The X-Men are unusual in the sense that they're a 50-year-old property that has more or less remained popular for its entire run. Every generation gets to claim the X-Men as their own. This is due in large part to the intermittent ubiquity of the Marvel mutants on television. Since the 1960's, the X-Men have found their way onto as many as ten different animated TV series, ensuring that every generation since the baby boomers got to discover them prior to awakening to pop cultural consciousness in adolescence.

When Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's original Uncanny X-Men launched in the 1960's it was just in time for a glut of action cartoons that invaded the Saturday morning lineup. Hannah-Barbera had a hit on its hands with The Fantastic Four, a series that ran for three years between 1967 and 1970 then got revived in 1978. Other Marvel properties enjoyed similar success, though they weren't quite as hot as the Four. The X-Men, referred to as The Alliance for Peace (potentially for licensing reasons), showed up on The Marvel Superheroes TV series in 1965.

In the early 80's, the X-Men got the cameo treatment again on Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends. The only X-Men regular on that show was Iceman, though a wide variety of other mutants found their way onto the show. Marvel even tried to convince viewers to accept a full-on X-Men spinoff, but that didn't really materialize despite the comic achieving new heights in popularity in the decade.

1989 saw the production of Pryde of the X-Men, a straight-to-video pilot for an X-Men animated series. Anyone familiar with the animation style of latter-day G.I. Joe or The Transformers will recognize Pryde's look, but it was something of a blessing that the series never got picked up. Marvel took some inexplicable liberties with the franchise, giving Wolverine an Australian accent and generally disregarding the nature of some of the mutants' powers to create what ended up being a pretty poor translation of the comic. And anyway, the failure of Pryde paved the way for the significantly more faithful and all-around better X-Men animated series that debuted on Fox in 1992.

For my generation, Fox's X-Men was our introduction to Marvel's timeless mutant heroes. Over the course of five years and 76 episodes, the series paid homage to the expansive world of the comics while creating new stories to complement the franchise. Fox's X-Men should be taken less as an adaptation and more as a companion piece to the comics, condensing the atmosphere of three decades' worth of books into what may be the greatest action cartoon of the 1990's.

With the popularity of the 2000 film adaptation of X-Men by Bryan Singer, Marvel partnered with Warner Brothers to make X-Men Evolution, another animated series that essentially created another universe within the franchise. Evolution clearly aims at the tween and early teen markets, reimagining most of the famous mutants as high school kids. Purists probably hate the very idea, but these TV makeovers have done wonders for keeping the X-Men franchise alive for five decades. 12-year-olds don't care what the fans loved in 1985, they want something that appeals to them.

With new series like Wolverine and the X-Men and the experimental half-animated adaptation of Joss Whedon and John Cassaday's Astonishing X-Men, it's clear that Marvel's mutants have become an indelible part of the pop culture landscape. They're the new mythology, transforming over time to capture new audiences and spanning as many different media as possible. TV shows can't replace the comics, but that's never been the intention. If each new generation gets to fall in love with the X-Men on their own terms, then let Marvel expand the franchise in whatever way it deems fit.