Originally Posted by
yogaflame
Yeah, the babies are too young to remember the early 90's. Comicdom was dominated by the X-Men(had been for a decade by then), and then it spilled out into the mainstream hard with TAS. It was network tv, not a paid subscription streaming service. That was a far bigger audience(I've seen numbers as high as 23 million households, which would be nearly 6x of '97's best numbers). Nevermind all the merch, and toys, and games, and posters, and cards. 3 episodes of '97 have been great, and definitely brought X-Men back into the general conversation, but that in no way has come close to X-Men at their peak.
Even the 2000s can't compare, because while the Foxmen films did okay, they were not a huge cultural revolution like The Matrix was(in fact the black leathers was riding off of that franchise's look), nor even matched the performance of something like Raimi's Spider-Man. Same goes for Morrison's run vs. Claremont. Claremont was king for over a decade, the hottest books the genre had ever seen. 1991's #1 is STILL #1 all these years later in sales. Morrison's New X-Men was certainly a curiosity and sold well for the time, but not like the golden era days of Claremont. And TAS's ratings were far more impactful than Evolution's. So, while younger fans might relish the early 2000's, in context, they still weren't as powerful as the early 90's.
I think we are just at the beginning of X-Men reemerging. If the rest of '97 continues to be as good or even better than the first few episodes, then we are in for a treat, but it will take more than a niche animation show on Disney+ to match the '90's X-mania. The ratings on '97 have to reach a wider audience first. Then the MCU has to execute a very impressive, very successful live action X-Men project after Deadpool/Wolverine, which also has to be well executed and super successful financially and in terms of audience reception. And we need some amazing next generation X-Men video games(not just Wolverine ones). So, realistically, we're still a good 5-10 years off from an era that could eclipse the '90s. And that's assuming Hollywood and the wider mechanisms of this world aren't severely disrupted during that time.... which is assuming a lot these days.