An interview with Bruce Timm on the Green Lantern cartoon

Bruce entered the interview room like a rock star. He did a 15-20 minute stint at each table, surrounded by 4-7 press members at each table. He discussed the new characters he created for Green Lantern: The Animated Series, including the new Red Lantern, Razor, who he hopes will become so popular that DC integrates him into the “established continuity.” While he can’t make the Red Lanterns as vile as the comics, he believes he did a pretty good job of showing their hideous aspects.

Although he couldn’t talk about confirmed villains, he discussed the confirmed vocal cast. He feels he lucked out with Josh as the lead, because Hal was the toughest to cast. They went through a lot of actors and, although Josh possesses a young-sounding voice, he pitched it deeper to hit Hal’s gravitas.

Overall, he seemed happy with everything. He called Josh perfect casting, he loves the score because “every show sounds like a feature film,” he used every DC character he wanted, and he found that “every aspect of the show so far has been pretty satisfying.”

It’s a lot of fun getting to talk to someone who penned the cartoons you enjoyed, and who understands abstract comic references to characters like the robotic female, Jocasta, in the Avengers‘ comics. Since at Philly Comic Con a couple of the artists and writers for the Green Lantern series discussed the DC reboot, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to ask Bruce Timm, who visualized DC for the 90s, his thoughts.

Below find the questions I asked him and the full audio of the round table.

A lot of the DC universe heroes, outside of Batman and Superman, aren’t usually that fleshed out in their alter egos. But Hal in the cartoon seems really fleshed out, and parts of his personality seem to pull from the movie. How are you going to flesh that out even further?

At the time that we were writing the first series, we actually had not had that much contact with the movie people. We weren’t really influenced that much by the movie. It may seem that way in that, probably the movie and us as well, we’re all kind of pulling from the same source material in the comics. It’s all kind of consistent because we’re all basing it on the same source material. It’s not that our movie clashes with the continuity of the movie, but it’s also not that it’s in perfect synch with it either. We’re not being restricted to anything because of what they’re doing in the movie series.

Will we see the Green Arrow?

Green Arrow … not necessarily. We don’t really have any plans to bring the Green Arrow onto the series yet. The thing about the series is that we really embrace the entire scifi aspect of it. So, I would say that 95% of the show takes place in outer space. It very rarely takes place on Earth. So it doesn’t really give us much of an opportunity to bring in characters like Green Arrow or Batman. There will be some other DC comics  characters crossing over, but probably not the ones you expect and not the ways you expect.

I like that you mocked Hal wearing the mask everywhere. Will you mock any of the other Lanterns in the same way?

Possibly … [laughs] there will always be some element of mocking.

Is Ia [the ship] like Jocasta [the female robot] from the Avengers comic?

A little bit … a little bit like Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation. But, that’s the starting point, but then she goes off into a different direction.

For strong female characters, did you consider bringing Jade [a Green Lantern’s daughter] over?

Isn’t she kind of complicated? Isn’t that like future alternate universe?

She becomes complicated, but at the core she’s just a GL’s daughter.

OK. Well, we didn’t go that way. [group laughs] We could’ve, but we didn’t go that way.

What do you think of the DC reboot?

I’ve been too busy to read much of it. I don’t really have too much to say of it.

I really liked what you did with the Guardians. Will you continue to flesh out their characters?

Definitely. The Guardians, I think, are really interesting characters. It’s kind of like James Bond with, like, eight Ms, you know. Each one has a different personality. We won’t flesh all of them out because frankly there’s like, I don’t know how many there are, twelve I think. Some of them are just going to be placeholders [laughs], frankly. There’s a number of the guardians who will get some significant screen time and character development.

The one thing I thought there was never any complication between any of the Green Lanterns and their dual relationship with their responsibilities to the core, and their responsibilities to the Justice League. Would you ever show some conflict between Hal’s allegiance to the core?

Conceivably so. That is something we actually discussed further down the road if we’re lucky enough to get a second season or a third season. We’ve talked about the possibility. If we get a second season, we don’t want to just do a repeat of what we did in season one, so it’s like, where can we take this show next? One of the possibilities that we were throwing around was, what if we did introduce more famous DC characters? What if we did a Justice League in space kind of idea? So that’s one aspect that the show could go. Fortunately, there’s tons of other Green Lantern lore that we could experience … mess around with. It’s all open. Anything’s possible.

Clacked by An Nicholson
on Nov 01, 2011 @ 16:00 EST5EDT