The Animated Series showrunner explains why Apocalypse doesn’t work in live-action movies

“Apocalypse is like the ultimate Mutant bad guy,” Larry Houston.

If anyone on Earth is qualified to make this claim, it’s probably Houston, who directed all 76 episodes of the original X-Men: The Animated Series and serves as executive producer of Marvel’s follow-up show, X-Men ’97.

“When we did Apocalypse in 1992, we wanted to establish that this guy is so powerful and so unbeatable that the only way you defeat him is to out-think him,” Houston says. “Because he had too many superpowers back then.”

Ahead of X-Men ’97 season 2, which features Apocalypse as its primary villain, Polygon caught up with Houston and Eric Lewald (one of the Animated Series showrunners and an EP on ’97) to discuss the return of the infamous “first Mutant,” why he’s the perfect antagonist for season 2, and why it’s so hard to get Apocalypse right in live-action.

In the Marvel universe, Apocalypse is the first-ever Mutant, born into slavery as En Sabah Nur in Ancient Egypt. His power is nothing short of complete control over his own body at an atomic level, giving him the ability to shapeshift, regenerate, and grow to a massive size. He also has super strength and is essentially immortal. Combine that with futuristic technology procured from an abandoned Celestial spaceship and you have a genocidal villain driven mad by his own unlimited power on a quest to reshape the world in his own image.

Somewhat surprisingly, this all makes Apocalypse the perfect supervillain for a kids’ cartoon, especially back in the ’90s, when much of his backstory had yet to be revealed.

“He’s so great in animation because you can give the scale,” Lewald says. “We always wanted to make him seem so much larger than life, so much different from all the other Mutants that were running around in the show.”

That sense of scale is also, arguably, why Hollywood’s attempt to bring Apocalypse into the live-action X-Men cinematic universe fell short.

“It’s a challenge in live-action because you have a lot of scenes with like a 5-foot-10-inch guy, you know, but it’s easy in animation to draw someone 100 feet tall,” Lewald says.

However, the defining trait that made Apocalypse the ideal enemy for X-Men ’97 season 2 wasn’t his massive size, it was his immortality, which allows the show’s writers to tell a story sprawled across the Marvel timeline. A lot of Apocalypse stories in the comics and the original Animated Series focus on attempts to change the present to avoid an apocalyptic future. And this one is no exception.

“He’s such a great character for season 2 with all the time-shifting,” Lewald says. “Everybody else is mortal. Everybody else lives to a hundred and dies, but it makes sense that Apocalypse is everywhere, and that made him the perfect adversary for a show that starts out with the X-Men in three different time periods.”

For Houston, the most exciting thing about returning to Apocalypse after all these years is the opportunity to tell a more complex story about the character using the world he established with the original Animated Series.

“There’s been 26 years of backstory that didn’t exist when I did my show,” Houston says. “So now the new team has been able to take that and cultivate it, and it’s going to be on the screen. All of that backstory, if you know comic books, it will all be there.”

X-Men ’97 season 2 premieres July 1 on Disney Plus