Meanwhile, halfway across the country, young Kitty Pryde’s taxi ride comes to an end at the gates of a certain Westchester mansion. However, it's quite apparent that Ms. Pryde (Kath Soucie) isn’t so sure about the mysterious invitation to come here and is having second thoughts. But the taxi driver won’t wait around because, apparently, a bunch of "freaks" live in that mansion and roars off. Left alone, Kitty rereads the invite. Seems the sender somehow knew about her special power: the ability to walk through solid objects (-- a/k/a phasing.) Then, the front door opens and the wheel-chair bound Professor Charles Xavier welcomes the young visitor inside, where he starts to give her the tour of his School for Gifted Youngsters. When he tells Kitty that she is a mutant, like him, the girl confides her "gift" is a curse but Xavier thinks differently. Asked how he found out about said powers, Xavier reveals Cerebro -- a mutant detector/super computer. She then gets his sales pitch about the band of do-gooders he’s assembled: the X-Men, who right wrongs and fight for mutant tolerance and acceptance. 

Kitty isn’t sold outright, but the tour and sales pitch continues as her host shows her the famed Danger Room, where his students train and hone their gifts. (Think of the Holo-Deck from Star Trek.) Appearing to be set on Tomb Raider-mode, as the X-Men raid a Mayan Temple, they must avoid giant rock creatures, carnivorous plants and nasty deathtraps. And while Kitty watches from the control room, Professor X introduces his X-Men:

First is team-leader, Cyclops, who can shoot destructive beams from his eyes; and the Dazzler can transform sound into laser beams; Colossus, meanwhile, has great strength and can transform his body into living steel; and though he can stick to just about anything, Nightcrawler's true power is teleportation; Storm can ride the winds and command the weather; and lastly is Wolverine, our favorite psychotic Canucklehead with the claws. (Who for some inexplicable reason has an even thicker Australian accent than the last time we saw him. More on this in a second...) Xavier then reveals his own telepathic powers, which, frankly, kinda creeps the girl out until he assures Kitty that he doesn’t pry into people’s minds. Unfortunately, whatever ground her host might have been gaining is lost when Nightcrawler teleports into the control room because his demonic appearance -- complete with fangs, deformed digits, and forked tail, frightens Kitty. (Or maybe it's his German accent?) To top that off, when the other X-Men join them and Xavier introduces Kitty, all are cordial except Wolverine -- seems the nasty little cobber has got a snit in his didgeridoo about letting a kid on the team. Anyways...

Suddenly, an alarm klaxon goes off, signaling trouble of an evil mutant variety has just erupted somewhere. And so, the X-Men, minus Kitty and Professor X, roar off in the Blackbird to answer this distress call. But after they clear out, the X-Mansion comes under attack by Magneto and the monstrous Juggernaut. (Who we all remember from Marvel Comics 101 is Professor X’s half-brother.) As they bust their way inside, Kitty accidentally phases through the control board and shorts out the mansion's defense systems. His victory now assured, Magneto announces that he’s after Cerebro’s "power-circuit." Thus, Xavier gives the vital piece of equipment to Kitty and orders her to keep it away from Magneto at all costs. And while the Juggernaut brings the control room crashing down around Xavier, Magneto chases after Kitty, whose underdeveloped powers prove no match for him. Still, once caught, he offers the girl a place in his ranks but she refuses. Shocking her unconscious, then, the dastardly villain absconds with the coveted power-circuit.

Meanwhile, the rest of the X-Men find two more of Magneto’s Brotherhood of Evil Mutants -- the Blob, whose power should be obvious, and Pyro (-- another Aussie), who can control fire -- at an astrological observatory. In the ensuing dust-up, the X-Men save the astronomer and his family, but the Blob and Pyro escape with the information they needed on the Scorpio Comet ... Returning to find the X-Mansion rubbished, the strike team happily find Professor X and Kitty still alive, and, after comparing notes, their mentor reaches out telepathically to try and find out what Magneto’s intentions are and why he stole the power-circuit ... We cut to Asteroid-M, Magneto’s secret hideout, orbiting above the Earth, where the Brotherhood has assembled, including the White Queen, the Blob, Pyro, Juggernaut and the Toad -- a grotesque little gargoyle blessed with great agility. (X-Fans will also spot Lockheed the dragon fluttering around for some reason, who is the victim of much abuse from Magneto and Toad.) Plugging the pilfered power-circuit into a cosmic do-dad, Magneto then steps onto a platform and powers it up with his magnetism. Meanwhile, Xavier mentally "watches" as the device amplifies and focuses his rival's powers as he reaches out and snares the Scorpio Comet, which he sets on a crash course with the Earth!

Having seen enough, Xavier breaks contact and assembles his troops for an assault on Asteroid-M. Again, the mission will be far too dangerous and Kitty, despite all protests, must stay behind. Meantime, all the other X-Men mount up and launch the Blackbird for a deadly rendezvous with Magneto ... As they approach the asteroid, the X-Men suit up for a little extra-vehicular jump. Using their powers they manage to breach the Asteroid-M's defenses and get inside. Back inside the cockpit, Professor X watches their progress, and then calls for Kitty to come out of hiding, knowing the whole time she had stowed away. Only wanting to pitch in and help, Professor X admires her spunk and tells her to be careful as she follows the X-Men inside. Once she catches up, the team tries to make there way to the control room, but, one by one, their numbers are whittled down as they engage the evil mutants separately. (Colossus takes on the Juggernaut. Dazzler takes on Pyro etc...) Soon, all that’s left is Kitty and Nightcrawler for the main assault on Magneto and his machine.

Before he makes his escape, Magneto can't help but gloat over how his enemies may have won the battle but lost the war because Nightcrawler must continue the power flow or the comet will revert to its original crash course with Earth, meaning he’s as good as dead. But Kitty won’t leave Nightcrawler when Professor X orders her back to the Blackbird with the others. Assured he has a plan, she finally relents, but it’s going to require precise timing. When all the others make it back to the ship (-- with Lockheed in tow), Professor X forms a mental link with Nightcrawler that allows him to teleport off the asteroid in the knick of time before it and the comet goes kablooey ... Unfortunately, the distance was too far and Nightcrawler didn’t make it. And as he tumbles into the atmosphere and starts to burn up in reentry, the Blackbird races to his rescue but they appear to be too late.

A lot of people mistake Pryde of the X-Men as the pilot for Fox's highly successful X-Men cartoon that premiered around 1992 -- if memory serves right. That's understandable, but a misconception nonetheless. They're close. This was a pilot episode, but it was the pilot for the first and failed attempt at bringing Marvel's famed mutants to the small screen in 1989.

Now, there had been rumors and rumblings of an X-Men cartoon as early as 1984. On the heels of the highly successful Spider-man and His Amazing Friends animated series, the proposed series was set to spring from the team's two cameo appearances in that cartoon and would feature Cyclops, Sprite, Storm, Wolverine, Thunderbird, Colossus, Nightcrawler and Video Man. Yes, Video Man -- a character that made his debut on Spider-man's cartoon. I can't explain it, either, people; folks just had Space Invaders and Pac Man on the brain back then. That incarnation never came to fruition, but the popularity of the team only increased on the newsstands. Marvel Productions then tried again, when they commissioned Toei studios to scrap the 13th planned episode of RoboCop: the Animated Series and use the aborted funds for an X-Men pilot instead. Word spread quickly through the comic vine, and we eager fan boys and girls waited impatiently to see it. And waited. And then waited some more.

Seems things were getting a little dicey at Marvel Productions. And though the pilot was completed, New World Pictures, who owned Marvel at the time, was going through some massive financial woes, which eventually forced them to sell the company to the Andrews Group, who quickly pulled the plug on all of Marvels animated adventures, save for the highly popular Muppet Babies. Thus, the X-Men pilot kinda got lost in the shuffle. Rumor has it that it did actually air once, and only once, but I, along with almost everyone else, missed it, bringing its very existence into question until an eventual release on home video, when the entire country went completely X-Men bonkers in 1991.

There is also one other amazing coincidence concerning the release of the video: it directly coincided with the release of Kanomi's X-Men Arcade game that just happened to feature the same team line-up and they fought the same bad guys (-- plus a few others. I seem to recall the Wendigo and a guy who I think was The Living Monolith.) So was this finally released just to be a 22-minute long commercial for the video game? When you consider the slam bang plot -- these are the characters, here's what they can do, now watch them kick butt -- it might as well have been. But remember, this was a pilot trying to introduce everybody and get the ball rolling. 

However, fans at the time of the release might have been scratching their heads at the line-up of characters: Where was Rogue? And Gambit? And the Beast? I don't know where Rogue was. But when it was made, Gambit hadn't been invented yet and the Beast was trying to form The New Defenders with his old buddies, Iceman and the Angel -- that only I and about three other diehard Valkyrie fans were reading. My favorite X-Man has always been Cyclops, despite the efforts of every scribe since Chris Claremont to make him look like a complete tool to make Wolverine look cooler. (In the old days, Cyke was one of the few guys who could tell Wolverine to shut his cake hole and live to tell about it.) Now, I do like Wolverine but I liked him better when he was a complete mental case and always one wrong look away from disemboweling everyone in the room. And speaking of everyone's favorite covert-Canadian super-assassin, it's high time we got to the bottom of his asinine accent of origin. Ten years before the movie Fargo made talking like a Yooper in vogue der, eh, some genius exec decided to make the character an Australian instead of a hosehead from the Great White North. And, believe it or not, back in the 1980's, with the soaring popularity of The Road Warrior and Crocodile Dundee, there was a concentrated effort at Marvel to make Wolverine an Australian expatriate by way of Canada to cash in. However you feel about this phenomenon, the experiment only made it as far as these first view animated adventures before the plug from down under got pulled. 

To be fair, I didn't care for the constipated approach the voice actor used in the later Fox series, either.

As for the bad guys? They're an odd mish-mash of the old Brotherhood of Evil Mutants and the newer version. Magneto founded the original one with the hypnotic Mastermind, the Blob, Toad and the force field projecting Unus. Later, the shape-changing Mystique founded a newer version that included the Blob, Pyro, the earth moving Avalanche, the clairvoyant Destiny and Rogue, who eventually switched sides. The White Queen, meanwhile, was part of Sebastian Shaw's Hellfire Club, which consisted of several more evil mutants, who took their titles from chess pieces. Shaw was the Black King and Jean Grey, a/k/a Marvel Girl, was warped into being the Black Queen that led to the classic Dark Phoenix Saga in the comics. Honestly, I don't have a problem with her being included here. She's definitely better to look at then the homely Mastermind. But Juggernaut's inclusion is a puzzler -- he isn't even a mutant. He was transformed by the mystical ruby of Cytorak, and, when not trying to kill his step-brother, hangs around with Black Tom Cassidy, the Banshee's evil brother. That's me shrugging right now.

Tallying it all up, this aborted first attempt at an X-Men cartoon gets a lot of things right but gets some other things horribly wrong. It looks great but just fizzles, story wise as the characters comes off a little too one-dimensional. Kitty's too whiny, Wolverine gargles on some phlegm before spewing every line, and the villains were just lame. Given time, I think they could have hammered it out better, but, for that, they'd have to wait another four years.