X-Men ’97 brought back a villain from the original animated series, and it’s a reminder that one movie redesign made the villains better.

The first episode of Marvel’s X-Men ’97 brings back a classic villain from the animated series, but it’s a reminder that Fox’s X-Men movies made the villains better with a small redesign. The sentinels are dangerous villains in the X-Men universe. Built by Bolivar Trask, these giant robots are incredibly destructive and were built specifically to hunt down mutants and destroy them. The sentinels arrive in the first episode of X-Men: The Animated Series, hunting Jubilee, who is eventually saved by the X-Men and later joins the team.

In X-Men ’97, the mutants fight a hoard of damaged sentinels, who reawaken to give the X-Men an exciting battle in the first episode. While the sentinels are intimidating due to their large size, strength, and quantity, they aren’t much of a threat to the team. Their return in X-Men ’97 is a refreshing snack of nostalgia berries, but it’s also a reminder that they are much better represented in the Fox universe.

The Sentinels Are More Intimidating In X-Men: Days Of Future Past

The sentinels made their cinematic debut in X-Men: Days of Future Past, and were given a small but significant change. After Mystique kills Boliver Trask in 1973, she is kidnapped by the government, and they infuse her DNA into the sentinels. With Mystique’s DNA, the sentinels can adapt to mutants while fighting them, in addition to their ability to hunt them down. Sentinels are extremely dangerous in this film, as shown in the first scene where several X-Men members are killed off as the sentinels hunt the last remaining mutants.

Days of Future Past made a smart decision with this change as it’s more believable that the sentinels could destroy all of mutant-kind. In The Animated Series, the sentinels are easily dispatched by the mutants, and the redesign by Fox made them more intimidating and frightening. All hope was lost for the mutants, which made Wolverine’s mission to stop Mystique even more dire.

The MCU Should Keep This Change If They Adapt The Sentinels

If the sentinels do appear in the MCU, Marvel should copy Fox’s redesign. The sentinels need to be more powerful than they are in X-Men ’97, especially if the Avengers could assist the X-Men in taking them down. The sentinels would have a more challenging time adapting to the Avengers, but it would make them more threatening since they could possess many of the X-Men’s abilities. It would be better to leave the Avengers out of the fight between X-Men and the sentinels, but that’s harder to do in a massive cinematic universe.