Maxance Vincent
Season two of X-Men ‘97 deals with the aftermath of the first season, which sees the X-Men separated into three distinct timelines as they are confronted by Apocalypse in the past, present, and future. It builds upon the foundations of what was established in the first, while expanding the universe by introducing new characters and a more menacing foe for the mutants, as the season balances different genres and tonalities.
The musical palette of the season is also expanded, but never to the detriment of what composers The Newton Brothers established in the first. Speaking to Awards Radar on Zoom, Andy Grush explained that the composing duo “wanted to treat the last season like a musical character overall, and then carry that into this season and build upon that idea. We wanted to build on the Egypt, the future, and the present time of it, figuring out how to stack those layers, and then add the new themes, maintain the sound, but have the sound also grow and evolve, so that it felt like we were going on a journey musically.”
For Taylor Newton, “it helps that we have a sound for the show because we’re using that as the grounding mechanism to keep us within the space continuum of where things are at and how things are moving all over the place. We also wanted to focus on storylines in their moment, like the En Sabah Nur stuff. It was important to focus on who he is and the trials and tribulations of Xavier and Magneto as they try to save the future, and how that ends up. So it was about being specific in those moments, and there are so many of them in pretty much every episode. But the En Sabah Nur/Magneto/Xavier situation is like a good example of sort of that.”
In conceiving the theme for Apocalypse, Newton revealed that the two “wrote the Apocalypse motif early on, even before we saw animatics; we just based it off the script, and the note of the direction, which is something that’s unstoppable, incredibly dark and evil. You really know he’s Darth Vader; he’s the big baddie. It was really fun to play with the fact that he did mean well. He grew into this monster, and everybody tried to change his path. And could they? I think that was the fun because you grow to like his character early on, and then of course you know he just becomes this god-awful monster that’s incredibly dangerous to the X-Men.”
As they were exploring the character, Grush explains that “it was very clear to us that we needed to be very brash musically, like less is more sort of vibe, you know. I think that worked in our favor. And big props to the creative team. They gave us that steer of knowing what we wanted for Apocalypse. In the moment when he has that whole scene with Magneto and Xavier, that is a moment where we need to feel his terror, and that ended up being something huge and simple. It didn’t have a ton going on musically, but I think that was the point of it.”
Listen to the full interview below:
[Some of the quotes in this article were edited for length and clarity]
Comments
Loading…