Cosmic Confidence
Long before it paid off as a big-screen box office hit, Marvel trusted its material to turn
into an animated series debuting Sept. 26 on Disney XD. By Tom McLean.
When Marvel set in motion Guardians of the Galaxy as a major entertainment franchise, it seemed to like a long shot given its obscurity even to comic-book readers. But even before any footage was shot for the hit 2014 feature film, the studio had enough confidence in the franchise to greenlight a follow-up animated series.
“Marvel had a strong feeling about the film and knew there was something special with these characters and a lot more stories to tell,” says Cort Lane, co-executive producer on the series. Lane says he read and loved the movie script — even listening to the now-famous classic rock tracks as he followed along — and immediately saw the potential for animation.
“We started talking about what a series would look like, what type of stories did we want to tell about these characters and what more could we learn about them,” he says.
The results debut Sept. 26 on Disney XD, as Guardians of the Galaxy brings to animated life the adventures of Peter Quill (a.k.a. Star-Lord), Rocket Raccoon, Gamora, Drax and Groot. The series features the voice talents of Will Friedle as Quill, Trevor Devall as Rocket, Vanessa Marshall as Gamora, David Sobolov as Drax, Kevin Michael Richardson as Groot and James Arnold Taylor as Yondu and the telepathic dog Cosmo.
The Marvel Animation series is executive pro- duced by Alan Fine, Dan Buckley, Joe Quesada and Jeph Loeb, with co-executive producers Stan Lee, Eric Radomski, Lane and Stephen Wacker. On board as supervising producers are Marty Isenberg and Harrison Wilcox. The consulting producer is Steven Melching and the supervising director is Leo Riley.
Fitting the Guardians into the ever-expanding Marvel Universe and its continuity is a question Lane says is less important than telling good stories.
“From a continuity point, we don’t want to get lost in the weeds, which is very easy to do with Marvel properties,” he says. “We’re not going to contradict these versions of the Guardians characters. We’ll try to be pretty consistent, but we’re less concerned about complex continuity and crossovers as we are in just getting the characters right so that a viewer from one show to the next goes, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s the Rocket that I love.’”
The show has some serialized elements but is not intended to be a fully serialized experience. One mid-season arc in particular brings in a number of established Marvel characters. Among the characters fans can expect to see are Thanos, who is the season’s main villain; and Cosmo, a Russian cosmonaut dog with telepathic and telekinetic powers who had a brief cameo in the movie and a has large role in the comics.
“We also get to meet a lot of new villains — some we’ve never featured in any animated series, some are reimagined for this series, and then there are some new characters that were created for the series,” says Lane. “It’s the best of all worlds.”
An Early Start Work began on the show a year before the movie was released and it was in development concurrent with that of the movie. On the animation side, Riley says he referred to the handful of appearances the Guardians had made on other recent Marvel animated series as well as the comic books. But otherwise, “At the time, I was kind of winging it,” he says.
“I looked at the property and said if I had a chance to work on it, this is kind of the visual approach I was interested in. And around that time I got an invitation to go see an early cut on the movie and from that we could definitely get a sense of how the characters were going to play out.”
Riley says early animation tests focused on action and a visual style, with requests for revisions coming back from Marvel based on how the movie was developing and other plans for the characters in areas like comics publishing.
By the time the show had character designs that reflected the feature versions, Riley and his team was able to do some translation to
course a lot of the production teams that we’re using are already familiar with the style that’s been established,” he says.
Jake and the Never-Land Pirates, Season 4
New episodes airing Fridays
New episodes airing Fridays
New episodes airing Saturdays
New episodes airing Saturdays
New episodes airing Saturdays
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New episodes airing Fridays
New episodes airing Fridays
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