Batman: The Animated Series launched a host of spinoffs, including the aforementioned Superman, the future-set sequel Batman Beyond, and Justice League. The legacy continues today, not only in Timm’s spiritual successor Batman: Caped Crusader, but also in every adaptation that tries to tell solid superhero stories for a general audience.
X-Men: The Animated Series (1992-1997)
First, let’s address the elephant in the room. Yes, X-Men ’97 technically resolved the Spider-Man: The Animated Series cliffhanger in the season one finale where we see a glimpse of Mary Jane standing next to Spidey, suggesting that the two did reunite and make their way home.
That out of the way, let’s talk about what X-Men: The Animated Series did really well: it brought the comics to the masses. While Batman: The Animated Series deserves praise for its economic storytelling, that approach had largely been abandoned in its source material. By the early 1990s, superhero comics were often convoluted, soap operatic stories with complicated interpersonal relationships. No one did these types of stories better than Chris Claremont, who started writing the X-Men in 1975, transforming the team from Marvel c-listers into the biggest heroes on the newsstand by 1992.
Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, X-Men: TAS followed the leader, adapting Claremont’s stories and using the recent visual redesigns of superstar artist Jim Lee. Somehow it worked, bringing bonkers tales like the Mutant Massacre and Fall of the Mutants to the small screen. It hooked a whole new era of fans. Of course the most pronounced successor to X-Men: The Animated Series is the Disney+ series X-Men ’97, which continues the storylines of the original show and heightens the political messaging. But X-Men: TAS also proved to executives that comic-accurate material wasn’t anathema to general audiences, opening the door for our current entertainment landscape, in which Disney produces billion-dollar adaptations of The Infinity Gauntlet and Secret Wars.
Spider-Man: The Animated Series (1994–1998)
Obviously, Spider-Man: The Animated Series owes a major debt to X-Men: The Animated Series. Like his merry mutant cousins, Spider-Man got to recreate his overstuffed comic book adventures on the small screen. However, even more than X-Men, Spider-Man: The Animated Series streamlined the comic book stories in a way that set the stage for future adaptations.
For evidence, take a look at the way the cartoon handled Venom. In the comics, Spider-Man got his black suit while off-planet in Secret Wars. For a while, Peter wore his black suit as his new costume, but eventually returned to his blue and red togs when he grew uncomfortable with having a symbiote. In 1988, four years after the black suit debuted, new character Eddie Brock wore the costume and became Venom.