Green Lantern The Animated Series Was Another Show Killed Off Too Soon

 Since it's St. Me Day and the color of the day is green, why not talk about Green Lanterns?  Particularly Green Lantern The Animated Series that I watched on HBO Max last month.  This was the forerunner to Beware the Batman in its CGI animation style, its more adult-oriented storytelling, and its 26-episode run.  Since I watched Beware the Batman, why not watch the other?  And Michael Offutt had a blog entry about it a long time ago.

(Not to go on a rant, but you people probably don't remember shit I say but I remember a blog post of yours from 8 years ago.  I'm just saying.)

Anyway, this was aired on Cartoon Network not long after the failed (but not terrible) Ryan Reynolds movie.  It thankfully doesn't start with an origin story.  They make you think that at first when they show Hal Jordan flying a plane, but then he takes out his ring to save a train so this starts after he's been a Green Lantern.  Like Beware the Batman it's more of a Year Two than a Year One.

Hal is called back to Oa after the murder of a Green Lantern whose ring came back.  Defying the Guardians who made the Green Lantern rings, Hal and the pig-looking Kilowog steal "the Interceptor," a prototype spaceship that has its own miniature version of the central battery the Lanterns use to charge their rings.  They head out across the galaxy to "the frontier."

There they discover that there are "Red Lanterns" who have rings that run on rage instead of willpower.  This mostly borrows from Geoff Johns's long run on the Green Lantern comics where they introduced a whole rainbow of rings:

Green:  Willpower

Yellow:  Fear

Red:  Rage

Purple:  Love

Blue:  Hope

Orange:  Greed

Black:  Death

White:  All the colors

I think largely then to save money by restricting the number of cast members (something they did for the Beast Wars Transformers show back in the mid-90s) the Interceptor is damaged so they can't go back to Oa right away.  Instead they're trapped in that sector of space for a while and have to recruit allies and find a way to stop the Red Lanterns.

One of the Red Lanterns named Razer is captured and ends up defecting to their side.  Meanwhile the AI that runs the Interceptor creates its own body and goes by the name Aya.  With the willpower battery on the ship it more or less has the same power as Hal and Kilowog.  Aya's body is based on Razer's dead wife and they start to develop feelings for each other, but Razer has a hard time with her being an artificial being.

The first 13-episode season ends with Hal and his allies defeating the Red Lanterns by stopping them from killing the Guardians on Oa and blocking passage for a fleet of Red Lantern ships to enter Oan space.  Razer and Aya are reunited after the Red Lanterns hijacked her and the Interceptor.

The second 13-episode season starts with Hal returning to Earth only to find a new Green Lantern there.  Not John Stewart.  Not Kyle Rayner.  Not Simon Baz.  Not Jessica Cruz.  No, the other one--Guy Gardner.  He and Hal butt heads at first but then learn to work together.  But then Hal has to go back into space because Manhunters are coming to life and attacking planets.  Manhunters are robots originally built by the Guardians before the Green Lanterns, but they started to think that anything with emotion needed to be killed and so were deactivated.

To stop the Manhunters, Hal reassembles his team from the first season, which means having to break Aya out of a lab where she's being studied.  Once in space, they find that the Manhunters have been revived by "the Anti-Monitor," a being who comes from the "antimatter universe" and is trying to destroy all life.  You might remember him from Crisis on Infinite Earths on the CW.  

Hal's first encounter with the Anti-Monitor ends with him being sent into the antimatter universe, where he ends up on an Earth-like planet that's been turned into a 19th Century steampunk planet.  There's a reference to the original Green Lantern who had a red costume and wore a cape, but after he died, someone else took his place.

After getting back to normal space, Hal and company's next fight against the Anti-Monitor doesn't go much better.  Razer is cut off and Aya goes to save him.  He confesses his love and she is thought to be killed to save him.  But she comes back later, having cobbled together a body from Manhunter pieces.  Now that she's alive, Razer retracts his love for her.  This makes her so angry that she drains the ship's battery of power and then beheads the Anti-Monitor.  Instead of coming back to the ship, she takes over the Manhunters and decrees that she's going to destroy all emotion.

So for the second half of the season, Aya is the main villain.  This creates a problem for Hal and especially for Razer as he's still uncertain how he feels about her.  After the Interceptor crashes on a distant planet, Hal and company get back to Oa and then look for the orange Lantern battery.  The Orange Lanterns, driven by greed, basically killed each other until only one remained, a Gollum-like alien called Larfleeze.  He's a fun character and it's too bad they don't have a season 3 or a spinoff to work him in more.

The final confrontation takes place on a planet where the head of the Anti-Monitor has erected defenses to try to keep Aya from stealing its time travel portal generator.  But of course she gets it and goes back to the start of the universe to try to erase all "emotional" organic life.  Meanwhile Guy Gardner returns and mentions that John Stewart has taken up being the Lantern of Earth, so again too bad there wasn't another season or maybe he could have shown up, gotten promoted, and then Kyle Rayner could have become the Lantern of Earth.

There is a great, emotional ending where Razer is going to kill Aya, but he can't bring himself to do it.  She blasts him, but then realizes her love for him, which means even she is not a perfect unemotional machine.  She saves Razer and then uses a computer virus to destroy the Manhunters.  But like Terminator 2 she also destroys herself to make sure all traces of her and the Anti-Monitor are gone.

The series ends with Razer going out into space to search for any signs that Aya might still be out there.  A blue ring follows him, drawn no doubt by his hope.  Which means that probably in time he would have lost the red ring of rage and started wearing the blue ring of hope.

It's kind of odd that while Hal Jordan is supposed to be the main character, he's kind of the third most important character in the series behind Razer and Aya.  They really could have used any of the human Lanterns and it would have been the same--if not better.

It's interesting that while this was airing on Cartoon Network before the Adult Swim block for adults, it was not really aimed at kids.  That's evident when the series begins with Red Lanterns murdering a Green Lantern.  Even if it's not overly graphic, it's still more PG-13 than PG.  A lot of the story material isn't all that kid-friendly either like when they go to a prison where the inmates are tortured with their worst memories.  Along with the love story of Razer and Aya it really was more like a grown up sci-fi show like the various Star Trek series than a series for kids.

Fun Facts:  In the comics Sinestro has been a longtime antagonist, even going so far as to form the Yellow Lantern or Sinestro Corps.  But in a second season episode Sinestro is still a Green Lantern. Sinestro was voiced by Ron Perlman who was not only the original Hellboy but as mentioned in a previous entry voiced a character on Batman the Animated Series.  

Sergeant Kilowog is voiced by Kevin Michael Richardson, who also voiced Bulkhead on the similarly CGI-animated Transformers Prime that aired around the same time.  You might also recognize his deep, rumbling voice from American Dad, Family Guy, and The Simpsons.