SPOILER ALERT: This article details X-Men ’97 Season 1, Episode 5, “Remember it!”
Beau DeMayo breaks his silence after exiting X-Men ’97. The creator of the Disney+ animated series took to social media to discuss Episode 5, “Remember it!” and give context to the shocking episode.
“Lotta questions and so I’ll momentarily break silence to answer,” he shared in a lengthy post shared on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. “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.”
He continued, “The world was a seemingly safer place for us, where a character like Storm would comment on how skin-based racism was ‘quaint’ in One Man’s Worth [the season 4 premiere of the OG series]. 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.”
DeMayo said that everyone’s perceptions of the world changed following the attacks on September 11, 2001.
“Things weren’t so safe anymore,” he said. “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.”
The writer and creator of X-Men ’97 said he wanted the episode to reflect on similar attacks in American history.
“Yes, it looked like Gambit’s story was going a specific direction,” he said. “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.”
He continued, “Like many of us who grew up on the OG cartoon, the X-Men have now 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.”
Episode 5 of X-Men ’97 has many casualties, including Gambit and Magneto. DeMayo was announced to have exited the Marvel/Disney+ animated series before its premiere in March.