Nov 26, 2024

-Creature Commands- Executive Producer Dean Laurie is making James Gunn-s vision come to life

In 1980, DC Comics introduced Creature Commandos, an entirely new motley crew of supernatural heroes, to the ongoing series "Weird War Tales." The team of Monsters is the author J. With a story set during the Second World War.M.Created by DeMatteis and artist Pat Broderick.

The team featured werewolves, Frankenstein monsters, gorgons and vampires and was led by an average human soldier, Lieutenant Colonel Matthew Shreve. The gang went on a mission for three years before retiring from the cartoon rotation until it was reinvented in 2000 and then evolved into the current iteration during the new 52 reboots in 2011. At that point, the troops were sent to S.H.A.D.E.Become a secret agent for a fictional U.S. military organization known as a Superhuman advanced Defense executive, a superhuman advanced defense executive, a superhuman advanced defense executive, a superhuman advanced defense executive, a superhuman advanced Defense Executive, a superhuman Advanced Defense Executive, a superhuman Advanced Defense Executive, a superhuman Advanced Defense Executive, a superhuman Advanced Defense Executive, a superhuman Advanced Defense Executive, a superhuman Advanced Defense Executive,

It's this iteration of Creature Commandos that James Gunn, co-Chairman and co-CEO of DC Studios, fell in love with as the first property to launch his own rebooted DC Universe (DCU) story. A slight cheat, this r-rated adult animated series first appeared in the 2016 featured Suicide Squad and still hangs behind the scenes through DCEU character Amanda Waller (Viola Davis)

In this Creature Commandos series, she comes back and plays Task Force M, basically Nice. Create a black Ops team of monsters that are blackmailed to follow the guidance of General Rick Flag Senior (Frank Grillo). He tries to suppress this unruly group, including amphibian scientist Nina Mazursky (Zou Chao). Robot (Sean Gunn), Radioactive Doctor Lynn (Alan Todik), Bride (Indira Varma), and finally Eric Frankenstein (David Harbour).

The first season of the 7 episodes of Creature Commandos (debuts on Thursday 12/5, followed by weekly episodes until 2025/1/9) will be fully written by Gunn and will feature Warner Bros. Animation's other adult animated series, Harley Quinn and Kai. Toman: Hell Yeah was a show run by Dean Lowry who was successful in executive producing. Cartoon Brew recently spoke with Lorey about Gunn's vision, the aesthetic challenges of their show, and whether there is a feature-length animation plan for these squads.

Cartoon Brewing: It was your existing success with Warner Bros. Animation and adult animation in DC that led to showrunning the Creature Troop-

Dean Rowley: Well, James was actually in one of Harley Quinn's episodes as himself. There was. He was always a fan. At Creature Commandos, it was a passionate project for him. He started writing it before he became [co-Chairman] of DC. He wrote 4 of them, and he became [co-chair]. He has always wanted to do it as an animated show, and potentially as a live-action feature at some future time. But it started with animation.

The top executive was Peter Girardi, who was also an executive at Harley Quinn and Kaitman. Peter came up to me and said, "Do you want to work on this with James-" The script was great, so I quickly became a part of it I met with James, met with Peter, and that's how I came to it. It was really pretty seamless.

How the handover from Gunn to you works and director Yves "Barak" Bigelaire and Paris-based studio Bobbypills are working hard to make day-to-day decisions.-

First of all, James was involved in every step, but I was surprised at what he could do. I literally don't know how he found time to do it. But we send him animatics. We sent him various cuts and he always came back to us immediately with very detailed notes. So it wasn't like I just took it and ran with it. He was part of the process. But when you're just starting out with the script, there's a lot of interpretation. Our animation director, Rick Morales, was closely involved in all of this. We cooperated with Bobbypills on design and everything. But at some point you have to take ownership of the project just to get things done, even if you're not writing it. But we always knew that having James was like bowling on a guardrail. If he did not correct the course, he could not go far.

What were some of the things you decided-

A lot of it became just about taste. I like the very fast pace, and so does James. Harley and Kaitman are cut very tight, and so is this one. That sensibility has been transmitted to Creature Commandos, but I think they shared that sensibility, even in very different shows. Harley and Kaitman are like pure comedy with some drama in it. This is a drama with action and a little comedy, but the DNA is very similar.

In terms of the overall aesthetics and character design of this series, was there a particular comic book issue reference from Gunn, or was there a lot of leeway there

Some of it came from previous works, as Belle Reve [prison] is already established in features. James always thought of the show as Canon, so he wanted it to follow what was established before. We did it, but there was a lot of flexibility in this show. So, we designed it to have a gothic, lush, Eastern European feel, very deliberately like an old hammer horror movie. It's like that, because our castle is always on the hill. But we really wanted it to feel lush and I think it does. We are working with an eye to painterly quality, and some of it came from Bobbypills and our side. It was a lot of excited people working together. It was one of those projects where, as we were working on it, sometimes new cuts might come in, and we looked at each other and said, "Is this as good as we think -"Everyone thinks "we're working on a really good show.""

Did you have any characters in your core lineup that are the hardest to iterate through -

I'm G.I would say. The robots were hard work because we didn't know exactly what we wanted. I knew he was designed in the 40s, so I wanted that classic look. But we also wanted him sweetness, yet he also had to be able to kill the whole division of the Nazis. It was hard to try to figure out where the weapon is on him, and how he looks face to face - but I would say Sean Gunn, when we recorded his take on him, it was so specific and so interesting that it informed the appearance of the character.

Then I would say Nina Mazursky needed a good job. Her [water] helmet, what does it look like - how does she breathe - do you see bubbles- and I guess Frankenstein and the Bride, it was a bit hard to find a modernized version of those classic characters.

In the second episode, we can see Eric Frankenstein and the bride and their adopted looks quarreled through decades. The development of its sequence helped you to solve their current appearance in the series-

We didn't actually work backwards from it, but it was a lot of trial and error. We wanted to be those characters so that they could be recognized, but were modernized. A lot of it has to do with the dress too, and that it helped. But as most of the series is done in Butchalistan, so are some of the heavy lifting, as they naturally fit into their settings.

The sequence of watching Eric Frankenstein and the bride chase and fight each other over time is what allows the animated medium to actually do something the live-action budget does not allow. Is there more such a sequence in the first run of the free-leaning episode that the animation gives you -

That's probably the biggest example. But I would say the Weasel episode with Fire and kids, we were doing that live-action, I don't think it's landed properly. The distance you get from the animation was where it felt like the animation really helped us because it only gave you one deletion and I think you need it to see a child with this kind of danger. And there's a lot of scene construction that we could do with animation. There's an episode in which Frankenstein is knocked out by the river, and the entire sequence of that river is very animation-friendly.

The Creature Troop does not pull its punches when it comes to portraying sex and violence. What was the threshold for how much was too much-

Lorey: In terms of violence, we wanted to hurt it. We wanted people to really feel it. But let's get it cartoon, at some point. In sex, it was really driven by the need for narrative. There is a scene between the bride and her creators, it is a creepy and creepy scene. I remember the original board I saw was kind of like a sex scene. We all think, "That's not what this is.""So we kind of reconfigured it. Comparing it to say, in the pilot, when Princess Ilana and Flag are together, it's like a traditional sexy scene. And much of it actually had to do with the content of the scene, as opposed to the overall mission.

As you mentioned, there was already a conversation about turning the Creature Squad into a live-action movie. Is it a committed path, or could this series eventually lead to more epic adventures on the big screen-

We have a big screen of it I would guess everything is on the table. We know that we very much want to do the second season of the show. And it depends, at some level, on James's writing schedule. We need to understand that.