The Head Of Fox Kids Put Her Career On The Line To Make X-Men: The Animated Series

30 years after its release, "X-Men: The Animated Series" remains not only the best portrayal of its titular super team, but one of the best superhero cartoons ever made and one of the all-time greatest Marvel productions, period. It perfectly captured the source material and the characters, defining them for a whole new generation. It also featured a terrific blend of faithfully adapting comics storylines and putting new spins on them, while creating standalone episodes that build an overarching story at a time when that level of serialization was still somewhat rare.

Getting the show made was no easy task. Before "X-Men: The Animated Series" proved to be a big enough hit that it helped expedite the development of the 2000 "X-Men" live-action film, and long before it got a Disney+ revival show that was nominated for an Emmy, the producers and creators of the original series had to resort to all kinds of tricks to get the show greenlit. This included hoodwinking the studio into letting the cartoon use Jim Lee's 1992 character designs for the show.

But the animated series wouldn't have been possible without one executive who, in a sea of executives worth getting parodied by Seth Rogen in "The Studio," fought so hard to get this project made that she put her whole career on the line. I'm talking about the former President and CEO of Marvel Productions, and the former head of Fox Kids, Margaret Loesch.

As showrunner Eric Lewald told Marvel for a making-of feature, Loesch had tried and failed to get an "X-Men" show made for a decade, with studios believing the show to be too weird or "inside-comic-bookie." When faced with skepticism from her bosses at Fox, Loesch decided to bet her job on the success of the animated series' first season.

As Lewald puts it, Loesch's boss didn't understand X-Men and considered it too dark for kids. But seeing Loesch believed in the project, he asked if she believed in it "'to the point where if this doesn't work the first season, you're done? I fire you?' She said, 'Absolutely.'"

Loesch was also responsible for many big pop culture shows of the '80s and '90s, including "Goosebumps," "Batman," "Muppet Babies," "Fraggle Rock," "Transformers," and the long-running phenomenon "Power Rangers." Though Haim Saban ended up being the one to produce that latter show, it was Loesch who first believed in the project when she tried to bring the "Super Sentai" franchise to the U.S. with Stan Lee and Toei while working for Marvel back in the '80s. After she began working for Fox Kids, Saban presented her the same "Super Sentai" footage Lee once showed her, and she decided to bet on the project and get "Power Rangers" greenlit.

Again, it wasn't easy to convince those further up the chain of command. As Loesch once said in an interview with the Television Academy, the president of the Fox network thought the idea for "Power Rangers" was terrible and only allowed her to greenlight the show if a pilot performed well at a test screening. When she screened 17 minutes of footage, they were a massive hit with kids — not only with boys, but with girls, which was when Loesch realized she had a hit on her hands.

"Part of my quest is to prove that little girls liked action/adventure as much as boys," Loesch said. "Girls don't necessarily buy action figures, as boys do. They don't play like boys. But from a story perspective, girls like action, suspense, mysteries and special effects."