With Fox’s summer tent pole, X-Men Origins: Wolverine,  multiple studios are gearing up to unleash new X-content on DVD and BluRay. Here’s a look at some of the exciting new products to help whet your Wolverine whistle:

X-Men: The Animated Series, Volume 1 and 2

Russo Rating: 8/10

I grew up on comic books, and the largest part of my Marvel diet was reading, watching and dreaming about the X-Men. In October 1992, Fox launched a X-Men television adaptation, which only ran for 32 episodes, but had a distinguishing impact on not only myself, but also millions of young children around the globe.

Adapting its stories directly from the comics, the X-Men Animated Series tackled complex issues for a kids show. Acceptance and tolerance were easily interweaved with the action and drama of the seemingly never-ending battle of Professor Xavier’s superheroes and Magneto’s Brotherhood of Evil Mutants.

Perhaps what the animated series did best was adapting the characters currently appearing in the comic books into some of the series more classic storylines. Day of Future Passed, The Phoenix Saga, The Savage Land, Archangel and Apocalypse and so many more classic X-tales are quite intelligently laid out.

Both Vol. 1 and Vol 2. of the X-Men animated series comes on a 2-disc set. Unfortunately the transfer on the animation hasn’t aged gracefully, so the crispness of the animation doesn’t look all that spectacular when upconverted to high definition. Luckily though the classic adventures of the X-Men will serve as such a great dose of nostalgia, picture quality won’t matter. Highly recommended.

X-Men Trilogy on BluRay

Russo Rating: 7/10

It’s time for a reboot.

Sure, there are some things that the X-Men Motion Picture Trilogy got right. For the most part, the series picked nearly perfect actors to flesh out our culture’s favorite mutants. Let’s be honest though, with the exception of X2, which does the best with what it had to work with, the trilogy has its flaws, and yes, that includes the Bryan Singer films too.

Perhaps the most notable reason is what state the series remained in after X-Men: The Last Stand. I still think Brett Ratner did a commendable job making the best movie he could with the time and hackneyed script he was given. However too many deaths, too many wishy-washy plot holes and completely raping the Dark Phoenix storyline of its rightful screen time nearly killed any room for future installments in this current X-storyline.

However the problems didn’t start with The Last Stand. No, it was way back when the studio dictated what was cool over a decade ago. “We can’t have superheroes actually wear the costume from the comic books, after all people barely take the genre seriously as it stands!” Nine years later, superhero films are one of the most lucrative genres, and consistently summer tent poles, and guess what? People like it when the look, style and tone remains true to the comics. That includes not changing all the characters into boring, black leather.

Plus, the first X-Men film was riddled with budgetary constraints. Especially revisited nine years later, in high definition, the effects, costuming and scope of the picture just don’t seem as grand as they should be for one of Marvel’s biggest breadwinners. Sadly, even X2, which is a superhero masterpiece, also feels smaller in scale after the superhero wake-up calls that were Spiderman 2, Iron Man, Batman Begins and The Dark Knight.

While 1080p doesn’t do the special effects any favors (notably Wolverine’s claws and Cyclops’s optic laser), the X-Men films have never looked better then they do on BluRay. The nine-disc set includes all three features, a plethora of special features and digital copies of each movie. This is the definitive collection of the X-Men Trilogy and will look great included in any X-fan’s library.

Now, after we get Wolverine out of our system, let’s get rebooting.