The Mutant Ages

Omega Red and Wolverine have a lot of unresolved sexual tension in this episode, which amounts to a series of fight scenes in which nothing ever gets resolved between them. Half of those fight scenes are in flashback with a voiceover from a nameless SHIELD agent identifying who Omega Red is, and what his powers are. See if you can guess whether Maddy and Ryan enjoyed this episode! Next week's epis...

The Wolverine anime might be getting worse with each passing episode, but onward we go ... or perhaps upward, since most of this episode takes place on a rooftop. Wolverine (and his new pal Yukio) meets and fights a brand-new character named Kikyo, who is a beautiful bishonen hired by Shingen as an assassin. That's the first half of the episode; the second half is a failed drug drop that Logan and...

The Wolverine anime is still not good, but we're doing our best to goof on it in an entertaining way. This week, that means lots of references to Initial D music, because there is a crappy car chase between Asano and Hideki. Meanwhile, Logan spends most of this episode being passed out and getting saved by Yukio. We're really starting to wonder what this anime is about. Like, really. What is going...

The pilot episode of the Wolverine anime may be called "Mariko," but that doesn't mean she's going to have any agency or character development on this show. Luckily, her sexist plotline goes down a bit easier this time, because the show is so freakin' goofy. Logan's character is a cross between Gambit and Dante from Devil May Cry; we are pretty sure he doesn't know what sex is. Also, all of the di...

Maddy, Ryan, and Todd struggle through the second half of Dark Phoenix (2019), which abandons all of the decent ideas set up in the first half of the movie. Forget about Jean's dad, it's all about the D'Bari now ... and also Magneto, who doesn't need to be in this movie, despite that Michael Fassbender provides a great performance. We conclude our revisiting of this movie's failures by asking Simo...

Maddy, Ryan, and Todd dive in to the first half of Dark Phoenix (2019), which is significantly better than the second half of the movie. Despite being the lowest-rated X-Men film in the 20th Century Fox version of the franchise, Dark Phoenix has some good scenes and strong portrayals of Jean, Scott, and Xavier. When the movie sticks with the character drama unfolding between these three characters...

At long last, here's the comic book segment from last week's Listener Mail for April 2023. It's a good one; Ryan fights against Logan's League of Evil Exes (including some exes who are mostly just cute and not that evil). Wolverine can't remember why any of them are there, or that there's a Book of Destiny between himself and Sabretooth that dictates the terms of these fights. Also, Mr. Sinister f...

Maddy and Ryan open the listener mailbag once more to respond to queries about the mutant metaphor as it relates to mental illness, which aspects of airline travel would piss off Wolverine the most, which mutants Mr. Sinister should combine into super-powered chimeras, and so much more. Also, Maddy divided this listener mail into two episodes because Ryan got sick and she didn't want our listeners...

Todd reunites with Maddy and Ryan for the season finale of the X-Men anime, during which there's not very much plot, but we still manage to mess things up by describing it all out of order. You won't be confused, though, because again, there isn't much plot. The ghosts of Takeo and Jean Grey bestow their blessings upon all of the X-Men, and Dr. Sasaki doesn't die ... or does she??? We have some th...

The X-Men anime is closing in on its series finale, and in this penultimate episode, Takeo goes full kaiju and takes revenge on Mastermind (but not on his mother, to our disappointment). Before Mastermind gets his comeuppance, he puts on the Dark Phoenix cosplay one more time and tricks Scott into believing he's the cause of mutantkind's destruction. The brainwashing of Scott works weirdly well, u...

Who's the worse villain: Mastermind, or Dr. Yui Sasaki? Maddy and Ryan have to keep re-evaluating that question every week, because the revelations about the extent of their evil have us shocked (and the X-Men, too). Apparently, Dr. Sasaki worked with the U-Men (!!!) in order to develop her mutant "cure," and she was doing it all for her poor son Takeo, who's been living in a glass tube in the bas...

We aren't sure how Mastermind would describe himself (bisexual? gay? queer?) but after this week's episode, we're certain he's somewhere on the rainbow spectrum. That's not much of a "revelation" (or even a surprise), but this queer-coded super-villain does have plenty to reveal to Emma Frost in this episode, and it's not just fun facts about how much he loves her diamond stilettos. Meanwhile, Bea...

Despite the repeated pleas from the X-Men, and the fact that it's very obvious something horrible is going on at the Sasaki Institute, Dr. Yui Sasaki adamantly refuses to tell anybody what's going on. It's also becoming very obvious that she's involved with whatever it is, because in this episode of the X-Men anime, two of her lab assistants turn into terrifying monsters. The X-Men manage to take...

Todd rejoins Maddy and Ryan this week as the X-Men anime kicks its plot into high gear. Tons of new characters show up, and we finally learn the identity of the strange little boy that Professor Xavier has been seeing in his mind palace/nightmare realm. It's Takeo, the son of the mysterious and suspicious Yui Sasaki ... and his dad is Xavier! In other words, Dr. Sasaki is basically a rewrite of Mo...

The X-Men anime finally gives us a big splashy fight scene for Sublime in which he shows off all of the data he's collected on the X-Men across multiple episodes... just in time for the X-Men to kill him. But is he really dead? And what's up with Yui Sasaki, the mysterious redhead who shows up at the very end of this week's episode? Maddy and Ryan are having a lot of fun with this show, because it...

The X-Men anime has some truly stellar writing for Scott Summers, which is to say, he is a massive dick in this episode and it's totally in-character. Instead of engaging with his anger towards Emma Frost (as well as his attraction towards her), Scott decides to take it out on poor little Hisako in the Danger Room. Meanwhile, Hisako comes to terms with her mutant identity after a pep talk from Oro...

Emma Frost discovers her diamond powers as a secondary mutation at the outset of the fourth episode of the X-Men anime, and it causes quite a stir. Beast convinces Emma that she must return with him to the Xavier Institute so that he can run tests on her, and Hisako comes along, after getting permission from her parents. Wolverine then fights a mutant on top of the Blackbird, and we have no idea w...

Maddy and Ryan invite Todd Harper back onto the show for the introduction of Emma Frost on the X-Men anime. We talk about her outfit, her boobs, the boob window on her outfit, and so much more (as it relates to Emma's boobs). Scott and Logan continue their sexual tension, and Scott tries to convince everybody else that Emma can't be trusted. This works fairly well until Hisako wakes up and makes i...

After the first episode of the X-Men anime, Maddy and Ryan didn't think they'd be doing much political analysis of what mutants represent in this world, but the second episode introduces anti-mutant bigotry once again. The show's main villains are the U-Men, a group of mutant-hating cyborgs who have been kidnapping mutant kids from a small town in Northern Japan. The X-Men head overseas to investi...

Ryan and Maddy start their tour through the Marvel Anime series, beginning with X-Men. The pilot episode starts right in the middle of the action, with Jean Grey having just transformed into the Dark Phoenix (no thanks to the Hellfire Club's influence). She explodes into fire and seems to be lost forever, after which Scott spends the next year of his life living in a junkyard refusing to bathe. Th...

Maddy, Ryan, and Todd manage to finish their review of X-Men Apocalypse (2016), and they're all the worse for wear. What even happens in the second half of this movie? An extensive Weapon X section in which Wolverine runs around murdering people and running into the child version of Jean Grey, who might fall in love with him, except she's busy taking secret phone calls from Xavier, who's trying to...

Finally, we've reached the final X-Men movie directed by Bryan Singer, although the fact that we have Dark Phoenix (2019) does not comfort us very much. Maddy, Ryan, and Todd collectively lose their minds over the sheer volume of characters in this movie, and the number of scenes that don't matter at all to the plot but still didn't get cut out of the movie. This is only the first half of our jour...

Maddy and Ryan dig through the listener mailbag and answer questions about which X-Men have the best butts, which of them have a podcast (and what's it about?), how Wolverine and the X-Men sounded in Scottish Gaelic, one listener's experiences with something similar to Warren's in "Guardian Angel," and so much more. Next week's episode: X-Men: Apocalypse (2016), Part 1 of 2 Visit our STORE: teespr...

Maddy, Ryan, Todd, Katie, and Ry T sit down together for a night of Christmas-themed X-Men comics, in which it's revealed that Santa Claus is a mutant. We put on our voice actor hats and do our best to emulate accents from around the world. Our apologies to listeners from the UK, Italy, Russia, and all the other European countries' accents that we butchered in our holiday merriment. We also do our...

Maddy and Ryan unpack everything they thought about Wolverine and the X-Men, from their favorite episodes to least favorite, as well as the extensive rewrites they have in mind for the show. (Maddy also offers a skip list, which includes almost every episode... sorry.) Despite it all, we still want to see this show get a second season. It would be a lot better without all the 20th Century Fox bagg...