Welcome to the five hundredth in a series of examinations of comic book legends and whether they are true or false. Click here for an archive of the previous four hundred and ninety-nine. This week, in honor of the five hundredth edition of Comic Book Legends Revealed, you'll get a TRIPLE-sized column this week, in three parts (today, tomorrow and Sunday). The special theme this week is comic book anniversaries, as each part will spotlight a different superhero celebrating an anniversary this year. Today is Wolverine, tomorrow is Daredevil and Sunday is Batman. Today, a pair of legends involving Wolverien's bizarre Australian accent in the Pryde of the X-Men and the story of why, exactly, Wolverine turned out not to be a mutated wolverine!

Let's begin!

NOTE: The column is on three pages, a page for each legend. There's a little "next" button on the top of the page and the bottom of the page to take you to the next page (and you can navigate between each page by just clicking on the little 1, 2 and 3 on the top and the bottom, as well).

COMIC LEGEND: A misreading of the script for Pryde of the X-Men resulted in Wolverine being turned Australian in the episode.

STATUS: False

Pryde of the X-Men was a pilot for a proposed X-Men series that came out in 1989 and was later released on home video.



While it did not end up being picked up for a series, it certainly appears to have played somewhat of a role in the X-Men eventually getting their own series a few years later which became very popular.

The most amusing aspect of the series by far is that Wolverine has an Australian accent in the episode, which is hilarious since Wolverine is famously Canadian - the guy was SPECIFICALLY invented to be a Canadian superhero!

One of the bad guys in the episode is Pyro, who actually IS Australian.



In the episode, Wolverine has a fight with another villain, the Toad, who Wolverine refers to as a "dingo."



A popular legend has popped up that states that it was this line that led to Wolverine becoming Australian. Here it is from one site (but it shows up a lot):

[Wolverine's Australian accent] was due to the actor and director misunderstanding a line in the script. Wolverine calls the Australian mutant Pyro "dingo", and rather than take that as an odd Australian slur, they assumed Wolverine to be Australian. Although in the episode he actually calls Toad a dingo.

As the story even goes, it doesn't make sense since he doesn't actually call Pyro a dingo. But I guess the idea is that at one point he DID?

Anyhow, that doesn't track because Wolverine actually debuted on Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends in 1982!

And in the episode, the SAME ACCENT was used on Wolverine!

Neither Pyro nor Toad were in the 1982 episode. So in other words, it makes no sense that his accent was a "mistake" in Pryde of the X-Men when it is the same accent used seven years earlier. It just seems as though whoever the producers were liked the idea of having Wolverine use an Australian accent.

Thanks to John Diggins for correcting my initial error on the actor for Wolverine. Neil Ross played Wolverine on Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends but Ross then played Nightcrawler in Pryde of the X-Men and not Wolverine as I first thought. Patrick Pinney took over the Wolverine role.

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Check out my latest Movie Legends Revealed at Spinoff Online: What teenage son of a movie director got the chance to write "the stupidest song ever" for one of his father's movies, only to see the song to go on to make the teen millions?

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This story of Wolverine's Australian accent leads us to the NEXT legend about this same topic...

COMIC LEGEND: Wolverine was forced to become Australian because of the popularity of Austalian cinema.

STATUS: Leaning Toward True

Rick Hoberg, who had a lot of success working on Marvel animation projects during the 1980s, recalled about Pryde of the X-Men in the book X-Men: The Characters and Their Universe:

I ended up being the voice director on the show, and I was forced to use the Australian version of Wolverine (which coincidentally, foreshadowed the casting of Australian actor Hugh Jackman in the live-action X-Men film), because all of this Australian stuff was popular at the time - the Mad Max films, Crocodile Dundee, and so on - it was going to turn out (in the comics) that Wolverine was an expatriated Australian. The direction of the character however never got beyond the plotting stages and Wolverine remained Canadian in the comics.

Once again, Wolverine was ALREADY Australian seven years before Pryde of the X-Men.

However, Mad Max 2 came out in 1981, so I guess I can believe that the success of that film had some impact on Wolverine's accent in the Spider-Man episode (which Hoberg also worked on, so he could easily be conflating the two) and I don't think the producers would have needed a whole lot of convincing to think that an Australian accent sounded cooler than a Canadian one (no offense, Chad!) and the success of Crocodile Dundee would only solidify the resolve of the producers to keep using the same accent from 1982 in 1989, so I'm willing to believe the basic details of Hoberg's story, even if he is obviously a bit off on a few of the details.

As for Wolverine being revealed to be Australian in the comics, as Hoberg notes, it only would have been that he would have come to Canada from Australia, so I can believe that that would have been a possibility had Pryde of the X-Men led to a regular series. Since it didn't, I don't think it ever went past "Hey, if this series gets picked up, could you put it into the comics that Wolverine came to Canada from Australia originally?" I doubt it was ever fully plotted into the comics.

But really, once again, the key move was in 1982 when the Australian accent for Wolverine was originally chosen, not 1989 with Pryde of the X-Men.

Thanks to David L. for suggesting this one!

On the next page, how did Spider-Woman save Wolverine from a weird origin story?

COMIC LEGEND: Wolverine's mutated wolverine origin was squelched because of Spider-Woman taking the origin.

STATUS: Appears to be True

One of the weirdest legends I've covered in these 500 installments of Comic Book Legends Revealed is the fact that Chris Claremont and Dave Cockrum planned on Wolverine being revealed to be a mutated wolverine, likely due to the High Evolutionary.

This origin was hinted at heavily in X-Men #98...



However, the origin was shelved at the time.

A year later, Spider-Woman debuted in Marvel Spotlight #32 and SHE got that origin! She was a mutated spider!







I always thought that Archie Goodwin simply picked up on a rejected story idea, however, as it turns out, even when John Byrne joined the X-Men late in 1977, the mutated wolverine origin was STILL in place! As it turns out, it was the Spider-Woman origin that scuttled it!

John Byrne explained to The Comics Journal in 1980:

You see, we're already on our second origin for Wolverine. The first origin that was concocted, was that he was actually a mutant Wolverine, boosted up to human form by the High Evolutionary. Okay, that works... except that Archie did a similar number in the first Spider-Woman story. And no matter how things have changed in that strip since, the idea has been done before... so we dropped it.

Isn't that amazing? So we actually owe Spider-Woman (whose origin was VERY quickly retconned to get rid of the evolved spider idea) for Wolverine not being a mutated wolverine!

Okay, that's it for part one!

Thanks to the Grand Comics Database for this week's covers! And thanks to Brandon Hanvey for the Comic Book Legends Revealed logo!

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See you all tomorrow!