The Guardians of Justice

2022 - 3 - 1

Guardians of Justice

Post cover — Image courtesy of "Inverse"

How Adi Shankar went from YouTube bootlegs to Netflix "fever dream" (Inverse)

The Guardians of Justice (Will Save You) is a new Netflix series featuring live-action mixed with animation, from creator/showrunner Adi Shankar, ...

“I’m making the broad point that this existed intentionally as a commentary on other things,” he says. “It’s the culmination of the last 100 years distilled into 30-minute episodes of madness,” he says. The superhero genre stopped being the superhero genre a long time ago.” “That's what I'm trying to do.” I’m of the generation where the superhero genre is just a tool to tell a story.” “No one fucking knows what's going on in his head,” Ozshan says. Every day of my life is kind of like weaving in and out of different mediums and tones.” “They created an ecosystem where the only version of this that works are blogs and podcasts; you just sit and record.” “Going on YouTube and dropping an 11-minute short film with Thomas Jane as the Punisher, that’s an act of rebellion when you're talking about the biggest companies in the world that control culture, government, and legislation,” he says. “I've never fucking worked like that in my life,” he says. “They're doing things in a way because that's how they did them yesterday.” I wanted to just come out of nowhere and drop something.”

The Guardians of Justice on Netflix is a masterpiece of awesomeness (Winter Is Coming)

The Guardians of Justice is yet another anti-superhero superhero show. Can it stand out in an increasingly crowded field?

I couldn’t sing this show’s praises any higher if I was working at Netflix (and trust me, I wish I was). Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have the rest of the season to watch. So those are my first impressions of The Guardians of Justice, a loving and gritty homage to classic superhero stories that still manages to shake up the formula. The Guardians of Justice is constantly asking itself, “what is the most fun and clever way to communicate this story beat?” And it delivers some great answers. The line between heroes and villains is very well drawn (or at least, there isn’t as much ambiguity as there is in, say, The Boys). But there are still lots of moving pieces to keep things interesting. One of the things that appeals to me about the show is the style. The Guardians of Justice are all that remain to hold the peace together.

'The Guardians of Justice' Season 1: Ending, Marvelous Man's ... (Digital Mafia Talkies)

The world is at the brink of war, with every country blaming another one for the death of the Marvelous Man. Knight Hawk begins his search for Cal's killer and ...

In Episode 1, we see Walker tell Knight Hawk that all the countries are blaming each other for the death of Marvelous Man. China is blaming Russia, whereas Iran and Iraq are blaming America. At this point, Hawk replies that the accusations don’t make sense, which, considering the 1980s, is true because Russia and China were allies, whereas Iran and Iraq were at war with each other (Iron-Iraq War, 1980–1984). To this, Walker answers that the steps that lead to war rarely make sense. This would not only make all the deaths of so many people in the course of the events of the show futile, but also prove that Marvelous Man was wrong. In “The Guardians of Justice” Episode 6, there is a scene where Hawk asks the computer to open file 377, which has the clip of Marvelous Man shooting himself. One of those so-called relationships that we have in the show is Speed-Awesome-Man, and the other is Marvelous-Man-Knight-Hawk. The love that Speed and Awesome Man share is pretty simple compared to the complexity of Cal (Marvelous Man) and Atticus (Knight Hawk). Yet, it doesn’t last long as Awesome Man kills Speed with his own hands at the end of “The Guardians of Justice” Episode 7. In episode 1, we see Marvelous Man defeating Mecha-Hitler (another dig at war). And the show ends with Knight Hawk preparing for it in episode 7. The only viable reason is that he hated Mind Master, not only for loving Marvelous Man, but also because, had it not been for Mind Master, Cal would still be alive. In the end, Knight Hawk has a whole army and the remaining Guardians at his disposal to fight Galacron, the titan whom Marvelous Man had warned about. And the Mind Master was there at the spot to stop him but couldn’t. Knight Hawk kills Mind Master, blames Marvelous Man’s death on him, and declares the terrorist organization Anubis responsible for ordering Mind Master to do so. Upon further investigation using a cortex (his own Cerebro cum Jarvis), Knight Hawk discovers that Cal and Mind Master were in love with each other and that Mind Master was present at the spot when Cal shot himself. Director Adi Shankar takes a dig at the tastes of the viewers by adding the perfect tinge of chaotic parody to all the things that we easily relate to today as pop culture. Imagine all the wars and chaos that the world has been through and is still going through.

Guardians Of Justice Season 1 Review (Game Rant)

Castlevania producer Adi Shankar's take on the superhero team is a chaotic mixed-media experience that must be seen to be believed.

The show takes some somber directions and the cast is game for the big emotions. Honorary second in command Knight Hawk begins the solemn work of investigating the death of mankind's favorite hero. Shankar's personal brand is defined by his Bootleg Universe company; originally best known for unlicensed short films crafted from pop-culture mainstays like Punisher: Dirty Laundry. Bootleg Universe has moved on from reimaginings of existing properties, and into something more like Watchmen-style deconstruction of the superhero comics ethos. Guardians of Justice was dropped subtly on Netflix on a Tuesday morning with almost no fanfare, but the bizarre spectacle of the series probably needs little help finding its audience. His likes and interests are splattered across the screen with uncritical glee with most of his works. The term comes with a certain negative connotation, but anarchic producer Adi Shankar is granting bootleg the respect it deserves.

Netflix's Guardians of Justice is Adi Shankar's Batman-loving dream ... (Polygon)

The Guardians of Justice is Netflix's new superhero TV show with a cast led by Diamond Dallas Page, Denise Richards, Andy Milonakis, and Kellan Lutz from ...

As he puts it, dropping The Guardians of Justice on a random Tuesday in March “has felt like a burden that I’m releasing.” And he could not be more excited for what’s to come. On top of cracking the case of his own ailments, Shankar is finding relief in no longer working on The Guardians of Justice. He describes himself as a “control freak,” and says that the raised stakes of each Bootleg project made the six-year process of filming and animating each bit of the ambitious series more daunting. Gone are Kid Adi, the guy who’d try anything; geek icon “Adi Shankar” of the San Diego Comic-Con circuit; and a spiritual Adi whose physical shell was mangled by the malevolent forces of the natural world. “I think the notion that I had any sort of fan base or people that were following me was a mindfuck,” he says. The “impostor” was great in a room, and a welcome ally to revered artists who would never in a million years direct a Mortal Kombat movie. Shankar admits that the aftermath of the cancer incident split him in two: the superhuman mover and shaker who could get a meeting with just about anyone, and a video-game-loving kid whose nomadic childhood and shattered college experience left him without any ground under his feet. The Graduate and The Thing producer Lawrence Turman’s 2005 book So You Want to Be a Producer became something of a bible, but a book was just a book — he needed to learn how stuff really got made. I saw the lack of opportunity in one angle [...] and doing serious interviews with the trades and going to red carpets with makeup on and literally not breaking character was also a fuck-you to a system that I felt like was literally not allowing me to participate in certain verticals because I didn’t look a certain way.” He pays his respects in The Guardians of Justice: The show’s version of Superman’s Metropolis is “Dominikopolis,” named for Killing Them Softly director Andrew Dominik; later in the series, viewers are transported to Satrapi Isle, a nod to Persepolis writer Marjane Satrapi, who directed the Shankar-produced 2014 film The Voices. Are all the characters in The Guardians of Justice versions of his psyche? His vision for what his life should look like, what the entertainment industry should look like, what a gritty Power Rangers movie should look like — it all bursts out of him with seismic effect, blowing any little discerning voices in his head back into their corners. There was no way in hell he was granting some kid the rights to Spawn. But he agreed to meet Shankar for coffee, to maybe teach him a thing or two about breaking in.

Marvelous Man in Netflix's The Guardians of Justice explored (HITC)

Marvelous Man hangs over The Guardians of Justice, so let's get the character explored as audience flock to check out the Netflix series.

He continued: “I like superheroes as a concept, but I don’t care about them on a cellular level because they are just constructs. Threatened by a resurrected and robotic Hitler, Marvelous Man saved the world from its total demise in no time at all. I wasn’t trying to make a superhero show.” This makes sense considering The Guardians of Justice can be best interpreted as a product of and comment on the superhero genre itself. Marvelous Man in The Guardians of Justice explored It offers a lot to digest, but let’s focus on The Guardians of Justice’s Marvelous Man for the time being…