Cebulski, alongside X-Men ’97 executive producer Brad Winderbaum. The conversation ranged from the show’s scrappy 1992 beginnings to the Apocalypse-centric back half of Season 2, still rolling out on Disney+, with a couple of genuine surprises about Seasons 3 and 4 thrown in.

Thirty Years in the Making

Getting the band back together for a revival isn’t how the industry usually works, and several panelists said as much. Houston, who directed the original series, recalled getting the call completely out of the blue. “I had retired. I was relaxing, and then suddenly we get a call from Disney: ‘Hey, you want to do the show again?’ I’m like, sure,” he shared. He added that he was moved to learn how many people now working on X-Men ’97, including director Jake Castorena, had grown up loving the original series themselves.

Dodd, meanwhile, revisited how he landed the role of Wolverine in the first place, a story that gets funnier with 30 years of distance. He had never even heard of the X-Men and assumed Wolverine was an animal character. The term “mutant” had to be explained to him. Despite his unfamiliarity, he was exactly the voice the character needed.

Eric and Julia Lewald put the original show’s odds in perspective, too: back in 1992, only Fox wanted it, and nobody expected it to survive a single season, let alone spin off a beloved revival three decades later that reunites the people who made it.

Seeding Apocalypse

Season 2’s Apocalypse-centric back half traces back further than fans might realize, all the way to a 1993 episode they wrote called “One Man’s Worth.” Marvel’s Editor-in-Chief at the time, Bob Harras, was so taken by the story that it inspired the Age of Apocalypse comic event 

Julia added that Apocalypse’s slipperiness across eras is exactly what makes him work as a season-long antagonist: “That’s the beauty of Apocalypse, we’re dealing with different timeframes, and he is so other. He’s so different from anything else we ever had to deal with. He can be there in all three timelines, and he’s just as horrific and terrifying in all of them.”

C.B. Cebulski spoke to just how closely the comics and animation sides now collaborate, sharing a favorite anecdote from the week the Season 2 trailer dropped. “I had dinner scheduled with Frank Miller,” Cebulski revealed. “I would never say you see Frank Miller giddy, but he came to dinner and couldn’t stop raving about how happy he was with the respect the show has shown his work.” 

Back in the Booth

Both returning voice actors described stepping back into their characters as far easier than expected. “I like to say playing Rogue is like pulling on a pair of very fine, well-worn gloves that are very comfortable,” Zann said. “When I walked into the booth and said my first line, I just went, ‘Aha, there she is, she’s back.’”

Dodd took a slightly more analytical route back to Wolverine, rewatching all five seasons of the original show to relocate the character’s voice before his first session. That prep led to a standoff with the new voice director on his very first line back. “Whatever the line was, she said, ‘That was great. Would you mind doing it a little bit lower?’” Dodd recalled. “I knew exactly where his voice was and where it should be, and I said, ‘I could, but I’m not going to.’ She said, ‘Okay then, let’s move on to the next line.’”

Rogue's Grief, Magneto's Legacy, and the Eggs Only Die-Hards Will Catch

Zann spent real time on Rogue’s emotional arc this season, which continues her grief over losing Gambit in Season 1. “It’s such a treat for an actor to be able to go to all these different, deeper levels with a character,” she said. “This show gets you to see so many different layers of her personality and her feelings. When I lost Gambit, the line ‘Sugar, I can’t feel you’ touches everybody, because when you lose somebody you love, and suddenly they might even be a little bit warm, but they’re gone, it’s heart-wrenching.”

Winderbaum spoke to another major Season 2 thread: Magneto’s exit and the introduction of X-Force, the new team led by his daughter. “The reaction has been incredible. We knew we were building toward something really special, especially in the wake of Magneto’s departure,” he said. “Being able to carry on his legacy through his daughter was something we really wanted to get right — and there’s a lot more of her to come this season.”

As for the show’s famously dense Easter eggs, Houston revealed the tradition actually started as an unauthorized bit on his part back on the original series. “When I did the original series, they told me not to do that; I never got permission,” he said. “But I knew, as a fan, that’s what you want to see. So all the other times, we used to sneak in a cameo, they were all unauthorized. I figured if they saw it and fired me, I didn’t care. It really helped the enthusiasm, because you’d watch an episode and go, ‘What other character can I see in the next one?’ And it built on itself.” 

Winderbaum confirmed the current team has run with that spirit at a much bigger scale. “If you ever look at anyone in the background that’s not a mutant from the comics,” he added, “it’s probably someone from our crew.”

What's Next: Season 3, Season 4, and a Surprise Clip

Winderbaum confirmed production is already deep into the next two seasons simultaneously. “We’re watching finished animation on Season 3 and animatics on Season 4 at the same time,” he said, giving a shoutout to co-executive producer Dana Vasquez-Eberhardt in the process. The panel then screened roughly a minute of finished Season 3 footage, pulled straight off an editing drive for the occasion, featuring Toad battling several sentinels downtown.

The Lewalds teased that a long-dormant plot thread from their original run will finally get resolved in an upcoming season, and revealed that a Wolverine-centric Season 3 episode they wrote has become a favorite among the returning crew. X-Men ’97 Season 2 is currently streaming on Disney+, with new episodes continuing to roll out weekly. 

Attendees at the panel walked away with an exclusive X-Men ’97 Season 2 variant cover comic and a card from a limited-run set of X-Men-themed tarot cards.