Back in the early 1990s, X-Men fans knew Cable was cool, but they didn’t know exactly why. (Besides that fact that he was a badass, battle-hardened, time-traveling super soldier, of course.) Turns out, neither did the creators of X-Men: The Animated Series.
“Back then, the only thing we knew about Cable was that he had a son named Tyler,” X-Men ’97 executive producer Larry Houston tells Polygon.
Houston also played a crucial role in X-Men: The Animated Series, directing all 76 episodes of its original ’90s run. He also serves as an executive producer on Marvel’s follow-up show, X-Men ’97, which puts the spotlight on Cable (aka, Nathan Summers) in its second season.
Nathan made his debut in a 1986 comic written by Chris Claremont as the infant child of Scott Summers/Cyclops and Jean Grey. It wasn’t until four years later that Cable showed up in The New Mutants #87 from writer Louise Simonson and artist/co-writer Rob Liefeld. Back then, nobody at Marvel knew Cable’s backstory, and it wasn’t until 1993 that he became Nathan Summers, transforming the anti-hero into X-Men royalty.
So when X-Men: The Animated Series debuted in 1992, the show couldn’t reveal what Cable’s true identity was because they didn’t know it either.
“We had no backstory,” Houston says. “So we had to dance around a lot of specifics because it didn’t exist back then.”
As a result, Cable didn’t get a ton of screentime or much character development. Instead, he would show up briefly to tip off the X-Men (and the audience) that something particularly intense was about to happen.
“We just used him briefly,” says Eric Lewald, one of the showrunners on the original Animated Series and an executive producer on ’97. “We didn’t really focus on him the way that people that love Cable are used to in the comic books. We used him to get the core team to react to certain problems, like Slave Island. He would pop in as a utilitarian character, like a really strong guest character, and then he’d leave.”
Lewald adds that since Marvel was still trying to figure out Cable’s backstory in the comics at the time, there wasn’t a lot of pressure to feature him heavily in the cartoon. “We were just using him a little on the side.”
A lot has changed in the X-Men universe since the 1990s. Marvel filled out Cable’s backstory in various comics, revealing his origin story as a powerful Mutant genetically engineered by the supervillain Sinister in an attempt to create a weapon strong enough to defeat the even more evil supervillain Apocalypse.
Don’t worry, nobody expects you to know any of this going into X-Men ’97 season 2, but you may know a lot more about Cable by the end of the season.
“It’s nice that the new team is taking all that mythology and putting it on the screen,” Houston says. “In the new season you’re going to see a lot more of why things happen and what happened to this character. And it’s going to lead up to one of the ultimate conclusions at the end of the season. You’ll find out a lot.”
X-Men ’97 season 2 premieres July 1 on Disney Plus.
