X-Men: Volume 1 Featuring Night of the Sentinels is one of the DVD releases I have been waiting on for years. In the mid-90's, Fox Saturday morning was dominated by Marvel superheroes, but the series that started that off was this animated X-Men series. Not only does it stay true to the comic, but it also touches on pretty much every major story arc that the comics have had (up to that point obviously). This first volume will take you through about a quarter of the 5-season show taking you from Jubilee's joining of the X-Men to Cyclops's and Jean's wedding (or at least what they believe to be their wedding).

When the series starts (with the two-parter "Night of the Sentinels"), Jubilee, a teenage girl who seems to constantly blow up VCR's (Ha!), finds herself being hunted down by giant robots assigned to "contain" her. When a band of mutants show up and stop the large robots, she runs off with them and discovers a "Home for Gifted Youngsters" run by Professor Charles Xavier. Here, she learns that he has put together a team of mutants to help bring human and mutant kind together, and that team is The X-Men.

The episodes that follow are fairly serial (though not to the extent of Lost or 24) and the events of one episode tend to smoothly flow into the next. After "Night of the Sentinels," we are introduced to Magneto, then the Morlocks and Sabertooth. The show starts introducing a lot of minor to major X-Men characters throughout the first few episodes until another two-parter, "Days of Future Past." In this episode, Bishop, a mutant from the future, is sent back to the present to stop an assassination that will cause humans to turn against all mutants. The problem is, he doesn't remember who performs the assassination, or for that matter, who is going to be killed. The events of these two episodes will have frequent repercussions throughout the rest of the series (especially when Cable shows up again in the next Volume).

This volume wraps up with the first three episodes of Season One, where Scott and Jean Grey finally get married (much to Wolverine's dismay). But they quickly find out that their wedding wasn't what they thought it was and end up in the hands of Mr. Sinister. After that two-parter, we get a glimpse at Storm's past as she returns to her African village to deal with some family issues and a new menace known as The Shadow King.

While X-Men: Volume 1 Featuring Night of the Sentinels doesn't have any special features, simply being able to watch this series again after so many years should be enough to make most fans of the X-Men, or anyone who watched Saturday morning cartoons in the 90's, want to buy it anyway. If you are like me and have been waiting for this release since they came out with the DVD format, then you won't be disappointed.

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