X-Position #19: X-Men Mojovision Review | Mojo, Marvel Comics, Story Breakdown & Analysis

"What do they want to see? Umm, peace? Umm, freedom? Maybe good government? HA! They want blood! And guts! And love! And hate! They want entertainment!" The persistent globe trotting of season 2 sees the X-Men transported to their most exotic locale yet: the technologically advanced, oppressive dimension known as the Mojoverse! Here, the world religion is entertainment, with the titular Mojo as its God. Mojo - a spineless, fanatical, obese, bloviating mogul - is panic-stricken after losing his star attraction, Longshot (due entirely to his own mistreatment and talent exploitation). Mojo's non-existent attention span then seizes upon the X-Men, "primitive" figures from a "backwater" dimension as his next meal ticket. Championing them as the latest and greatest opiate for the increasingly fickle masses of his planet, Mojo abducts the mutant heroes and forces them to take part in his programming, broadcast live and worldwide for the approval of Mojo's mindless denizens. As a character who evolved to most prominently be employed as a commentary on empty consumer culture, particularly of America in the late 1980s, adapting Mojo for television is particularly cutting for a hit Saturday morning cartoon. Whereas Mojo was infamously used to satirize mass media expansion in light of the rapidly ballooning X-Men line of comics, whose core identity was being diluted and eroded through a seemingly endless number of spin-offs, the role of television and network ratings as a metaphor for this message arguably put some distance between the source and the object of criticism. Moving that source from the page to the screen places the X-Men: The Animated Series directly in the line of fire, making the show complicit in the trend being skewered. In this way, Mojo gives the producers free reign to poke fun at the success of their own creation. Tellingly, they don't even take the out of trying to discredit Mojo's philosophy that violence equals ratings, as the fighting team doesn't defeat the villain by way of their high-minded ideals - they beat him, seemingly to death, and depart. Disoriented, annoyed, and having learned nothing from the experience. Like basically all Mojo tales, this one suffers for the fact that nothing about it inherently belongs as an X-Men story. The same could be told with essentially any popular superhero or superpowered team. That's a limitation of the concept than the execution, however, as "Mojovision" represents the rare example of an adaptation somehow feeling even MORE faithful to its source by way of translation to TV. X-TRA: As originally conceived, Mojo was meant to represent a blight upon existence itself and described as, "an obscenity that goes on forever." This vision isn't totally irreconciliation with his depiction as a soulless, numbers-driven network executive guided by enshittification at every turn.