After their guest spot stint on Titans, Doom Patrol are launching into their own spin-off show! The Chief, Robotman, Elasti-Woman and Negative Man will be joined by Crazy Jane and Cyborg in fighting the villainous Mr. Nobody. The first short teaser is out: Show premieres in the US on the DC Universe streaming service on February 15th. No international release dates and/or platforms announced as of yet.
The website for the show is up: https://www.dcuniverse.com/doompatrol/ And the twitter account has started posting short teasers for some characters: https://twitter.com/DoomPatrolDCU Kinda surprised there's no proper trailer for it yet since it's coming out in a few weeks...
Now this actually looks pretty good. The addition of Cyborg and Crazy Jane is weird, but adaptations are always a little off (or a lot off). It's too bad that it's on yet another streaming service that I have no desire to pay for. Maybe they'll hook up with Amazon or something.
I dunno, adding Cyborg makes sense in a way. They've already got Beast Boy as a regular on Titans, so he can't fill his usual slot on the Doom Patrol, whereas Cyborg isn't a Titans cast member so he was available to fill the void.
I didn't realize she was still a member. I just associate her with Grant Morrison's run, and this looks like it's supposed to mostly emulate the original team.
As a starting point, yes, but there's no reason that should be a straitjacket. Any adaptation is free to draw on elements from the entire run of a series. That's the value of adaptations, that you're doing a new and different version so you can remix and distill the best parts.
I've not read any of the comics so I have no attachment to the property, but everything from the synopsis to the cast to the look to the show seems interesting to me and the Titans episode was fun so I'm really looking forward to this.
I can't think of any specific examples, but I've seen adaptations of long running teams like this mix and match members from different eras.
If you're familiar with the comics for the last few decades, Cyborg in the Doom Patrol is weird. Cyborg was always a member of the New Teen Titans. Beast Boy was a member of both teams. He started out as Beast Boy in the Doom Patrol way back in the 60s. He became Changeling for the New Teen Titans in the 80s. However, much like Marvel movies, they don't constrain themselves by comic continuity. The TV shows and movies are very much their own thing and not necessarily bound by what happened years ago in comics. That's good and bad, in certain ways.
Oh, sure. Just look at the X-Men movies and their liberal reworking of character chronology (e.g. Storm a more veteran member than Iceman or Angel, or Jubilee already a student when Wolverine first arrives). Or the way the Arrowverse creates teams out of characters who were never teamed up in the comics, like Green Arrow, Mister Terrific, and Wild Dog, or Flash, Vibe, and Killer Frost. Basically the past few years of the Arrowverse have distributed the entire Justice League Detroit lineup except Aquaman and Zatanna across the various shows -- Vibe, Gypsy, and Elongated Man on The Flash, Martian Manhunter on Supergirl, Vixen in her own animated show, and Steel and another Vixen on Legends of Tomorrow. And of course sometimes a single character is an amalgam of different ones. Every screen version of the Barry Allen Flash has had elements of Wally West folded into his character, like needing to eat a lot due to his fast metabolism, or being partnered with STAR Labs. Batman: The Animated Series's version of Dick Grayson had Tim Drake's Robin costume and computer skills, and The New Batman Adventures's Tim Drake was basically a renamed, less obnoxious Jason Todd. And this is not limited to comic book adaptations either. Look at all the Sherlock Holmes productions where Moriarty and Irene Adler are in the same story (or, in one case, are the same person). Or the way the TV version of The Expanse has introduced characters and plot threads from later books at an earlier point in the series to give it more unity.
I'm glad they recast the Chief. I couldn't stand his accent in Titans. Timothy Dalton is a fantastic actor. I think they added Cyborg to the Doom Patrol so there would be a familiar member for those who don't know much about the Doom Patrol.
Well the main villain seems to be Mr. Nobody. Cliff and Larry's look's are from the Morrison run. So They are drawing from the teams entire history.
I started watching Titans as having just finished S3 of DD, I was in the mood for something different before plunging straight into S2 of Punisher. I was expecting something much lighter, more like the cartoon, but have really loved it and particularly enjoyed the Doom Patrol episode. So I’m more than up for this.
It's a minus for me. One of the reasons that I'm seldom interested in TV or movie adaptations of superheroes (or any other property for that matter) is that they're very obviously not the characters that I want to see. The less faithful they are to the source material, the less I'm interested. Apparently so. I wonder what time period it's set in. The original Doom Patrol began in the early 60s, but the YouTube clip looks more retro than that (and the song is from the 1920s, although they're using the famous Tiny Tim cover from the late 60s).
I'm right there with you. I'm definitely in the camp that if they stray too much from the source material, my interest goes right down the drain. My wife watches Arrow. Sometimes, I will pay attention when she's watching it and it boggles my mind how much they deviate from the comics and don't get me started on some of the Marvel movies.
I'm not as bothered by the deviations with this kind of stuff since they're more inspired by the comics than direct adaptations of specific comics. The only time I'm really bothered by deviations is for stuff like this is for more direct adaptations like the Harry Potters and The Expanse. Even with that kind of stuff, if the adaptation is a good enough show or movie I'm willing to overlook the deviations.
There is no sense in doing an adaptation that's just a word-for-word copy of the original. That version of the story already exists, so it's a total waste of time just to duplicate it. An adaptation isn't supposed to be a copy, it's supposed to be a new variation on the same theme. That's how creativity works -- you take a source subject and you interpret or alter it into something new, something different. You turn a folk song into a symphony. You turn a model into an immortal god in marble. You turn a starscape into Starry Night. The purpose of art is not to duplicate an existing thing, but to build something new using that thing as your inspiration. As I've said before, "adaptation" means change. It means turning one thing into something different, something that serves a different context or purpose. Transforming the original is the entire point of the process. It's right there in the name of the thing. Doing it differently is what makes it worth doing at all. If you want something exactly like the original, that's what the original is for.