The Blue and Gold era is probably one of the most well-known periods in X-history.
Both teams (and especially Blue) are often cited among fan favorite listings and they’re certainly beyond iconic.
Yet I’m curious if things like X-men TAS helped make this period seem bigger than it actually was.
In my X-men read-through (I’ve spent some years reading or re-reading basically every X-book since the Roy Thomas days), I was surprised to realise how little the Blue/Gold division actually lasted.
Contrary to my previous perception, both teams were only consistently around for very few issues (like 13 in UXM’s case). By the time crossovers like X-Cutioner’s Song arrived (only a year later), UXM and XM started becoming almost interchangeable, with characters coming and going between books all the time and no discernible line-ups. The follow-up to that first crossover had the Gold book heavily focusing on blue members Jubilee and Rogue, for example. The line between books only became more and more blurred, especially when Lobdell took over both books. By the mid 90’s, there was no such thing as a Blue/Gold division at all.
So do you think that the Blue/Gold teams famous because of their impact upon launch (and their effect on TAS), moreso than each teams’s actual history as separate units?