Green Lantern: The Animated Series

Well I was well prepared not to like this. I thought the movie was pretty much "meh," and that also sums up how I feel about the character of Green Lantern ala Hal Jordan. The animation looked craptastic and then I saw the main villains were going to be Red Lanterns. Red Lanterns! They are so close to a parody of nineties style super heroes that it hurts.

So given all that I was surprised to end up really liking it.  The animation is still craptastic, but it does have a fluidity to handle the battle scenes which helps a lot.  There are a lot of battle scenes!  They mix it up to between Lantern fighting and spaceship battles.  There were parts that just made me cheer like when Hal made a baseball bat with his ring and went to town on some red lantern whippersnapper. 

But a show should be more than a lot of cool fights, though I like me some cool fights don't get me wrong there.  Luckily, the writers here are operating at optimum levels.  They have obviously planned things for a long interesting story arc.   The first thing they did right is they isolated Hal from his little blue bosses who are the eternal kill joys.  Using and then breaking a one of a kind prototype of a green lantern ship they are now 18 months away from any help from the blue geeks of Oa.  They second smart thing was having Kilowog be Hal's wing (ring?) man.  Kilowog is huge alien with a nice sense of humor who keeps Hal from getting to puffed up. 

The even made the Red Lanterns interesting.  They are filled with righteous rage over something the green lanterns and their bosses did.  This is why they are literally burning with red energy and killing any green lantern they can find.  In the pilot, though, one of them has enough conscience to feel bad about blowing up a planet just to kill lanterns.  In the end, he tries to get Hal to kill him to put him out of his misery.  Of course Hal doensn't so it will be interesting to see what happens with that character.

Another thing that made for an enjoyable hour of TV was that there were some mini shorts included based on DC characters.  Nothing earth shattering, but a teen titan belch off was fairly funny.  I can say I definitely enjoyed the entire package and I'd watch it when it starts in 2012.