UT College Scholars Lay Foundation for Marvel Cinematic Universe
In early 1974, both Eric Lewald (’76) and Mark Edens (’77) joined the newly set up College Scholars Program because each, in his own way, liked telling stories. Lewald used the program to become one of the first three cinema studies majors, while Edens became a College Scholar to combine his interest in ancient history and creative writing (and ended up creating his first historical novel).
Flash forward, as they say out in Hollywood, to 1992. Lewald and Edens are seven years into busy, thriving screenwriting careers. The Fox Television Network offers them an assignment to attempt something that, until then, had never been done: create a successful TV show out of a Marvel comic book. The result was a five-season-long Number-One hit: X-MEN: The Animated Series. Other Marvel series followed. Then nine X-MEN movies and the 22 other films known today as the Marvel Cinematic Universe (2007-2019). Pop culture was turned on its head, and for the past two decades, the dominant presence in world popular culture has been screen adaptations of comics-based superhero stories, mostly from Marvel.
All Lewald and Edens were trying to do was tell some good, heroic stories (and pay the mortgage). They did not even know the X-Men before being given the assignment to reimagine their world for television. Lewald, as series showrunner, hired more Volunteer writers (Edens’s brother Michael Edens, the late Bruce Reid Schaefer), so there
is a strong streak of Big Orange pride running through the series. There was also a great deal of luck and good fortune: a new, struggling TV network, Fox, that wanted to get attention with ambitious, genre-stretching series; the right, talented creative partners throughout the huge cast and crew; and, unbelievably, little corporate supervision
(Marvel comics was going bankrupt). Lewald and Edens were able to tell the stories they wanted.
Today, more than 25 years after they started, Lewald and Edens are getting newfound benefits from their association with what many fans consider the most beloved and well-told animated superhero series ever. Hundreds of millions of people worldwide watched the series during the ‘90s. Both writers are humbled by the fact that often over 50% of America’s television sets were tuned in to watch their stories. Today, fans of the series are sharing the experience with their children. The show’s longevity recently prompted pop-culture publisher Jacobs-Brown Media to ask Lewald to write a book about the experience (Previously on X-Men: The Making of an Animated Series [2017]). Since the book’s debut, there have been many Comic Convention invitations for Lewald, his wife Julia (also an X-MEN series writer), Edens, and others associated with the production.
It all started back at UT, 45 years ago, when a couple of student movie buffs decided that it would be an adventure to design their own majors within a groundbreaking new academic program called College Scholars.