The season finale of the hit Disney+ animated reprisal “X-Men ‘97” was an all-time banger. While the season ended two weeks ago, I was a little bit late to the party and just finished watching it over the weekend. What can I say? I was embroiled in a “The Walking Dead” rewatch, and I had to catch up on “The Bad Batch” before I could settle into another season of one of my favorite animated action series from my formative years. So imagine my surprise when, in the 8th episode of the season, “Tolerance Is Extinction: Part 1,” for a little over one minute of screen time, the X-Men turned into a car show. That’s right, Scott “Cyclops” Summers, drives a Porsche.
After the mutant-hating human/machine hybrid Bastion turns most of the world into mutant-hunting Sentinels Prime with a techno-organic virus. Cyclops, Jean Grey, and their time-travelling son Cable (okay, he was born to Jean’s clone Madelyne Pryor, but they share the same memories, just go with it) have to escape the Sentinel threat. This scene begins with Sentinels taking down another X-Men Blackbird plane. Scott escapes the plane crash with his family aboard his Porsche escape pod.
This sleek machine rockets away from the downed ship, lands on a hillside, and powerslides through a cadre of brainwashed robo-humans. Jean uses her telekenetic abilities to take over the driving duties while her husband and white-haired quasi-son burst through the roof of the car to start blastin’. After 69 nice seconds on screen, the car explodes in a fireball and the trio walk away. It’s a fast-paced action sequence that doesn’t really add anything to the plot, but it allows Cable to incredulously ask his laser-eyes mutant father, “Y0u drive a Porsche?”
This doesn’t look like any Porsche I’ve ever seen, and certainly none that existed in 1997, so I couldn’t really suspend my disbelief during this scene. The anachronistic nature of the car in question was just a bridge too far for my entertainment sensibilities, you know? Anyway, I had to try to figure out just what kind of car it was that Mr. Summers was hooning through a canyon with his whole family.
What do we know about the car? Well, with three adult humans onboard, it has back seats. Just after ejecting from the plane, Cyclops executes a perfect downshift and hammers the throttle, so we know it has a stick shift. Cable manages to detach the roof from the car with relative ease, so it’s some form of Targa roof. The back bumper is emblazoned with a “Turbo” nameplate script.
After studying this car from every angle it was drawn, I’m forced to conclude that it is an amalgam of a handful of Porsche supercar and concept models over the years. The overall shape of the car, the headlights, and the rear bumper treatment all appear to have been cribbed from the never-built 919 Street concept from 2017. The hard targa roof and stick shift seem straight out of the mid-2000s Carrera GT. You can take the big wing and vented frunk lid from any number of GT3 models over the last two decades, but we’ll say it’s a 997-generation example for the heck of it. In some frames the car has a bit of 918 Spyder to it as well, perhaps the back deck/engine cover.
There’s only two problems. None of those cars have a back seat, and none of them existed in 1997!
I’m not sure any of this is actually a conclusion. I guess the car is cool as hell, and that’s all we need to know. Oh what I wouldn’t give to be cruising in the Porsche with my telekinetic baddie passenger princess and my time-travelling estranged adult son in the car, just blowing innocent brain-infected people to smithereens. What a cool family outing in a cool family car.
Here’s a bit of fun trivia. The car’s license plate is SL1M, which is a callback to Cyclops’ original name in the comic books. In issues 1 and 2, his name was Slim Summers, but for book 3, it was changed to Scott and Slim became an occasional nickname for the character, usually used somewhat pejoratively by Wolverine.
X-Men ‘97 is available to stream now on Disney+.
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