Green Lantern: The Animated Series

Our Review

The best Green Lantern screen adaptation in any medium. Bruce Timm’s CG series takes Hal Jordan and a rage-powered Red Lantern named Razer deep into space’s frontier, where a Frontier Lantern’s murder starts an interstellar war. The show does what the 2011 movie couldn’t: makes the emotional-spectrum mythology work — Atrocitus is genuinely tragic (his planet was massacred by the Manhunters, the Guardians’ failed robot peacekeepers), and the spectrum’s logic powers real drama.

The core trio — Hal, Razer, and Aya, the ship’s AI who becomes something more — gives the series its emotional engine, and Razer’s arc (rage cooling toward love, and the finale’s “there is hope” beat) is the show’s masterpiece thread. Canceled after 26 episodes because the toy line flopped — the eternal animation tragedy — but those 26 are complete and better than any live-action Lantern attempt.

Verdict: Watch it. In brightest day, in blackest night, this show deserved more.