It's been a little under a week since Disney+ launched, and fans are beginning to notice a number of their favorite television shows are either missing episodes or being aired out of order. Although Disney's new streaming service contains a ton of kid's cartoons from the 1990's, like both the Spider-Man and X-Men Animated Series, as well as DuckTales and Goof Troop, something feels... off.
There is already a precedent for Disney using its subscription service to once again rewrite history, as fans of Star Wars have already noted. The Disney+ version of A New Hope, a film which has already been re-cut and re-edited more than most other movies in history, changed the infamous Han/Greedo scene to include a new line of dialog from Greedo, specifically him shouting the word "Maclunkey," before shooting (still first) at Han. However, this isn't the most egregious change Disney has made.
According to a Twitter thread from former CBR editor and X-Men enthusiast Brett White, the episode order on Disney's streaming service is not the same order the episodes were aired in, nor is it the order the episodes were written. Disney+ seems to have adopted a completely different order for the series, one which follows the show's normal airings accurately up until the third season and then goes "widely off the rails."
It turns out, after more investigation, X-Men is not the only show which Disney has reshuffled. As compiled in a megathread on Reddit, numerous television shows are either airing episodes out of order or outright missing episodes altogether. Shows which are, like X-Men: The Animated Series, playing in the wrong order include The Simpsons, DuckTales, Kim Possible, and Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes. As far as shows which are missing full episodes go, Darkwing Duck, The Simpsons, The Little Mermaid, and Tron: Uprising are all listed.
Although there may be a good reason for removing certain episodes of older television shows, namely for containing content which people in today's society may perceive as offensive, the act of reshuffling and airing episodes in a different order than they were originally intended seems ridiculous. Perhaps these improper orders are the result of some sort of glitch in the Disney+ system, because there would be no possible positive outcome for them to have done this by choice. Although many shows, especially children's cartoons, are more akin to anthologies and less reliant on being viewed in order, that doesn't give the company permission to just mix them up any way they want to. Longtime series fans, many of whom likely own box-set collections of these shows already, will always be able to tell the difference.