No need for very much explanation here. This video is the openings (and eyecatches) from the Japanese dub of the 90’s X-Men cartoon. The songs are “Rising” and “Dakishimetai Dare Yori Mo” by Ambience.
The animation here is so much better than in the actual episodes.
How did Cable get so prominent in the first opening? He was only in like three episodes. And the Brood were in less than that.
So I’ve decided to do a mini-series of posts this month about Japanese takes on familiar non-Japanese characters. I’ll start with what’s probably the one I have the most to say about: Spider-Man.
Basically, what happened was that there was a deal between Marvel and Toei that let each use the other’s characters in any way they wanted. Neither company actually did as much with this as you’d think; Marvel used two Toei anime robots (Combattler V and Danguard Ace) in their Shogun Warriors comic, Toei made an animated movie based on The Tomb of Dracula (one of Marvel’s horror comics), and then there was this tokusatsu version of Spider-Man, and one other thing.
They definitely went for the “in any way they wanted” part; this Spider-Man is a different character with a different origin involving aliens, who only wears the same costume and has similar powers. (And first idea they had would have been even more different; Spider-Man was almost the sidekick of a time-traveling Yamato Takeru!)
I just read the hardcover book of Marvel’s Civil War event.
I said I was going to show that most things that had crossovers at all could all be connected to each other, so here we go.
I’ve been writing a series of posts about crossovers, and I’m almost ready to bring it all together, but first, one more point about multiverses.
It makes sense to me that if a franchise has a multiverse, then any crossover with any part of it establishes being able to crossover with any part in a multiverse sense. Here’s a (certainly incomplete) list of franchises whose multiple continuities are established to be a connected multiverse and/or split timeline. (Notably, most “new universe” crossovers actually include at least one of these, making them effectively count the same as multiverse crossovers.)
Comic books obviously provide an easy example of large shared universes; I don’t even need to explain how clearly established it is that Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, Captain America, Iron Man, the X-Men, and many others exist in the same universe. But let’s see what else Marvel’s characters have interacted with, besides each other, still without crossing universes.
The main Marvel universe contains quite a few characters that Marvel doesn’t have the rights to anymore, though I’m not familiar enough with Marvel’s Godzilla or Conan comics to say whether this counts as a ”probably one way canon” situation or as Marvel just having their own versions of those characters. There’s also Rom the Space Knight (where the comic is the only reason anyone cares about the character) and Shogun Warriors (where Marvels’s version of the robots should be considered unrelated lookalikes to their anime counterparts).
Then there was Archie Meets the Punisher.
Television crossovers are the most analyzed, but other media have a tendency to take things even farther.
Using the broadest definition of crossover (and still excluding fanfic, obviously), there are surprisingly few separate groups of things that are in crossovers within small groups; depending on your definitions, everything that has a crossover at all can be connected to nearly every other crossover.
Other media can be more complicated about it than television tends to be, so before getting into comic books and video games let’s divide crossovers into categories:
On the Edge of Enlightenment 