'X-Men '97' Season 2's Funniest Easter Egg Calls Back To A Wild Marvel Lawsuit
X-Men '97 (2024) Season 2's latest episode, "Danger.exe," sees the Danger Room take on a new persona as a threat to the X-Men and Professor X, and it also has Polaris returning to the team after leaving X-Factor. We also learn a lot about her in the process.
When she reunites with the team, we also see Beast saying hi to her in a t-shirt we haven't seen since X-Men: The Animated Series (1992). As Beast enters with a Howard the Duck shirt, it calls back to one of Marvel's weirdest characters and gives us the perfect chance to talk about some legal trouble the character went through with none other than Disney.
Beast's Howard The Duck Shirt Highlights One Of Marvel's Funniest Characters
Beast's Howard the Duck shirt is no stranger to the X-Men cartoons, and seeing it return in X-Men '97 is a double-layered Easter egg because it's not only a return for the character's wardrobe but also highlights a character that is even stranger than the Marvel Universe itself.
Howard the Duck originally came from another dimension called Duckworld before getting ripped from his world and thrust into Earth-616. Trapped on this new world, he's met many characters from the Marvel Universe, including Spider-Man and Man-Thing, and even became a private investigator.
Howard is famous for his biting sarcasm and inability to take much seriously, even though he's constantly confronted with cosmic threats and typical day-to-day dangers. Since his debut, he has also faced his own host of strange villains like the bell-themed Doctor Bong, and he even got an ill-fated movie titled Howard the Duck (1986), showing that while he faced lawsuits and controversy, there's a reason that Beast has a shirt of the beloved duck.
Disney Forced Marvel To Change Howard The Duck's Look
When Howard the Duck first appeared, he had a very distinct design. Long legs, a flat bill, no pants, and a blue suit with a red tie. If these elements sounded familiar, Disney thought so too, and in the late '70s it sent a cease-and-desist.
The claim was that Howard looked too much like Donald Duck, and to keep Marvel's version of the duck, everything had to change. He got a shorter bill, white feathers, and thicker legs, but the most iconic change was that Howard now had pants.
To this day, Howard has continued to wear pants, and even when he appears in movies like Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), he's shown in pants, long after Disney acquired the Marvel brand. Ironically, the look Beast wears on his shirt is from the classic design, but you can't see whether he has pants, making it easier to use the design.
Howard The Duck Is No Stranger To Lawsuits
Ironically, this wasn't the only lawsuit that Howard the Duck faced, as the character's co-creator, the late Steve Gerber, once sued for rights to the character after being fired from the book. Gerber sued upon learning of a potential movie deal, as he was a co-creator and wasn't made aware of the news.
In the end, Gerber conceded that he was a work-for-hire writer and therefore didn't have any legal rights to the character because it was technically created through Marvel and therefore owned by the company. That said, he was able to secure a percentage of profits from the character after the fact. This is something that has continued to be an issue when it comes to creator rights, as some creators of characters that have appeared in the Marvel Cinematic Universe still don't get enough credit.
Howard the Duck is a strange but fun character that deserves just as much love as his creator, and seeing an iconic homage in X-Men '97 is further proof of that. Howard may not be the character everyone remembers like Wolverine, but he's still an important part of Marvel's history. Any way he can be immortalized is a win, and seeing him return in a look we haven't seen since the '90s is one of the best examples of that. Now, it's just a question of when we could see him again.
