Today starts a tradition of fan-focused posts once a week. Testimonials — like that of Jenee Darden back in July — will be popular. We’ll start with a special contribution by arguably the biggest fan working on the series, producer/director Larry Houston. Mark Edens and I and the other writers who contributed to the challenging adaptation of The Phoenix Saga, from a dozen excellent comics to to a 105-minute TV story, are proud of our written work. But in this instance, producer Houston let his fan-love of the Marvel universe shine through above and beyond our storytelling. As the Earth shakes from a galactic threat, superheroes around the globe rush to help out. Usually Marvel wouldn’t let us use other major characters (they’ve learned since the value of cross-overs). So for Larry to show some of his fan-favorites, he had to sneak many of them in. Please see his recent note to me about Spider-Man’s only appearance in X-MEN:TAS.
The Spider-Man wrist cameo was in The Phoenix Saga part 5, “Child of Light.” That’s all I could sneak by. Back in season one, a full model sheet of Spidey was disallowed by Marvel, even though he was on the same Fox network. This time, I made sure to not label it Spider-Man’s wrist when I submitted it for approvals. It was called just a “miscellaneous arm,” to the best of my memory. And it was b/w, not color, too. Everything I did back then (and you did) to add to the experience of watching the X-Men could never happen today. Too many cooks in the kitchen. LH
