The Best '90s Superhero Cartoons Didn't Just Entertain You. They Built Everything You're Watching Now.
By Jimigrimm
You heard the guitar riff and you were locked in.
Didn’t matter if you had homework. Didn’t matter if your mom was telling you to come outside. The second that X-Men theme kicked in on a Saturday morning, you were gone. You were on the couch, volume up, cereal in hand, and for the next 30 minutes nothing else in the world existed. And on weekday afternoons, when you got home from school and Fox Kids came on at 4:30, Batman: The Animated Series owned that time slot the same way. You dropped your backpack, turned on the TV, and disappeared into Gotham until somebody physically made you stop watching.
The ’90s didn’t just give us superhero cartoons. It gave us the shows that made us care about these characters in the first place. Before we ever set foot in a movie theater to watch an Avengers film, we were already fans. The cartoons made us fans. And the wild part is, those shows were so good that a lot of us still haven’t found anything that tops how they made us feel.
Batman: The Animated Series Started It and Nothing Has Topped It
Let’s just get this out of the way. Batman: The Animated Series (1992) might be the greatest animated show ever made. Not greatest superhero show. Greatest show. And if you watched it as a kid, you already know why.
It didn’t look like anything else on TV. Gotham was dark and moody and felt like it existed in its own universe. Kevin Conroy’s voice WAS Batman. Not one of the Batmans. THE Batman. Mark Hamill’s Joker was terrifying and hilarious at the same time, and nobody has come close to touching that performance in 30 years of trying. Mr. Freeze made you cry. An animated villain on a kids’ show made you actually sit there and feel sad for the bad guy. That had never happened before.
And Harley Quinn? She didn’t exist before this show. Think about that. One of the most popular characters in all of comics, with her own movies, her own animated series, her own everything, was invented for a Saturday morning cartoon. Batman: TAS didn’t just adapt the comics. It gave the comics new characters that are still generating billions of dollars today.
Then the show kept going. Superman: The Animated Series (1996) came from the same creative team and finally made Superman feel cool again. Tim Daly’s Clark Kent had warmth, sincerity, and the Darkseid episodes went so hard they’re still some of the best Superman stories in any format. Batman Beyond (1999) put a teenager in the cowl, set it in a cyberpunk future, and somehow made you care about a brand new Batman just as much as Bruce Wayne. Kevin Conroy voicing cranky old Bruce mentoring Will Friedle’s Terry McGinnis? That dynamic was so good fans have been begging for a revival for over 20 years. Justice League and Justice League Unlimited took everything Batman: TAS built and turned it into a full-blown animated universe that fans still argue is the best DC adaptation ever made. Live action included.
One show. Batman: The Animated Series started one show in 1992, and by the time the DC Animated Universe wrapped with Justice League Unlimited, it had produced arguably the greatest run of superhero storytelling in any medium. That’s not nostalgia talking. That’s just what happened.
X-Men and Spider-Man Made Marvel Matter Outside of Comic Shops
If Batman: TAS was the gold standard, X-Men: The Animated Series (1992) was the earthquake.
Margaret Loesch, the head of Fox Kids, had to bet her entire career to get it on the air. The network thought comic books were too confusing for kids. She told them if X-Men flopped, they could fire her. It didn’t flop. It went from premiere to phenomenon overnight and turned Fox Kids into the number one kids’ block on television.
And the show didn’t play it safe. It adapted Days of Future Past. The Dark Phoenix Saga. The Sentinels hunting mutants through the streets. These were heavy, emotional, serialized stories about prejudice and persecution, and they trusted kids to keep up. Before this show, Wolverine was a comic book character. After this show, Wolverine was a household name who sold action figures, lunch boxes, and eventually movie tickets. Storm. Rogue. Gambit. Jubilee. Professor X. Magneto. The cartoon made all of them famous. And when X-Men ’97 hit Disney+ and became one of the most acclaimed animated shows of the year, it proved that the audience this show created never went anywhere. They were just waiting for it to come back.
Spider-Man: The Animated Series (1994) did something even crazier. It built a connected Marvel universe on screen. In 1994. Peter Parker was teaming up with the X-Men. Blade showed up. Doctor Strange showed up. Iron Man, Captain America, the Punisher, the Fantastic Four. The show adapted Secret Wars and even did a Spider-Verse storyline years before that concept became a billion-dollar animated movie franchise. Every time a new Marvel hero popped up on that show, it felt like the biggest event in the world. You’d be sitting there watching Spidey swing through New York and then suddenly the X-Men are there and your brain just short-circuited.
And then the show ended on a cliffhanger. Peter searching for Mary Jane across dimensions. Fade to black. No resolution. For 27 years. X-Men got the full ’97 revival. Spider-Man eventually got a comic miniseries to close the loop. But for the fans who grew up with that Peter Parker, who watched every single episode, who were there when Venom first showed up and when the Hobgoblin terrorized the city and when Kingpin was pulling every string from the shadows, that unfinished story still doesn’t sit right. That was OUR Spider-Man. He deserved better.
The Shows Most People Forgot (But the Real Ones Didn't)
The big names get all the love, but the ’90s had range.
The Tick (1994) was a full-blown superhero satire that parodied Batman, Wonder Woman, and Aquaman while somehow being one of the most lovable shows on television. Three seasons. A cult following that has never faded. If you know, you know. And if you don’t, go find it.
Spawn (1997) on HBO was the show your parents definitely didn’t want you watching. Todd McFarlane’s dark, violent, Emmy-winning animated series proved superhero animation could be dead serious and made for adults. If you snuck downstairs late at night to catch it, you remember exactly how that felt.
The Maxx (1995) on MTV was unlike anything else that has ever aired. Based on Sam Kieth’s Image Comics, it dealt with trauma and alternate realities through animation that changed styles between episodes. Most people have completely forgotten it exists. The ones who saw it never stopped thinking about it.
Silver Surfer (1998) was genuinely ambitious. Mixing cel animation with early CGI, tackling cosmic and philosophical stories from the comics, it was doing something totally different from every other Marvel show. Cancelled after 13 episodes because of a legal dispute between Marvel and Saban. Gone before it ever got the chance it deserved. Fans who caught it still call it one of the most underrated animated Marvel properties ever.
Iron Man (1994), Fantastic Four (1994), and The Incredible Hulk (1996) filled out the Marvel animated universe. None of them reached the heights of X-Men or Spider-Man, but they all contributed to the shared continuity that made Spidey’s crossover episodes possible. When Iron Man and the Fantastic Four showed up in Spider-Man’s Secret Wars adaptation, it was because those shows existed. The connected universe was already being built, one cartoon at a time.
You Were Already a Fan Before the MCU Existed
When Marvel Studios launched the MCU with Iron Man in 2008, the playbook wasn’t new. A shared universe. Characters crossing into each other’s stories. Events in one corner affecting another. The whole being bigger than any single piece. The ’90s cartoons had been doing that every weekday afternoon and Saturday morning for a decade.
The X-Men cartoon built the audience that showed up for the X-Men movies in 2000. Spider-Man: TAS proved interconnected storytelling worked outside of comic books. Batman: The Animated Series set the standard for how to treat superhero stories as serious, emotionally complex art. Superman: TAS reminded the world why the character mattered. Batman Beyond proved legacy heroes could carry their own stories.
Every superhero movie you’ve ever watched, every Disney+ series you’ve ever binged, every trailer that made you feel something before the title card even dropped, all of it connects back to a decade when a handful of animated shows decided to take comics seriously and trust their audience to care.
And you did care. You cared so much that 30 years later you still remember the theme songs. You still remember where you were sitting when you first saw the Dark Phoenix Saga. You still remember how it felt when Spider-Man and the X-Men were in the same episode. You still remember Kevin Conroy’s voice, Mark Hamill’s laugh, and the way the X-Men theme made you feel like anything was possible for the next 22 minutes.
That’s not nostalgia. That’s a foundation. And everything you’re watching now was built on it.
Which ’90s superhero cartoon was your first? Which one do you wish more people remembered? Which theme song can you still hum right now without even thinking about it? Drop it in the comments. We already know this is about to go off.
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