While trying to find a clip of the Morlock's to defend myself from accusations of class bias -- rather than comic book geekery -- in the thread below, i came across this great clip from the old X-Men cartoon.
Man. I forgot how much I loved that show.
Update: In comments, Josh writes:
The X-Men concept works best in a limited medium like animation or film than in a comic-book series that must go on forever. An endless comic run means that the X-Men must always fail in their goals. And that undermines the basic concept on which the book is based. We're supposed to believe that Professor X's methods are superior to Magneto's, yet Professor X must never win any real or lasting gains. If he did, then it would undermine the comic's premises. So there must always be setbacks and there can never be any real improvements in the mutant situation. This makes the Professor look not like an idealist, but a misguided fool - and leads to the conclusion that maybe Magneto was right after all. I don't think that's what the writers were going for.
Now we're getting somewhere! I disagree that success for the X-Men is based on lasting gains of the sort that would resolve the Xavier/Magneto conflict. A flowering of enduring tolerance and harmony will never exist in a world where mutants walk around with world-ending powers locked behind the shaky bars of their willpower and sunny outlook. In that way, Magneto is almost obviously right in a predictive sense: In the long-run, there will be either a world run by mutants, or a world destroyed by mutants. Traditional humans are just too weak to remain competitive.
The success of the X-Men is entirely in delaying that world, in protecting the suboptimal status quo, rather than moving towards some delightfully multicultural future. Even if true respect and acceptance isn't in the offing, keeping the uneasy balance between a world in which humans are institutionally dominant but mutants are more powerful is probably better than one in which humans are either killed or in servitude. Xavier's ideology may speak of something far more pleasant than that uneasy balance, but in reality, it works to keep that compromise viable.
