Superman Homepage

2014 Movie News Archives

January 19, 2014: Director Giancarlo Volpe Talks "JLA Adventures: Trapped in Time"

Fans were surprised to learn about the "stealth release" of a new Target Exclusive direct-to-DVD animated movie titled "JLA Adventures: Trapped in Time", set to hit shelves on January 21. VoicesFromKrypton.net sat down with the animated film's director Giancarlo Volpe ("Green Lantern: The Animated Series") and asked him for some extra details about the movie. Here's an excerpt from the interview...

Q: What was the genesis of this particular storyline?

GIANCARLO VOLPE: Mike Ryan, the writer, and I actually had begun to develop a Justice League project, but it didn't work out. When this came around, it was confusing because I wanted to tell the story that we originally wanted to tell, but we knew that that story would require 13 episodes and the order for this was, I think, originally 44 minutes. As a result we were just trying to come up with something simple that we could fit in the 44-minute timeframe. The other impetus for this was also essentially modernizing the Super Friends TV show. Mike, who was a huge fan of the '70s Super Friends, said that one of his favorite episodes had Lex Luthor sending the Legion of Doom to the past to futz with the origins of Superman, Wonder Woman and Green Lantern. He was, like, "I'd love to retell that story."

I'm getting ahead of myself a bit. There was an initial concept piece that was drawn for this project before I was even a part of it. Two of the characters were Karate Kid and Dawnstar. If you know those characters, they're actually not from our era. They're Legion of Superheroes characters, which are 1,000 years in the future. So instantly we thought, "We need some sort of reason they'd come to our timeline." I didn't want that to be some sort of convenient rip in the sky and they fall out of it and suddenly we go on some other adventure. I wanted the whole thing to be about time travel. So when Mike heard that, he told me about that Super Friends episode, so we borrowed from that a lot. Originally we were also going to have Lex futz with multiple characters, but in the interest in keeping within the allotted time, we had to focus just on Superman. In our continuity, Superman was the first hero ever. If he never formed, there would be no Batman and there would be no Wonder Woman and so on. Lex kind of knows this and if he can get rid of Superman, there would never be a Justice League.

Read the complete interview at the Voices From Krypton website.