Why Marvel backed a court ruling that said the X-Men weren’t human

Unsurprisingly, the ruling had to do with toy sales! Fun piece from Polygon.

The ruling upheld a motion, posed by Toy Biz, that the X-Men weren’t human — they were humanoid “mutants,” a category likened by the defendant to robots and monsters. They argued that X-Men action figures weren’t “dolls,” due to the fact that “to be properly classifiable as a ‘doll’ under the HTSUS (Harmonized Tariff Schedule of the United States), a toy figure must clearly represent a human being.” The US Court of International Trade had other ideas.

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