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The bizarre reason Marvel shot down the idea of Jean Grey being pregnant in the original '90s X-Men cartoon
The original X-Men: The Animated Series writers planned on making Cyclops and Jean Grey parents, until Marvel rejected the pitch
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The '90s X-Men cartoon took the characters to some interesting places. However, they never got a chance to have Scott Summers and Jean Grey experience parenthood. As Eric Lewald and the other writers were pitching the show’s second season, they toyed with the idea of opening the season with Jean already pregnant.
“Wouldn’t it be cool if Jean was seven months pregnant with a double mutant baby? Wouldn’t that be a cool idea,” Eric Lewald says during a Marvel Television panel at New York Comic Con.
Marvel didn’t think the idea was cool.
“And so, we started writing it up, and we got this note from Marvel saying, 'Cool idea, but we’re working on something kind of like that ourselves. Could you kind of set that aside?''.”
It’s unclear what storyline this would be, in Marvel's X-Men comics Scott and Jean had already sent baby Christopher into the future at that point, and Cable had already been revealed as an older version of that time-displaced child. Either way, Lewald had a chance to reuse that story beat when he came back for X-Men ’97.
“And 30 years later, what we wanted for season two was the perfect way to start X-Men ’97.”
X-Men ’97 season two premieres summer 2026.
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