‘X-Men’ Adapted ‘Dark Phoenix’ Way Better Than Any Movie Ever Could

As a kid growing up with X-Men as my first-ever exposure to appointment TV, there was one thing I wanted most: a live-action movie. No surprise, the 3rd grader wasn’t satisfied to just have a rad cartoon with complicated character dynamics. He loved the cartoon, but he wanted more! He wanted his childhood heroes to step into the real world, an understandable wish since the only superhero movies he had was the Batman franchise and all of its pulpy offshoots.

Fast-forward 25 years, I’ve grown up and I’ve gotten my wish–kinda. While the Marvel Cinematic Universe has gone above and beyond my wildest expectations for what a superhero movie could do (how are they so dramatic and so weird at the same time?!), my forever faves the X-Men have trod rougher terrain. Yeah, they turned the party in 2000 with X-Men, a movie that gave me everything I wanted at the time, but it’s been hit or miss since then–especially as the Marvel movies got bigger and (comparatively) brighter. Wolverine snarked about wearing yellow spandex in 2000, but now Captain Marvel punches spaceships while wearing bold blue and red. Because the X-Men proved superheroes with superpowers can work in a PG-13 setting (obligatory reminder that the R-rated Blade came out 2 years before X-Men), the Marvel movies were able to hit the ground running and embrace their comic book roots in a major way. And… I’ve been waiting for the X-Men movies to finally follow their lead. And if any X-Men story deserves the big, bombastic, Marvel-style approach, it’s “The Dark Phoenix Saga.”

Originally published in 1980 as X-Men #129-137 (or #138, depending on where your collection cuts off), Chris Claremont and John Byrne’s masterpiece is rightly accepted as not only the greatest X-Men story of all time, but one of the best superhero stories of all time, period. It’s the culmination of 30 issues of build-up, a stretch wherein writer Claremont turned a team of oddballs and newbies into the tightest of superhero teams. They were a family dealing with one of their own, Jean Grey, taking on the power of a cosmic god and and being reborn as Phoenix, an all-powerful mutant deity with fiery mental powers.

“The Dark Phoenix Saga” detailed Jean’s slow burn corruption at the hands of the Hellfire Club, a kinky upper-crust club of hedonistic scoundrels  with a fetish for 18th century garb and domination. The Hellfire Club unlocked Jean’s dark side, exposing the cosmic being within her to untold vice and giving her a thirst for more–which she acquired by snuffing out a star in a faraway galaxy, destroying billions of alien lives in the process. With all that blood on her hands, an elite team of space cops laid down the law by attempting to execute the Phoenix/Jean, a sentencing the X-Men didn’t agree with as they were hastily working to either subdue or separate the cosmic being from their beloved teammate. The solution? Trial by combat, a sprawling space brawl on a once-inhabited area of the moon between a bunch of emotionally-frayed Earth heroes and the most punishingly efficient team of galactic commandoes ever assembled.

Sounds epic, right? Kinda sounds like a story that demands an adaptation along the lines of Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, doesn’t it? Kinda sounds like a story that needs to establish and pay off a whole bunch of complex character beats and go all in on its outer space inclinations? But what have we gotten in Fox’s two attempts to adapt this story? 2006’s X-Men: The Last Stand and the just released Dark Phoenix, two movies that feature zero fancy fetish clubs, zero teams of colorful heroes or opponents, and none of the emotional payoff this story needs. I’ve been waiting forever to see “The Dark Phoenix Saga” come to life when I’ve actually had the perfect adaptation all along.

It aired in 1994 during Season 3 of Fox’s X-Men animated series, and it is everything that you want Dark Phoenix to be.

Adapted into four parts, which gives it a near feature-length runtime of 88 minutes, “Dazzled”/”The Inner Circle”/”The Dark Phoenix”/”The Fate of the Phoenix” gets everything right. Revisiting it now almost 25 years later (I vividly remember the first two parts airing in a special hourlong block), I realize that there really is no way for any film franchise to do this story justice unless it comes after many, many movies of team-building. Airing in Season 3 after 36 previous episodes, the relationship between the main cast is way more solid than anything achieved in the films. This is very much a family fighting against and then for one of their own, and it sells the drama of it all.

It also makes room for lighter moments, too, like Wolverine effortlessly slicing off a big turkey leg to chomp down on while he makes his way up to the Circle Club’s den of sin for revenge. Much to my delight, Rogue and Gambit–two characters that hadn’t even been created when the original story was published–get some flirty fun that delights me to this day.

And as the team’s powerhouse, Rogue gets slotted into the role Colossus played in the comics, which means she gets to go toe-to-toe with the purple-skinned, mohawked Superman stand-in Gladiator.

Oh yeah–the cartoon actually goes to all the places the movies were too afraid of! The Shi’ar Imperial Guard is there, led by Lilandra. What’s truly bizarre is that a Saturday morning cartoon gave us a more accurate depiction of the Hellfire Club than the movies ever did–and they couldn’t even use the term “Hellfire”! X-Men: First Class depicted the villains as a swingin’ ’60s social club, leaving out all of the kink (and 95% of the lineup, too). The cartoon, though? Behold, a team of villains who either wear tight pants or no pants!

The animated Dark Phoenix even had the guts to actually give gay fave Dazzler something to do, even if she is sporting her bland ’90s duds instead of her glitzy disco look.

Of course this adaptation isn’t perfect. A not insignificant chunk of that 88 minutes is dedicated to recapping not only the events of the animated “Phoenix Saga” from earlier that season, but also events from earlier chapters of “The Dark Phoenix Saga” too. It’s a little repetitive, but also it’s a story that originally unfolded across multiple weeks. I cut it some slack there, because the overall character dynamics are so tight.

I’m truly glad that I rewatched this “Dark Phoenix” while the other one is in theaters. It’s a lot of fun and it brings the comic to life in a way that honors the original while fitting with the new medium and character lineup. I’ve spent so long waiting for my favorite X-Men story to hit the big screen that I’ve overlooked the fact that the perfect “Dark Phoenix Saga” adaptation already exists, and I watched it when I was 10.

Buy X-Men: The Animated Series "The Dark Phoenix Saga" on Prime Video

Buy X-Men: The Animated Series "The Dark Phoenix Saga" on iTunes