Fired 'X-Men ‘97' Creator Beau DeMayo Breaks Silence, Calls “Remember It” 'Centerpiece' Of Series Pitch
Fired 'X-Men ‘97' Creator Beau DeMayo Breaks Silence, Calls “Remember It” 'Centerpiece' Of Series Pitch
Spoilers ahead, but one can only wonder if doing so violated anything. The insights are interesting and welcome.
The fifth episode of quickly-beloved Marvel Animation series X-Men ‘97, “Remember It”, premiered on Disney+ Wednesday morning. It was a truly intense episode, elevating everything the show had already accomplished by growing up with its audience and being unshackled from network S&P. The episode was full of melodrama and foreboding, as Cable comes from his future to warn his mom of trouble, but he can’t quite get his warning off well enough. Subtly in the skies is The Watcher, and the trouble begins as the Wild Sentinel unleashes a devastating, genocidal attack on the gala as Genosha celebrates being on the verge of UN recognition. The devastation seems to claim the lives of many notable mutants including Sebastian Shaw, Banshee, Marrow, Leech, and even Magneto, but most definitely fan-favorite Gambit, who sacrifices himself to end it all, and Rogue is inconsolable. Fans all across the internet are on a shaken high, but biggest of all, it awakened an unexpected voice thought to be silenced.
Beau DeMayo, the creator of X-Men ‘97, was fired in early March, two weeks before the premiere of the series but after he had already completed season 2. An official reason for the firing has not been disclosed, but he wasn’t allowed to promote the show. However with such powerful events playing out onscreen, he felt compelled to share, through screenshotted notes on Twitter and Instagram Stories, behind-the-scenes info about the episode detailing the specific tragedies and personal experiences that laid the foundation and allegorical roots of the massacre.
Lotta questions and so I’ll momentarily break my silence to answer. Episode 5 was the centerpiece of my pitch to Marvel in November 2020. The idea being to have the X-Men mirror the journey that any of us who grew up on the original show have experienced since being kids in the 90s. The world was seemingly a safer place for us, where a character like Storm would comment on how skin-based racism was “quaint” in One Man’s Worth. For the most part, to our young minds, the world was a simple place of right and wrong, where questions about identity and social justice had relatively clear-cut answers.
Then 9/11 happened, and the world turned against itself. Things weren’t so safe anymore. Grassroots populist movements began to rise around the world as a whole nation struggled to deal with collective trauma and fracture at the seams of every diverse demographic. The effects we still feel today, and have only been exacerbated by more collective traumas like COVID or several recessions.
For me personally, 9/11 was when I came out of the closet and realized not everyone would accept me. It’s when I entered college and noticed certain groups avoided me, or that a Supercuts in Tallahassee refused to service me because they don’t do “ethnic haircuts”. Reality - as Jubilee found out in episode 4 - got very real and very scary. This happened to many people. We had kids and got jobs with high stakes. Suddenly it wasn’t enough for us to survive. We had responsibilities, and people whose survival depended upon us meeting those responsibilities. We were growing up…
If you were like me, you would actually watch old episodes of the OG cartoon to comfort…God knows I did during COVID. But just like Roberto warned Jubilee, there’s a danger of living in the past and clinging to nostalgia. There’s a danger to not letting go of who we think we are, as Cyclops and Jean are learning. It leaves us stagnant, and dangerously unaware of a future we didn’t anticipate.
Yes, it looked like Gambit’s story was going a specific direction. The crop top was chosen to make you love him. Him pulling off his shirt was intentional. There’s a reason he told Rogue any fool would suffer her hand in a dance, even if it ended up not being him suffering. But if events like 9/11, Tulsa, Charlottesville or Pulse Nightclub teach us anything, it’s that too many stories are often cut far too short. I partied at Pulse. It was my club. I have so many great memories of its awesome white lounge. It was, like Genosha, a safe space for me and everyone like me to dance and laugh and be free. I thought about this a lot when crafting this season and this episode, and how the gay community in Orlando rose to heal from that event.
Like many of us who grew up on the OG cartoon, the X-Men have been hit hard by the realities of an adult and unsafe world. Life’s happened to them. And they, like we did, will have to decide which parts of themselves they will cling to and which parts they’ll let go of in order to do what they’ve been telling humanity to do: face an uncertain future they never saw coming. As Trask told Cyclops in the premiere “You have no idea what it’s like to be left behind by the future.” Now the X-Men do, and like each of us, they’ll have to weigh whether this is a time for social justice - or as Magneto preached at his trial - is it a time for social healing.
As DeMayo returns to his silence, fans await the back half of this first season of X-Men ‘97, which continues without break next Wednesday on Disney+, with “Lifedeath” part 2. The first part was very Storm focused, so it very well may see her storyline come back in the wake of all the death and destruction, intertwining. It’s followed by “Bright Eyes” on April 24 and the three-part “Tolerance is Extinction” each week of May until May 15. It still might be a while after that before the facts come out about DeMayo’s firing.
Source: Beau DeMayo