As any child worth their salt growing up in the 1990s will tell you, X-Men: The Animated Series was an absolute joy to behold.

Scheduled somewhere around the midway point of Saturday morning favourite Live and Kicking, it gave kids the perfect chance to take a break from Zoe Ball and Jamie Theakston’s shenanigans and immerse themselves in a bit of mutant-based brilliance.

Theako may have been the king of children’s television back in the day – having inherited the throne from Andy Peters – but he was no match of Wolverine, the Beast and, to a lesser extent, Cyclops.

Serious shit went down in the X-Men too – characters died, people cried and Wolverine said called Jean Grey “Jeanie” a whole bunch of times.

But, after five series and some 76 episodes, the show stopped with Spiderman the only other Marvel hero to come close to replicating X-Men’s animated success.

With X-Men: Apocalypse just around the corner the old animated series has definitely been on our minds at Loaded.

So when we discovered that one incredibly gifted YouTuber had managed to create a version of the X-Men: Apocalypse trailer using only bits from the cartoon series, we basically shit ourselves.

And after cleaning up the resulting mess – don’t worry, there was no real mess – we sat down to watch the results like a group of geeks tuning in to the first trailer for Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

The good news is that it does not disappoint, successfully fusing the film with the animated series, in which Apocalypse featured regularly as a villain.

Will the new film live up to the animated series? Who knows but, for now, let us just enjoy this wonderful trip down memory lane to a time when Wolverine looked a whole lot like Jack Nicholson and the cartoon Mystique was somehow sexier than Jennifer Lawrence.