Green Lantern: Emerald Knights review and discussion
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Bah- it's not available through Red Box until 7-5-11 either 
It is available for rent through iTunes, Blockbuster's Rent on Demand, and Amazon's 48 Hour Rental service for 3.99.
This war on Netflix just chaps my ass. I pay for the damn DVDs as well and this is what happens!?
Do they really want to drive people to resort to piracy?
Since I'm a discovered and reformed pirate...I guess I'm off to Amazon
It is available for rent through iTunes, Blockbuster's Rent on Demand, and Amazon's 48 Hour Rental service for 3.99.
This war on Netflix just chaps my ass. I pay for the damn DVDs as well and this is what happens!?
Do they really want to drive people to resort to piracy?
Since I'm a discovered and reformed pirate...I guess I'm off to Amazon
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I enjoyed it. I thought it'd be good for my daughter to watch before we saw the movie next week.
It is good I just dont get why Sinestro is still a Green Lantern, is it due to the movie coming out??
Sinestro pops up as a GL in an awful lot of other-than-comics media - like "First Flight" the other year. He's half-rehabilitated in the comics themselves; as the founder of the Sinestro Corps he's portrayed as verging on tragic and definitely a guy with ambiguous motives. There's just something so appealing to him for a lot of the writers, I guess, that they can't just leave him as a moustache twirler - despite the fact that he's got the 'stache for it. 
It's not the same continuity as First Flight. They simply used the same character designs.
Which is pretty stupid, really.
It's needlessly confusing to the casual viewer, especially seeing as there seems to be nothing to indicate that this film isn't tied to First Flight. I'll admit, I've not been keeping up with the latest DC animation news, so when I saw this was available, even I thought it was going to carry on from FF. Realistically, most casual viewers are going to pick this up (or not) based off their enjoyment of First Flight.
What makes it even more needless is that Sinestro was completely pointless in the film anyway. He didn't do anything of significance, and they could have left him out of the GL Corps entirely, and had him as one of the stories - maybe as a cautionary tale to the new recruit, or even just what we saw in the Abin Sur story as a nod to the fact that he's out there.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed watching it, thought it was really well cast and was a nice little group of GL stories, but the Sinestro thing just niggled me a bit.
Agreed.
I read from another site that this feature was greenlit soon after FF and that because of time restraints they just did this one "in the same breath," so to speak.
But really, it's the same with Crisis on Two Earths not being part of Young Justice. Or Young Justice not being part of Batman Under the Red Hood though they have same voice actors and designs.
I am sure kids will get over any initial confusion pretty quick.
That would make sense from a production standpoint, but they could have put a bit more thought into it.
It is kinda different though, because they don't all have the same prefix - First Flight and Emerald Knights both have Green Lantern in their titles, so in the absence of evidence to the contrary, it appears that they're connected. The odd thing being that with this they kept the designs, but recast all the voice actors.
Yeah, I agree on that point, but it just seems like the confusion needn't have been there in the first place.
Kids are generally a lot more flexible in regards to continuity than adults. They just want to be entertained.
I'm with you there. I guess they did it because they think maybe it will get people to buy the movie/show instead, which IMO doesn't make sense because if people want to buy something, they'll but it whether it's on Netflix or not.Bah- it's not available through Red Box until 7-5-11 either
It is available for rent through iTunes, Blockbuster's Rent on Demand, and Amazon's 48 Hour Rental service for 3.99.
This war on Netflix just chaps my ass. I pay for the damn DVDs as well and this is what happens!?
It brought back memories of all the Tales of the Green Lantern Corps ANNUALS I used to read. The thing I would have liked to see for one is that it was "LEGION" that brought Abin down. He seemed to be like "it" but am not so sure.
It's not stupid when one realizes that the DTV's have had a mandate to have separate continuities. The only two films that are of the same continuity so far are "Superman/Batman: Public Enemies" and "Superman/Batman: Apocalypse".
The creators of the upcoming "Green Lantern" animated series have teased that we could see the formation of the Sinestro Corps as well as Blackest Night down the road. This is why they've not fully touched on this story in a DTV. Th closest we have got of course was the aforementioned "Flight Flight".
I've not seen this yet. Will probably rent it next week.
The creators of the upcoming "Green Lantern" animated series have teased that we could see the formation of the Sinestro Corps as well as Blackest Night down the road. This is why they've not fully touched on this story in a DTV. Th closest we have got of course was the aforementioned "Flight Flight".
I've not seen this yet. Will probably rent it next week.
It was good, very enjoyable. After seeing First Flight, the appearance of Sinestro did throw me off for about half a second, but then I just thought to myself, "Self contained story in the GL universe, doesn't really need to fit in with an established continuity". Especially once I saw it was a "Tales of the Green Lantern Corps" kind of endeavour.
Totally forgot about Mogo!
Totally forgot about Mogo!
Well, Netflix won't have it until next month and my local Blockbuster closed down to make room for an expansion of my local grocery store, so I went ahead and spent the $3.99 to watch it on On Demand cable (even though that means having the sides of the picture cut off because I don't have a modern enough TV). It was good. Not a great introduction to Hal Jordan, if one is looking at this as a promotional tie-in to the upcoming movie, since Hal was basically just a narrator for other people's stories. (By the same token, it wasn't a great showcase for Nathan Fillion.) But the stories were pretty good and pretty eclectic.
The "First Lantern" story had a nice idea -- that it was will and imagination rather than just warrior training that made for a true Lantern -- but it didn't quite sell it well enough, given that the outcome of the scribe's imagination was just bigger weapons. The Kilowog story was okay, but I just don't care for that "abusive drill sergeant" cliche, and the training was taken to rather ridiculous extremes. And the problem with the Abin Sur story is that it made him look like a fool, given his conviction that Sinestro wouldn't turn on the Corps. I mean, sure, Abin's whole role in the Green Lantern mythos is to fail, to die so that Hal can inherit his ring and his job, but surely he doesn't have to be made to look ineffectual, especially in a story that isn't even about that event.
The standouts were the Laira story and "Mogo Doesn't Socialize." Particularly the former. The animation in the Laira story was top-notch, with some spectacular fight choreography and some remarkably long, continuous action shots that must've been really hard to animate, but which came out with great fluidity and attention to detail. (I particularly love the bit where Laira's coming out of a flip and has to flail her arms a bit to regain her balance.) On top of that, it tells an effective character story, with some poignant storyboarding as the holographic images of Laira's childhood with her father come on sequentially as they're fighting in the background. Also excellent voice work from Kelly Hu and Tony Amendola.
"Mogo" stood out for its visuals. The backgrounds and the CG spaceships had a texture to them that's very unusual to see in animation, more of a painted look with brushstrokes or pencil lines than the usual clean lines and solid colors. I saw in the credits that the original story was drawn by Dave Gibbons, but the style of the art here, the use of color and texture and design, reminded me more of Moebius. A fascinating, distinctive look. Unfortunately, the story didn't do as much for me, since I was already spoiled on the ending, and it just doesn't have the impact if you know what's coming. Also, I had a problem with the visuals in the ending.
The frame segment was pretty good too, for what it was. I particularly enjoyed the character animation of Arisia, who had distinctive body language and expressions, like the way she stiffened when something startled her. It conveyed youth, uncertainty, nervous energy -- worked well for the character and made her stand out from the group. I also liked the animation of Krona, how slow his movements were. Animating things moving slowly is a difficult thing to do well, and usually when you see giant entities in animation, they don't move much slower than normal-sized ones (it got particularly ridiculous in last season's Sym-Bionic Titan, where the giant robot and giant monsters zipped around in the same high-speed, staccato, Tartakovskyesque manner as the normal-sized characters). But they went to the effort to make Krona's movements slow and stately and gave a good sense of his size and mass. Although of course the astronomical scale was way off. Arisia said he was the size of a moon, but if we assume Oa's sun was supposed to be comparable to our own, then just one of his eyeballs would've been about the size of Earth. And yet he was then shown to be smaller than Oa.
Well, the fact that all the voices are different should be a clue. And I didn't even notice that the character designs were the same anyway. It's been a while since I saw FF.
I don't think they have the same designs, just similar ones. I know from what I've read about YJ that they did new character designs specifically for the show.
Is it really a mandate, or more of a preference? After all, as you say, they have made one exception already, which suggests it's not something they absolutely have to do. And I do recall hearing that there was some consideration of doing sequels to one or two of them, like Wonder Woman, but they weren't successful enough to warrant it.
The "First Lantern" story had a nice idea -- that it was will and imagination rather than just warrior training that made for a true Lantern -- but it didn't quite sell it well enough, given that the outcome of the scribe's imagination was just bigger weapons. The Kilowog story was okay, but I just don't care for that "abusive drill sergeant" cliche, and the training was taken to rather ridiculous extremes. And the problem with the Abin Sur story is that it made him look like a fool, given his conviction that Sinestro wouldn't turn on the Corps. I mean, sure, Abin's whole role in the Green Lantern mythos is to fail, to die so that Hal can inherit his ring and his job, but surely he doesn't have to be made to look ineffectual, especially in a story that isn't even about that event.
The standouts were the Laira story and "Mogo Doesn't Socialize." Particularly the former. The animation in the Laira story was top-notch, with some spectacular fight choreography and some remarkably long, continuous action shots that must've been really hard to animate, but which came out with great fluidity and attention to detail. (I particularly love the bit where Laira's coming out of a flip and has to flail her arms a bit to regain her balance.) On top of that, it tells an effective character story, with some poignant storyboarding as the holographic images of Laira's childhood with her father come on sequentially as they're fighting in the background. Also excellent voice work from Kelly Hu and Tony Amendola.
"Mogo" stood out for its visuals. The backgrounds and the CG spaceships had a texture to them that's very unusual to see in animation, more of a painted look with brushstrokes or pencil lines than the usual clean lines and solid colors. I saw in the credits that the original story was drawn by Dave Gibbons, but the style of the art here, the use of color and texture and design, reminded me more of Moebius. A fascinating, distinctive look. Unfortunately, the story didn't do as much for me, since I was already spoiled on the ending, and it just doesn't have the impact if you know what's coming. Also, I had a problem with the visuals in the ending.
In the original story, Mogo's Green Lantern "ring" was a belt of forest in the shape of a Lantern emblem and ring band surrounding the entire planet. That's a cool idea. But here, the ring emblem was just a glowy energy thing that Mogo projected over his surface. That was a rather less interesting interpretation.
The frame segment was pretty good too, for what it was. I particularly enjoyed the character animation of Arisia, who had distinctive body language and expressions, like the way she stiffened when something startled her. It conveyed youth, uncertainty, nervous energy -- worked well for the character and made her stand out from the group. I also liked the animation of Krona, how slow his movements were. Animating things moving slowly is a difficult thing to do well, and usually when you see giant entities in animation, they don't move much slower than normal-sized ones (it got particularly ridiculous in last season's Sym-Bionic Titan, where the giant robot and giant monsters zipped around in the same high-speed, staccato, Tartakovskyesque manner as the normal-sized characters). But they went to the effort to make Krona's movements slow and stately and gave a good sense of his size and mass. Although of course the astronomical scale was way off. Arisia said he was the size of a moon, but if we assume Oa's sun was supposed to be comparable to our own, then just one of his eyeballs would've been about the size of Earth. And yet he was then shown to be smaller than Oa.
Well, the fact that all the voices are different should be a clue. And I didn't even notice that the character designs were the same anyway. It's been a while since I saw FF.
I don't think they have the same designs, just similar ones. I know from what I've read about YJ that they did new character designs specifically for the show.
Is it really a mandate, or more of a preference? After all, as you say, they have made one exception already, which suggests it's not something they absolutely have to do. And I do recall hearing that there was some consideration of doing sequels to one or two of them, like Wonder Woman, but they weren't successful enough to warrant it.
Yeah, 'cause no sequel or follow-on has ever recast anyone before.
Bruce Timm has been very clear from the start of these that they meant to have different continuities telling different stories. The example I stated in my previous post was an exception because as I believe Bruce stated himself it was logical to have that follow up story as the sequel.
Are casual viewers renting or buying these DTV's though? I don't think they're meant to reach that kind of demographic to be honest. At least not fully. These are being made for fans. Fans will know the difference one way or another. I just don't see this as a big deal. It would have been nice to have this fit in with the First Flight continuity but obviously Timm and company didn't feel like doing that.
Are casual viewers renting or buying these DTV's though? I don't think they're meant to reach that kind of demographic to be honest. At least not fully. These are being made for fans. Fans will know the difference one way or another. I just don't see this as a big deal. It would have been nice to have this fit in with the First Flight continuity but obviously Timm and company didn't feel like doing that.
Of course they want new and casual viewers to pick them up. What kind of idiotic business plan would it be to just make them for hardcore fans, given the cost of making and distributing them?
And as I said, my main problem with Sinestro being there as a Lantern was that he did absolutely nothing. He wasn't integral or necessary to the framing story, so why bother putting him in there at all? Anyone who is familiar with the character probably identifies him more as the leader of the Sinestro Corps anyway, and new/casual viewers who saw First Flight expect him to be the bad guy.
It doesn't even make sense to postulate that they kept him as a Lantern so people wouldn't go into the Reynolds movie with preconcieved notions about the character, since the conversation with Atrocitous blew the hat off that secret anyway.
so this the second animated movie in the series, cool .
can't wait to get it on blu ray. gl corp is one of all time
favorite millitary groups of all time. I just wish they would get around doing the lsh all ready.
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