X-Men ’97 is setting up a Wolverine plotline that started as a joke

polygon.com:

Carrying on the legacy of its predecessor, X-Men ’97 leaves no stone unturned when it comes to adapting and remixing the great X-Men comics of the 1980s and ’90s. And the final moments of this week’s episode, “Tolerance is Extinction — Part 2,” are no exception.

If you’ve seen it, you know, and if you haven’t you should go watch it, because what comes next is one of the strangest swerves Marvel Comics ever tried to take with Wolverine.

[Ed. note: This piece contains spoilers for “Tolerance is Extinction — Part 2,” the penultimate episode of X-Men ’97 season 1.]

At the end of “Tolerance is Extinction — Part 2,” Magneto rips the adamantium out of Wolverine’s body, in a moment ripped straight from the pages of 1993’s X-Men #25, and originally inspired by an offhand comment in a Marvel writers’ meeting. Comics writer Peter David recalled the moment to Comic Book Resources in 2007:

What happened was that we were all discussing how we were going to have Magneto’s return be a big deal. The other writers were bouncing around the notion of a huge Magneto/Wolverine slugfest and I said, thinking out loud, “Boy, y’know, if I’m Magneto, I don’t even bother with Wolverine. I just yank out his skeleton and be done with him.” And there was dead silence for a moment, and then everyone looked at me and said, “That’s a great idea.”

And so the adamantium-less Wolverine era was born. Losing his metal didn’t put much of a crimp in his snickt-ing; to all of the X-Men’s surprise (Wolverine included, thanks to his history of memory loss), it turned out that Logan’s claws were actually a part of his mutation, not a modification from the Weapon X program that laced his skeleton with adamantium in the first place. Underneath the metal, he had a sextet of jagged, retractable claw bones.

So he could still cut the hell out of a guy — but recall that the whole point of adamantium is that it can cut through anything but more adamantium. Wolverine was no longer the slice and dice anything guy,