A fan video has depicted what a retro-casted 1980s X-Men movie would have looked like with 24 stars of the time cast in iconic mutant roles.

Split image of Kurt Russell as Ego in front of Wolverine from Marvel comics

A fan art collection has emerged depicting what 24 X-Men would have looked like if they were cast in a pre-MCU 80s production. While X-Men ’97 is Marvel’s first X-Men-focused production since the studio reacquired the rights, mutants have been at the forefront of the MCU zeitgeist for quite some time. The sheer quality of the animated series has hinted at how the future of the X-Men is in safe hands with Marvel in its upcoming MCU releases, reinvigorating enthusiasm for the iconic team after 2000’s X-Men helped to spark the popularity of the modern comic book movie genre.

While fan casts ramp up as the MCU’s X-Men approach, creator stryder HD has decided to look back at an alternate history and reimagine what the X-Men could have looked like in live-action in the 1980s in a video posted to YouTube. Among the 24 X-Men characters depicted are iterations of Magneto and Professor X that look decidedly younger than the post-millennium iterations that Ian McKellan and Patrick Stewart made so iconic. These versions of the characters offer a hint as to just how different the team could’ve been had the Fox X-Men timeline seen its first release decades prior.

How The X-Men Movie Would’ve Been Different If It Was Made In The 80s

The Actors Playing Professor X And Magneto Wouldn’t Be The Only Difference

Professor X in front of a window in X-Men trilogy

Where X-Men: First Class and its sequels capably depicted a much younger version of the mutants that the original X-Men trilogy popularized, an X-Men movie made in the ’80s would likely do the same for Magneto and Professor X. Interestingly, however, not all of the characters shown in the fan video above could have appeared in the first place. This includes Gambit, Cable, and Deadpool, who all made their Marvel Comics debuts in 1990. Other characters like Jubilee, Pyro, and Rogue were introduced in the 1980s, meaning a large chunk of the cast would have only appeared in a late-1980s production.

Depending on when the movie would have been released, Jean Grey was also dead in Marvel Comics canon in the ’80s, though a movie might have retconned this.

It’s also clear that a 1980s X-Men movie would not have been so rife with CGI as modern-day iterations. This may have hampered how certain mutants’ powers were depicted, though movies like Star Wars, which was released in the 1970s, help to illustrate how things like Cyclops’ optic blasts could have been handled. Meanwhile, casting Sylvester Stallone in the role of genius scientist, Hank McCoy, may be questionable, but probably isn’t too far off the mark of what could have been considering his star power at the time.

The storylines, meanwhile, might have ironically looked identical to those depicted in Fox’s X-Men franchise, as the comic book runs on which the Dark Phoenix and Days of Future Past plots were based both debuted in the 1980s. A scrapped James Cameron-led X-Men movie also proves that Wolverine would have also remained a central figure. Given that Angela Bassett was also on the cards to play Storm in that same movie, the fan video certainly has some on the mark ideas about what could have been.