Cartoon TV & Movies (page 3)

Young Justice trailer + MTV sneak peak

In the last few days two new Young Justice trailers have appeared online -  a Cartoon Network trailer for the first episode (called “Independence Day”) and MTV have an exclusive copy of the 6-minute preview that played at New York Comic Con.

Independence Day Trailer.

The first proper trailer for new Young Justice cartoon (above) is out in the wild. The show will premiers on Cartoon Network on November 26th with a special hour-long event called “Independence Day”. The official episode blurb tell us that:

In Young Justice, being a teenager means proving yourself over and over — to peers, parents, teachers, mentors and, ultimately, to yourself. But what if you’re not just a normal teenager? What if you’re a teenage super hero? Are you ready to join the ranks of the great heroes and prove you’re worthy of the Justice League? That’s exactly what the members of Young Justice — Robin, Aqualad, Kid Flash, Superboy, Miss Martian and Artemis — will found out, whether they have what it takes to be a proven hero.

The full series will begin sometime next year. This should be good.

MTV Exclusive

The MTV trailer is a copy of the 6-minute preview that played at this years New York Comic Con. A camera-phone version has been make the rounds on Youtube, but this is the full version in gloriously sharp video.

Young Justice news from NYCC

The Young Justice panel at the New York Comic Con showed off the first full scenes from the new series. It showed the mentors and sidekick duos each fighting ice themed villains before gathering together at the Hall of Justice. The teen heroes then spin-off to investigate Cadmus Labs and discover that they’ve created a teenaged clone of Superman called Superboy.

A lot of the discussion reiterated material and themes from Comic-Con, but there was also a flurry of new details:

  • It will become obvious half-way through the season why they’ve chosen Zatara and not Zatanna for the Justice League.
  • The Justice League will be in the background, but some members will feature prominently – Red Tornado will reprise his role as mentor/den-mother from the original Young Justice comic book, Black Canary will be their trainer, but it’s Batman who will be assigning missions and calling the shots.
  • The one-hour premier will broadcast on November 26th.
  • Some of the relationships in the group were explained. Robin and Kid Flash are already friends and Kid Flash knows Robin’s secret identity whereas the other don’t. Aqualad is Garth’s best-friend (as in the original Aqualad Garth). Speedy will be around for the origin, but may not stick around.
  • The Kid Flash isn’t as fast as the Flash and uses his speed like a cannon ball (ergo the shoulder pads and padded costume).
  • 150 DCU characters will appear in the first half of the season. These include Jay Garrick.
  • The new Aqualad was created specifically for the Young Justice cartoon, but Geoff Johns liked the character so much he borrowed him for the Brightest Day comic book.
  • The Young Justice comic-book will start in January with a special written by Greg Weisman and Kevin Hopps.

[Original sources: UGO, IGN, Newsarama]

Young Justice premier details

Details about the premier of the new Young Justice cartoon series have been announced as part of the press release for the New York comic con. The series will debue in November 2010 as a special hour-long event on Cartoon Network, however, the series proper won’t start its regular schedule until 2011.

The details were contained within a description of the Young Justice panel:

Young Justice Video Presentation and Q&A — Join the league! Fans were given their first glimpse of Robin, Aqualad, Kid Flash, Superboy, Miss Martian and Artemis this past July at Comic-Con International: San Diego. But this panel will offer far more than just a glimpse, as producers Brandon Vietti (Batman: Under the Red Hood) and Greg Weisman (Gargoyles) answer questions from fans and show footage from this highly anticipated series. A one-hour special event of Young Justice will premiere in November 2010 on Cartoon Network, and the series begins in 2011. Young Justice is produced by Warner Bros. Animation and is based upon characters from DC Comics. Room 1A14

You can find the full run down on all the panels and entire press release at The World’s Finest.

Two All-Star Superman videos

MTV have put up the first trailer for Dwayne McDuffie’s adaptation of Grant Morrison’s All-Star Superman as part of the DC Universe direct-to-DVD line.

The trailer is interesting and they obviously have tried to hit iconic beats from the series, but I’m not quite as excited about this one as I have been for some of the their other releases. If I think there is a single problem it is that the trailer makes it look rather similar to the Death of Superman – i.e. a Superman who dies – feature from a few years ago.

All-Star came about after a chance meeting between Superman and Grant Morrison. Grant and Mark Waid talk about their meeting him in this clip from Respect! Films and Sequart’s documentary Talking with Gods – a new documentary about Grant’s work.

Baltazar and Aureliani Young Justice interview

Our commenter Len has brought to my attention an interview that Art Baltazar and Franco Aureliani gave to Comic Book Resources a couple of weeks ago. Baltazar and Aureliani have been the writers behind the popular Billy Batson Jonny DC title and are moving across to write the in-continuity adventures of Cartoon Network’s incarnation of Young Justice.

I wanted to ask about the format for “Young Justice.” Will these be done-in-one style stories or will there be a larger arc carrying through, sort of like with “Billy Batson?”

Baltazar: Each issue will be a stand-alone story, pretty much, but the stories will interconnect kind of. You can still read them individually though and you’d be fine. We’re trying to stay close to the cartoon, but [the comics] give the individual characters their time to shine in the issues. It’s pretty cool.

[...]

You guys mentioned the Justice League, and we know that they’ll be featured in the cartoon pretty heavily. They’ll be playing a pretty prominent role in training the Young Justice members and you’ll be seeing them a lot. Will it be the same with the comic book series?

Baltazar: Yes. [Laughs] It’s pretty much the “Young Justice” cartoon’s extended adventures. It’s going to rock. We got to see some stories of what they’re doing with the cartoon and I wish I could tell you everything. It’s amazing the amount of thought that went into this cartoon and everything involved with the cartoon is so good. And we’re going to try to bring all that to the comic. We’re going to try do as much justice to “Young Justice” as possible. This comic will be better than eating food. You don’t know if you’re going to want to go grab a burger or read “Young Justice.”

[Many thanks to Len for pointing this out. ]

Young Justice’s target audience

Greg Weisman and Brandon Vietti have been interviewed by Comic Book Movie about the the upcoming Young Justice cartoon. They commented on the target audience for the show,

I think, from an economic standpoint, we have to hit boys 6 – 14 for Cartoon Network to sell their ad space or whatever, so if you think of it as a bull’s eye with concentric circles, that’s the bull’s eye we have to hit – but I’m not satisfied with that and I don’t think Brandon is either. A, we want boys and girls, so there’s a lot of great relationship stuff in this, there’s humor in this show – I mean, it’s a serious show, but there’s a lot of humor in it, there’s a lot of eye candy for little kids. I think little kids could enjoy this show, and some stuff will go over their heads, but they won’t know it’s going over their heads. There are a lot of explosions and guys in costumes, big villains and big events that are eye candy for the youngest audience, but there’s a lot of sophisticated stories for a teen audience, a college age audience, an old fart audience like me – and I certainly think any fan of DC comics in general is going to find a lot of great stuff from the 75 year history of DC comics to enjoy in the show.

They also revealed that Nolan North would be providing the voice for both Superman and Superboy as one is the clone of the other.

New Weisman/Vietti YJ interview at CBR

CBR have an interview with Greg Weisman and Brandon Vietti, producers of the up-coming Young Justice cartoon. Some of the new stuff they discuss is the sequence for the origin of the new Aqualad…

One new character the producers developed for the show is the new Aqualad, who also recently debuted in the DC Universe proper. “Phil Bourassa, who is our lead character designer on the show, did the original design for Aqualad and Brandon and I basically created him; Geoff [Johns]came in and really liked the character and we talked about him a lot,” Vietti recalled. Those discussions eventually led to Johns introducing the character in his “Brightest Day” series – although slightly altered from his cartoon counterpart.

…and how the show will be episodic (separate, self-contained episodes), but with strong continuity and arcs.

Video interview with Greg Weisman

Comic Book News interviewed Young Justice producer at SDCC 2010 about his various animation projects including the new YJ show.

Cliff Notes:

  • Weisman was brought into WB Animation after the second season of his Spiderman cartoon at Marvel.
  • At the suggestion of Sam Register (their boss) Weisman and Brandon Vietti (his co-producer) took a look at DC’s younger characters and had to set up a clear path between Justice League Unlimited (“so iconic, so great”) and Teen Titans.
  • They put together a list of 50-60 teenage heroes from the DCU and filtered them to come up with a diverse group that fitted the themes of the series.
  • That theme, repeated from the panel, is “Secrets and Lies”.
  • They looked at Peter David’s original Young Justice, the original 60s Teen Titans, and Geoff Johns stuff.
  • Weisman knows his DC parallel Earths.
  • This is a “young” DCU so they’re dealing with the first generation of sidekicks (Dick Grayson, Wally West, Garth), but characters like Superboy and Miss Martian can be slotted into any generation.
  • “The show is a huge canvas and we have a lot of characters.” They start with four characters in the beginning (one who doesn’t join the team), the others are slowly added through the first 6 episodes. A seventh regular joins half-way through the season, and an 8th joins at the end of the season.
  • They’ve planned for a second season, but that hasn’t been green lit yet.
  • Characters mentioned: Captain Atom, Batman, Red Tornado, Black Canary, Superman, Martian Manhunter, Aquaman, Flash, Green Arrow, Captain Marvel, Zatara, Wonder Woman, Captain Atom, Hawkman, Hawkwoman, two Green Lanterns (Hal and John).
  • Greg wrote Captain Atom with Cary Bates for years and is itching to give him a bigger role in the show (he’s a member of the Justice League).
  • Zatara – not Zatanna – was mentioned as being part of the League. Could his daughter show up as a teenager?
  • The question of Wonder Woman and Wonder Girl was brought up. It seemed that it was a case of them being allowed to use Wonder Woman, but not Wonder Girl. Greg mentions legal reasons. This could possibly related to licensing – historically DC characters in movie production have been ring fenced from other projects, e.g. Smallville was restricted in their use of Lois Lane during the time that Superman Returns was being developed/distributed). Updated: Greg clarified on his Ask Greg column that they were prohibited from using Wonder Girl while the show was being developed, but that restriction has now been lifted.
  • The Young Justice comic book won’t “be a little kiddie book”. It will have the same tone as the cartoon and will exist within the same continuity. No crossovers are planned with the main DC Earth.
  • There were superheroes in the 1940s on Earth-16.
  • The voice director on Young Justice is Jamie Thomason who worked with Weisman on Gargoyles and Spectacular Spiderman.

Art Baltazar and Franco Aureliani on YJ comic

Newsarama has a brief interview with Art Baltazar and Franco Aureliani, the writers behind the new Young Justice comic and the soon-to-end Billy Batson and the Magic of Shazam title. Given their work on Billy Batson one may be forgiven for thinking that the YJ comic is in the same theme, but we already know from the SDCC Panel that the comic will be in continuity with the cartoon and that the cartoon skews towards the young teen market.

“This is just about the Young Justice team. Their stories,” Baltazar said. “The comics take what happens on the show and we expand on the stories you’ll see on TV.”

[...]

While Tiny Titans and Billy Batson were both aimed at a very young audience, the writers said Young Justice will be appropriate for kids of any age, but particularly teens.

“The cartoon falls somewhere between what they were doing with Justice League Unlimited, which felt more adult, and Teen Titans, which felt younger. This leans more toward Justice League, but with teenagers,” Aureliani said.

The new title will feature art by Mike Norton who also worked on the Billy Batson title. It should be out in November to coincide with the cartoon’s launch on Cartoon Network.

SDCC Panels: Young Justice transcript

DC Comics has uploaded podcasts of all of its San Diego panels to its website. That includes the WB Animation: Batman: Brave and the Bold Panel (MP3) which includes a few minutes of Young Justice intro by producers Greg Weisman and Brandon Vietti. It starts around the 24 minute mark if you want to jump straight to it, but the rest of the panel is quite fun and it’s only 32 minutes long. The rest of the hour-long slot was spent watching a new episode of Batman: The Brave and the Bold, which unfortunately, isn’t included on the podcast.

The panel was moderated by Sam Register, the Executive Vice-President for Creative Affairs at Warner Brothers Animation. He introduced the Young Justice segment by describing how it came about.

We were working on Batman when I got to the studio a couple of years ago and we had one show in production. We had to put other shows into development and somebody at Marvel messed up in my opinion because they let Greg Weisman [supervising producer of The Spectacular Spiderman] go. So I went hunting after Greg Weisman immediately. And at the same time Brandon Vietti, who has been working on many great shows, was directing on Under The Red Hood [the latest DCU direct-to-DVD feature]. I got these guys together. Now… they look alike, they think alike… and what came from this pairing was Young Justice.

Now guys, this is decidedly a different take on the other show [i.e. the comedy of Brave and the Bold which had just been discussed]. So what we wanted to do is, this show will be premiering this November, I think, on Cartoon Network. And what we wanted to do today, because you are fans of DC and Animation DC, we wanted to give you guys the oppurtunity to share for the first time some animation from what the Young Justice series will look like.

Greg Weisman and Brandon Vietti then take over the microphone, but its hard to tell which one is which. I think Vietti may be the one with the slightly deeper voice. Sorry if I’ve got them back to front.

Vietti: We’ve been working on this show for about a year now. It’s all about secrets and lies and we’re going to share a few secrets with you right now.

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