Shorts Reviews: Guardians of the Galaxy ”Star Lord” Parts 1 & 2

Spoilers Below

At only a couple minutes long each, Guardians of the Galaxy’s first two shorts on Disney XD leaves a lot to be excited about, but also a lot to be thinking about as we get closer to the premiere of the real show.

To kick things off we get a bit of a history lesson of when Peter Quill aka Star-Lord meets Yondu for the first time. Anyone who has seen the movie will be happy to know that a frame-for-frame remake of the live-action film was converted to animation, keeping the same somber tone as we saw in the film. Also, right off the bat, the character designs for the show are so far better than anything I’ve seen from either DC Comics or Marvel Comics for that matter. Those fearing we’re going to get the largely uninspired efforts seen in Ultimate Spider-Man: Web Warriors need not worry, but fans of Japanese anime should because this show looks just as good as anything I’ve seen from the land of the rising son, but with better dialogue.

In terms of voice acting, veteran James Arnold Taylor does an OK job doing his best Michael Rooker impression, and am a little surprised we couldn’t get Mike to reprise his role due to the fact that if anyone had the time to do it, it would be Rooker. We don’t see a BUNCH of Will Friedle as Star-Lord yet due to the fact that this origin story focused more on Star-Lord as a kid. Voices and character designs for the monsters sounded like they should have been picked for the Men & Black animated series rather than this one, and to be perfectly honest, seemed outrageously out of place.

For the most part, there is more to like here than not like. As a matter of fact, just by watching these shorts, I couldn’t help but wonder if there’s hope for Marvel Animation. Every major comic book franchise has been shit since coming over to Disney Animation, but Guardians of the Galaxy could be the first to thwart this and give the network their first legitimate flag bearer in comics animation similar to the way the original Batman: The Animated Series did for Warner Bros.

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