Green Lantern: The Animated Series and "DC Nation"

[Howard_Casto]

So the new green lantern cgi cartoon premired tonight.  I'm not sold on it, but it has potential.  Although in 3d, the art style is exactly like the Bruce Timm/paul Dini cartoons so at least it looks good.  They seem to have gotten the same (or at least similar) voice actors as well.  Also suprising is the fact that it appears to follow the cannon of that universe as well (or at least loosely).

Bruce Timm is also the Producer of the series, but I think he technically produces all WB/DC animation so that doesn't really mean anything anymore.

There was a bit of trickery with the opening sequence.  It follows the plot of the DC animated Green Lantern film released a couple of years ago EXACTLY and I was thinking "dear god do we have to see his origin AGAIN" only for Hal to jump out of the test plane in full costume.  So like I said, by all accounts it's in line with the animated Dc universe. 

The bad news is that Hal and his buddy Kilowog get stranded on the outskits of the galaxy, so a ton of Lanterns aren't going to guest star in this show.  The Red Lanterns seem to be the big bad in this series, which seems like an odd choice.  Personally I would have liked to have seen a more open-ended plot and maybe the Sinestro Corps as the baddies, but it's still good.  It's kind of got a Transformers G1 vibe to it if that makes any sense. 

Anyway, the first episode was really good and I think the show has potential. 

Also odd is the cartoon networks promotion of next years "DC Nation" campaign.  Basically what they are doing is heavily promoting the WB/DC cartoons again, which is nice but they don't really have any left to promote.  It was kind of odd really, they said that New Episodes of Green Lantern and Young Justice (which I thought was cancelled) would be shown in the block.  Batman: The Brave and the Bold  wasn't mentioned at all nor were any new shows.  So it seems like a hell of a lot of promotion for just two shows.    I'm excited about it though as this might mean that we are getting a new Batman series.  The last two or three they tried were all duds. 

Also interesting were the announcment of DC shorts that will be shown between the two shows.  They threw up a couple of samples.  One was the Batman/Superman characters in "British Claymation" form with little kids doing the voices.  It was worth a chuckle but that's about it.  Another was a Super-Deformed clip of the old Teen Titans cartoon that kind of fell flat.  While short, it seems like a lot of time and money went into the shorts and many more are on the way.  This makes me wonder why they didn't use that time and money to make at least one more new series.    Of note is the fact that they showed a clip of batman during the promo reel taht was animted but looked a whole heck of a lot like the batman from the arkham video games. 


So anyway, this seemed like a big deal to me, at least in terms of cartoon network's direction, so I thought I would mention it.

[wp34]

There was a bit of trickery with the opening sequence.  It follows the plot of the DC animated Green Lantern film released a couple of years ago EXACTLY and I was thinking "dear god do we have to see his origin AGAIN" only for Hal to jump out of the test plane in full costume.  So like I said, by all accounts it's in line with the animated Dc universe. 

I fell for that and thought the same thing.  The animation turned me off at first but I ended up enjoying it.  It is not Justice League but nothing is anymore.  I'll keep watching.

Hal's trick for charging his ring using the ship at the end was pretty cool.