“Wolverine and the X-men” marks Marvel’s fourth try at creating a cartoon based off of everyone’s favorite mutants, the X-men. The show is left with an extremely daunting task: make hard core fans of the previous cartoons happy and at the same time introduce the X-men to a new fresh-faced generation of cereal eating kids who wake up early on Saturday mornings. Does it complete this task? Well to be honest, it doesn’t.

Where “Wolverine and the X-men” fails is in its job is that it doesn’t to cater to new fans that are interested in the X-men (or at least a shiny new cartoon to watch). The first episode never explains who the X-men are, what a mutant is or why this Prof. X character is so important to everybody. If kids haven’t seen the movies before watching the show then they will be instantly lost and might not have the patience to stick around for more episodes to figure out what’s happening. This episode serves more as a sequel to the movies than a new beginning for the X-men, except that the characters that died in the 3rd movie are alive and well. Kids may get excited when Wolverine finally puts on his costume and cuts through some bad guys but the problem is that they are never told who Wolverine really is. At least the animation was clearly designed for the new audience, the X-men wear bright spandex and character designs are heavily anime-influenced (imagine a less-exaggerated Humberto Ramos comic).