News | Trailer | ‘Green Lantern: The Animated Series’ Premiere

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Cartoon Network has given fans a glimpse at the new Green Lantern: The Animated Series in a special hour-long episode that sets up the overall concept and provides an opportunity for the network to show off the slick, CG animated style of the show. While DC has normally done well by its heroes in the animated arena, Green Lantern: The Animated Series doesn’t quite live up to one series it is clearly attempting to follow.

Green Lantern Animated Series Sneak Peek | Trailer

 

Like the similarly titled Batman: The Animated Series, Green Lantern: TAS is being launched with a feature film still relatively fresh in the minds of its intended audience. After the critical drubbing and underwhelming financial gains of the Green Lantern movie, however, the world beyond the comic book pages has begun to look unduly harsh for the Emerald Knight.

To set this right, Green Lantern: The Animated Series intriguingly begins not with Hal Jordan or any sort of unnecessary exposition into the Green Lantern mythos, but by first introducing the audience to a relatively new faction of the overall GL universe: the Red Lanterns. This recent expansion of the Lantern color wheel – which was previously limited to green and yellow – has helped define the Green Lantern characters by the emotion associated with that lantern’s hue. For instance: green (willpower), yellow (fear), red (rage), orange (avarice), indigo (compassion), violet (love), black (death) and white (life).

In starting the episode with these newer Lanterns – Razer and Zilius Zox, to be specific – Green Lantern: The Animated Series is telling the audience that this will not be a simple rehash of the feature film – but instead it will be a far more expansive experience, akin to the direction writer/DC Entertainment executive Geoff Johns has taken the characters in the various GL books over the past few years.

Like the story-arcs seen in the books, there are hints of larger forces at play as Razer and Zilius Zox (basically a toothier version of Marvel’s MODOK) bait and kill a distant galaxy’s Green Lantern. Before we are allowed to learn more of the nefarious plot, however, the focus quickly switches to hot-shot pilot Hal Jordan and the only time we see him on earth. After setting up an unrequited romance with Carol Ferris, Hal is summoned to a strangely unpopulated Oa by Ganthet and the other Guardians. While answering to the Guardians for his unorthodox methods, Hal learns of the fallen Green Lantern and demands action be taken. Unfortunately, Hal and Kilowog are informed that even at full speed, it would take them 18 months to reach the sector where the murder(s) occurred.