Superhero meets steampunk in 'Green Lantern' cartoon

USATODAY

Steampunk subculture and all its goggles, zeppelins, gears and a brown-heavy color palette have taken over some corners of literature, and now has invaded superhero cartoons.

The new episode of Green Lantern: The Animated Series (airing Saturday morning at 10 ET/PT on Cartoon Network) debuts the Steam Lantern, an alternate-world hero (voiced by Robin Atkin Downes) with a jet pack and green-tinged force blasts but who — unlike Hal Jordan and other Green Lanterns — didn't receive a power ring from the Guardians of Oa.

"He's like the ultimate fanboy in that he met a Green Lantern once and he has tried to replicate their powers using steampunk technology," says Green Lantern producer Giancarlo Volpe.

"His character arc deals a lot with what it truly means to be a hero. Is it a birth-given right or is it something that you could see someone else and consider them a hero and decide you are, too? That's the point of his character."

The main problem for Volpe and his team was figuring out a way to work him into continuity, so they decided to take matters to the Anti-Matter Universe, a major locale in Green Lantern comic-book lore.

Volpe says Jordan needed to visit at some point, and he's sent careening there after a throwdown with the powerful Anti-Monitor. He winds up on a steampunk planet, with robots, weapons and British accents galore, and teams with this world's Steam Lantern.

(Producers are keeping it ambiguous whether this planet is actually Earth-2, one of the only planets in the Anti-Matter Universe to survive the Anti-Monitor. If it is, Volpe says, "it could be their equivalent of London and maybe they're a little bit behind us technologically. We never really had a period in our history quite like steampunk.")

Green Lantern exclusive clip An exclusive clip from the "Steam Lantern" episode of "Green Lantern: The Animated Series."

The fun aspect of immersing the animation in a steampunk atmosphere is it allowed the creation of something very close to Earth but not quite, according to Volpe.

"A lot of times when we go to faraway planets, we're trying to make it seem alien," he says, "but this was one of those things that was an exotic locale, as far as I'm concerned, that wasn't like Coast City, which is essentially just buildings. It could easily be San Francisco or San Diego. But this is more of a world that's close to home, familiar to home, but very different.

"I was really happy with the way this episode ends. It gives our heroes a chance to really wow and impress. It has quite the climactic finish."

Another highlight of this new episode: some pretty blatant easter eggs for the hardcore Green Lantern fans.

"You're either going to know what they're talking about or not," Volpe says. "If you think that we were insinuating something, we probably were."