People are REALLY overestimating how much the average person would have known anything about him back then. The general audience had no clue who Iron Man was. Maybe a very, VERY small portion of people might have seen the 90s cartoon, but that was it. If you weren't a nerd, you didn't recognize him. Back then there was a massive gulf of difference in recognition between a hero like him compared to stuff like, say Spider-Man, Batman, Wonder Woman, even somewhat "lower-profile" heroes like The Hulk. No one was like "Eh, I think I'll dress as Iron Man for Halloween" if they couldn't come up with an idea for a costume. Saturday Night Live hadn't done a sketch parodying Iron Man. If you asked a person on the street to name superheroes they wouldn't ever think him up. It doesn't matter how much of a headliner he was in the comics, it doesn't matter what cartoons or video games he had appeared in the prior decade, the point is he had NO pop-culture footprint back then, and in that regard, in the eyes of the general public, he was just as well-known as Madame Web.
Wouldn't that also apply to the X-Men as well?
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