When the X-Men are pinned down by mutant-hunting Sentinels, Cyclops knows to call in the big guns.
Tapping the communicator on his chest, he says, “Give ‘em the forecast.”
He relishes giving the command because he knows what’s coming.
Alison Sealy-Smith voices Storm in ‘X-Men ‘97’.Marvel Animation
“‘Summoning the power of the arctic winds!’
and ‘Rise, desert sands!’
I was in my element.
Storm from ‘X-Men: The Animated Series’.Marvel
I was in that studio going, ‘This is it.
This is what this instrument was for.'”
To put it simply, she’s just the GOAT.
Storm from ‘X-Men: The Animated Series’.Marvel
Each person’s reaction is theirs.
Even among the X-Men fandom, you’re going to find people who say, ‘Oh, Storm?
I never did really like her.
Marvel’s mutants return in ‘X-Men ‘97,’ the sequel to ‘X-Men: The Animated Series’.Marvel Animation
What’s with the stilted Shakespearean stuff?’
Instead, she performed in various theater productions for social change.
“It barely paid the rent,” she says, but she was hungry.
“I was hungry to prove that I deserve to be here,” she continues.
“No, I’ve never been to theater school, but I can do it.
Yes, I’m a little Black girl from Barbados, but I can do it.”
She remembers thinking, “Cartoons are Scooby-Doo, and I’m a serious actress.”
“I’m going, ‘Well, they’re right out there.
So what do I hold on to?'”
“I am Afro-Caribbean.
We grew up with this existential fear of hurricanes.
My island is about a spec in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean,” Sealy-Smith says.
She may even hurt her friends."
That was an allegory the original show never shied away from.
Though they are mutants, they are discriminated against for being a mixed-race couple.
How quaint," she says.
“Oh the relish with which you’re free to say that line!”
Sealy-Smith remarks of that scene.
The truth is, I don’t know if that line would mean anything to my seven-year-old grandson.
He just wants to see Storm fight somebody and win.
All these years later, Sealy-Smith returned to the role with a different mindset.
The character, while remaining the same at her core, is also dealing with different things.
But she says she approached the character differently with all these years of hindsight.
“My lifestyle is completely different.
I don’t need this show.
I don’t need it to prove that I’m a good actress.
I don’t need it to pay the rent or the mortgage,” she says.
“I feel a much deeper, stronger, heavier sense of responsibility to the audience.
I wasn’t in the ’90s.
