This has been, indirectly, the year of Gambit. The card-throwing mutant provided a beating heart to the animated series X-Men ‘97, available with your Disney+ subscription. And then, to the surprise of most, Gambit appeared in live action during a pivotal moment in Deadpool and Wolverine, giving actor Channing Tatum a moment for which he’d dreamed for at least a decade. Gambit always has been popular. I’m not sure he’s ever been this ubiquitous.
A huge chunk of that has to be owed to the way that the creators of X-Men 97 treated the Cajun mutant. Gambit can be a tricky character, working very well on the page but potentially struggling to convince an audience when it’s time to see his particular set of skills in action. Just ask Taylor Kitsch, who tried to play the mutant in the ill-fated X-Men: Origins - Wolverine.
X-Men 97 nailed it. The creative team understood how Gambit could be mischievous, and chivalrous. He could be humorous, and also heroic. And all of that came to a head when Gambit sacrificed himself, in an act that left the voice talent devastated, at the end of Episode 5, titled “Remember It.” When I got the chance to speak with X-Men 97 director Emi/Emmett Yonemura, who directed that episode, I asked how many tries they took at the line reading that gave the episode its title, as the cocky delivery perfected the Gambit persona. And Yonemura credited vocal talent A.J. LoCascio as they explained to CinemaBlend:
That scene, especially the last scene as well, went through different versions. We boarded it a few different times to find the right moment. We had big reads of, like, ‘Remember it!’ Like he's (screaming) it. But we're just like, at the end of the day, Gambit is the cool guy in the room. He's always going to play suave. He's going to play this as cool as possible, even when he's dying. It just felt like him doing that smug little smile and just saying, ‘Remember it’ was just… that's Gambit! That just, to us, was Gambit in a nutshell. And we all agreed. Everybody in the room was like, ‘Yeah, that's the Cajun right there.’
It’s one of the more satisfying moments in the first season of X-Men 97, sad as it is. And we expect plenty more of these moments to emerge out of the eventual Season 2 of X-Men 97, which had some incredible time-travel teases at the end of Season 1. If you are interested, we went ahead and ranked all the X-Men 97 episodes, and you will want to click that to see where “Remember It” fell. Also, if you want to see even more Gambit, join the fight for future stories with Channing Tatum in the lead, and potentially see him in an Avengers movie, or a massive team up like Avengers: Secret Wars.
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