X-Men: The Animated Series was defined by its censors

polygon.com:

After much anticipation, X-Men ’97, a direct continuation to X-Men: The Animated Series from the 1990s, hits Disney Plus this week. But it’s not the first time Marvel has dusted off the old series and revived it for a nostalgic new millennium.

Marvel Comics itself took a swing with X-Men ’92, published in 2015 and technically a Secret Wars tie-in (but don’t worry about it). For ’92, writers Chad Bowers and Chris Sims and artist Scott Koblish had to figure out how to make a comic book story that felt like a beloved cartoon show closely based on ’90s comics, without just replicating ’90s comics themselves. X-Men: The Animated Series definitely had its own vibe — but blocky animation doesn’t translate to still images, and once you put character designs ripped right out of the comics back on the page, they just look… like they’re from comics. Rogue and Gambit’s outrageous accents? From the comics. Storm’s operatic diction? The comics.

X-Men: The Animated Series was beloved because it was a truly excellent introduction not just to the characters of the X-Men, but their most compelling comic book storylines — or at least as close as the folks behind the show could get given television standards of the time. And so Bowers and Sims and Koblish made an interesting choice: According to their X-Men ’92, the thing that makes a story feel like the ’92 animated series is… censorship.

In the realm of cartoon adaptations of long-running comics series, X-Men: The Animated Series has always set itself apart by how closely it mimicked the comics it was based on. You could almost call The Animated Series more of a translation than an adaptation, with the way it directly adapted even comics stories published during the show’s run.

Or at least, it adapted them as best as it could — given a very different set of content standards.

Shall we go down the list? No cussing, so everyone, even Wolverine, uses incredible minced oaths. Every bad guy must show signs of life after they’ve been