Green Lantern: The Animated Series brought Bruce Timm's style to a new dimension

In September 2020, Giancarlo Volpe, the producer and showrunner of Green Lantern: The Animated Series, posted a bit of workplace gossip on Twitter that succinctly illustrated the superhero cartoon’s underdog status. According to Volpe, Bruce Timm—the venerated animation guru behind classics like Batman: The Animated Series and Justice League, and who makes his grand return to DC TV this week with Batman: Caped Crusader—once admitted that Green Lantern was “the best show he worked on that nobody watched.”

That sentiment rings true. When stacked against the enduring popularity of the Timm-produced juggernauts in the DC Animated Universe like BTAS and Batman Beyond, Green Lantern looks more like a footnote in the producer’s resume, an experimental detour before Timm settled into his tenure as the executive producer of Warner Bros. Animation’s direct-to-video line.  

Twelve years after its run on Cartoon Network’s DC Nation block ended, the vibes surrounding Green Lantern: The Animated Series remain at a low ebb. And a lot contributes to the show’s curio status. There’s the general feeling that Timm’s track record has been spotty outside the strict confines of the DCAU (with Batman And Harley Quinn and Batman: The Killing Joke being among his more widely dismissed works). Plus, as a series that isn’t explicitly interconnected with shows like Batman or Justice League, prospective fans uninitiated to the complex lore of the Green Lantern Corps might look at this peculiar 3-D cartoon today and feel less inclined to dive into something that isn’t canonically vital.

There is also its unfortunate connection with Martin Campbell’s 2011 Green Lantern, a ruinous misfire that its star, Ryan Reynolds, still holds in contempt and one that abruptly ended GLTAS. (After that movie’s critical and commercial drubbing, Warner Bros. suddenly saw no need to license even more green plastic toys that wouldn’t sell, and thus, Green Lantern: The Animated Series got the axe.) It boasted twenty-six episodes, one season (or two, depending on who you ask), a DVD set with a startling lack of behind-the-scenes material, and one equally perfunctory Blu-ray release before it arrived on Max. Pop culture hasn’t forgotten Green Lantern: The Animated Series so much as discarded it. 

And that’s a shame. While Green Lantern does stand apart from Timm’s more celebrated DC work—not just continuity-wise but visually, as well—the show, assembled by WB animation veterans Volpe, Jim Krieg, and Sam Register, is just as engaging, thrilling, and thoughtful as its superhero peers. And while the material it pulled from was contemporary for its time, adapting from Geoff Johns’ lauded nine-year run on the character (wrapped just as GLTAS was powering up), its incorporation of Silver Age elements from the works of John Broome and Gil Kane makes it feel as timeless as Batman and as forward-looking as Superman.

This is aided in no small part by the series’ sleek futurist design, which fused Space-Age optimism with Edgar Rice Burroughs’s muscular and vivid John Carter stories. It was a snug environment for Hal Jordan, Green Lantern of Sector 2814 (Josh Keaton), presented here as a fast-thinking, smooth-talking hero from the pulp adventure vein, more akin to Han Solo than the high-handed conservative space cop from the Bronze Age or the emotionally compromised galaxy-threatening terror from the ’90s. For a space-faring scion of willpower—the emotion that lets Green Lanterns wield their awesome rings—Hal has refreshing, down-to-earth charm. 

The art direction for the series, overseen by Timm, also provided sleek refinement to Hal’s small supporting cast, trimmed to a workable four-person unit due to the series’ tight budget. The gnarly alien features of Kilowog (Kevin Michael Richardson) were toned down, and Razer (Jason Spisak), an original character created for the show, represented an elegant shift in the villainous Red Lantern’s power set from the comics’ gross, rage-froth design. Whatever doubts Timm initially had about bringing his distinctive style to the third dimension, the gorgeous results of Green Lantern must have surely trounced them. 

Premiering as a 44-minute pilot on November 11, 2011, Green Lantern initially received warm notices from critics who complimented its narrative restraint (like Batman, it skipped the origin story), its fluid computer-generated space action (animated by the studio CGCG, which Volpe had worked with on Star Wars: The Clone Wars), and Keaton’s sturdy, agreeable characterization. Its quality, both in terms of eye-popping visuals and solid storytelling, only grew from there. Volpe and his team set out on a mindful exploration of themes such as police ethics and the consequences of unchecked power, detailed as early as its third episode, “Razer’s Edge,” when Hal discovers a planet of prisoners outside of the GL Corps’ jurisdiction who have been subject to torture. (Like The Clone Wars, Green Lantern wasn’t shy about acknowledging death, a sign of kid entertainment’s growing maturity.)

We come to understand the motivations of the series’ main heavy, Atrocitus (Jonathan Adams), who assembled his Red Lantern Corps as a response to the unchecked authority his people suffered under the Guardians of the Universe (represented by Ian Abercrombie’s Ganthet, among others). As revealed in the episode “Reckoning,” the Guardians deployed peace-keeping Manhunter androids (whose first appearance seems to evoke James Cameron’s Terminator) only to have their emotionless programming eventually ravage the far reaches of space called the Forgotten Zone, where much of the first half of the season takes place. Hal and Razer reckon with the sins of their respective groups, and a shaky peace is eventually struck between the two. (Kilowog takes longer to come around.) It was a nuanced take on the nature of good versus evil. In Green Lantern, war isn’t binary but a gradience of hues.  

As the series went on, these fascinating character dynamics became its guiding light, especially in the case of Aya (Grey DeLisle), a Guardian AI who develops sentience, a robot body, and a relationship with Razer built on trust and a bizarre sense of knowing affection. (Aya constructed her form based on Razer’s fraught memories of his departed true love.) As the second half of the series amped up the stakes—bringing in the Anti-Monitor of Crisis On Infinite Earths infamy—Aya’s ultimate role in the story took on a fearful shape and culminated in a bittersweet finale, one that ended the series with an ellipsis instead of a period. As an opening salvo and a unique spin on a well-worn comic series, the first season of GLTAS outperformed. And it had so much left to show us.

Before the new Batman: Caped Crusader could lurk onto Prime Video, Green Lantern was notable for being the last time Timm oversaw a DC television series, a changing of the guard that, for a time, led to more vivid child-friendly shows like Justice League Action and Teen Titans Go! By that point, it was already clear that Green Lantern’s legacy was to be a last big swing from the producer; five years before Hal saw his first flight on Cartoon Network, Timm’s work on Justice League Unlimited was over, and as the equally unceremonious axing of Beware The Batman proved, 3D cartooning for Warner Bros’ DC superhero line had become old-hat. In the decade that followed, it sure seemed like Timm’s style was consigned to the direct-to-video wastelands. 

With the producer’s return to Gotham City this week, and given the second life afforded other cult DC animated series such as Young Justice, there’s hope among the GL faithful (and Volpe, who continues to champion the series) that it might yet return. That hope is reasonable; in this climate of multiverses, endless sequels, and resuscitated IP, there’s every reason to reignite Green Lantern. As it exists today, sitting on Max, waiting for new eyes to view its brilliance, it’s a well-made curiosity. If it’s awarded a future, it stands a chance to become something foundational and maybe—who knows?—one of the best things Bruce Timm worked on, period.