Ahead of his DC Extended Universe debut, the Blue Beetle is coming to audiences in a short as part of the latest DC Showcase animated collection. The special sees the Ted Kord incarnation of the Beetle teaming up with a bizarre hero named The Question to put a stop to the nefarious Dr. Spectro in a send-up to the classic animated superhero shows of the past.
Along with Blue Beetle, the new DC Showcase collection includes two other shorts that previously came packaged with DC Animated films – Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth! and The Losers – along with a brand-new short film called Constantine – The House of Mystery.
In anticipation of its home media release, Screen Rant spoke exclusively with story writer Jeremy Adams to discuss DC Showcase: Blue Beetle, his love for the Charlton Comics character, developing a Hanna-Barbera send-up and more.
Jeremy Adams: Screen Rant is a must read for me, so [this is] cool.
Screen Rant: I’m glad that we get to talk, because I love when people recognize the site.
Jeremy Adams: I’ve been reading that site for ages. I am like the ultimate old school nerd, man, like I can’t believe all the stuff I got abused for is now popular. [Laughs]
Then it must be a dream come true for you to help develop the story for the Blue Beetle short.
Jeremy Adams: Man, you don’t know. Blue Beetle was my number one superhero forever. It was huge, because I was working at Supernatural and Jim called me up like, “Hey, I know how much you love this. Would you want to come up with some ideas and do the outline?” I was like, “Are you kidding me?!” Rick, Jim and I sat down, we were eating lunch together – we’re all really good friends – and just came up conceptually with what it is. And I have a lot of knowledge, but Dr. Spectro was one that I had to dig for a little bit, because I needed to tie it all together. Why would we need all of these Charlton characters in one place?
That seemed to fit correctly, so for me, the Charlton Blue Beetle with Ted Kord was the first comic that I bought with my own money. I grew up in a town that didn’t have comic stores, so it was like a kind of antique store. [Chuckles] In fact, I have it up on my wall, the No. 1 with Blue Beetle versus the squids, and there’s a backup story with The Question.
There’s something about [Steve] Ditko, I love the way he did Spider-Man, I love the way he did Speedball, I love the way he did Ted Kord. My dad had given me a Doctor Strange paperback… I just love the weird aesthetics, and the weird art. That was super compelling to me; the design and Ted Kord’s really cool gadgets. I’m rambling, but I’m just saying I do love Blue Beetle. [Laughs]
That about answered half of my first question, so that was perfect.
Jeremy Adams: I love him so much, bro. This is how nerdy I am, I’ll tell you this. On YouTube, probably 13 years ago – when YouTube was new to the world – I made a Blue Beetle
that hit all three of them. There’s a video about all three of them, the origin stories of all Blue Beetles. If you search “SpaceKicker Blue Beetle,” I bet it would come up. I don’t even know how many YouTube strikes are against it, because I use music that I didn’t own, because back then [that’s what] you did. [Laughs]
It goes through Dan Garret, goes through the history of Jaime Reyes at the time. Yeah, I’m a big Blue Beetle nerd. We should have a fan base name like the Beatles. I don’t know, you can’t call yourself the Beatles, but I’ll figure it out. [Laughs]
When you were approached with this, you mentioned you chose Ted Kord since he had a very personal touch for you. Were you given free rein in terms of which characters you could and couldn’t include for the short?
Jeremy Adams: We knew we want to just do Charlton characters; we knew we wanted to stay there. One of the great things about the short is it’s a gateway to let other people know about other characters. Our joy would be that people go, “Oh, who’s Nightshade? Oh, this isn’t the Captain Atom I remember,” and go back and dig into those old archives and read some really, really fun stories. I knew it could be Ted Kord, I knew we could do Question, and it was like, “How can we put all these characters together?” Yeah, those are the main ones.
Obviously, Peacemaker is in a movie and even a live-action television show, so it’s not like people need to know about him all that much. I would love to see the new version of him interact with this animation style; that would be kind of fun. But this is a short, so we only have limited time. Otherwise I would have started putting in obscure characters.
What do you think would be the most obscure character you’d love to explore?
Jeremy Adams: I’m trying to think of other Charlton characters out there. I did Judomaster in Batman: Soul of the Dragon. I would love to know more about [and] explore Nightshade; maybe I’ll sneak some Nightshade into some comic books. Because I do love those characters that now I’m like, “Nightshade, oh, that’s fresh and weird.” [Laughs] Like I said, they just used Judomaster in the live-action Peacemaker. He’s different, but I don’t know.
You are generally used to writing full TV movies and specials. What would you say were some of the unique challenges in looking at a short versus something of a longer length?
Jeremy Adams: Luckily for me, I just had to do the outline. [Laughs] If I wrote the script, the challenge would be having to pare down dialogue and jokes, right? The cool thing for me is, because I’m doing an outline and because I helped come up with a story, it’s a little more condensed. Jennifer tells me that she thinks what I did was harder, but I somehow doubt that. Coming up with stories, the kind of blueprint for what that story is going to be, is pretty easy to me. Because I’ve worked in animation, my first job was on Green Lantern and then not too long after that on Justice League Action. Those were short.
What I learned from Justice League Action that I always took to heart was that when you when you’re dealing with a shorter project, I like to start in the second act of the project. You don’t really have to set up the superhero. You’re kind of assuming that everybody knows who the superhero is, and you jump in on action. You go second act, third act – you know what I mean? It’s very quick setup of what your stakes are, and then you just need to get out of it.
Versus if you’re doing long form, you can spend a little more time learning about the character and their foibles and weaknesses and things that you hope to pay off in the third act. I always feel like, “Okay, we can just jump into this with an action sequence, thank God.” We’re not spending that much time learning about what it is that Ted Kord had to overcome as a person to succeed. There’s a lot more just going on a fun, rollicking adventure. We play the dramatic stakes from the fact that The Question’s crazy and keeps ending up being right.
I did love that dynamic. Whose idea was it to make this like a Hanna-Barbera cartoon? Because I thought that was hysterical, and when I talked to Milo, he said it wasn’t his idea.
Jeremy Adams: Basically Jim, Rick and I went out to lunch, and we all talked about it. It just kind of came from that conversation. I don’t know who specifically came up with it, but I imagine it was probably off something Jim said, because Jim loves the ’60s Spider-Man cartoon in a way that no one will ever love it. You can look up, “Viva La Spider-Man.” That was Jim’s college movie, which is a live-action version of the ’60s animated Spider-Man starring Jim as Spider-Man. Then, Jim and I did Scoobynatural. Even in that, we think about the meta version of whatever we’re doing, and what would make this stand out.
Rick and I have done, like, 10 projects together now, so Rick and I are really close. And Jim and I are really close, so we’re all friends. I know in that conversation, what it felt like to me is we sat down, we started talking, and by the end of the thing we knew that was totally what it was going to be. We kind of knew the plot, so then I had to go back and find a bad guy. That was kind of what we were doing, and then tying in all the other characters. But I remember from that lunch that we knew it was going to be jokey, like the theme song and animation stuff.
I didn’t realize it would be as good as it was, because when I saw it… Rick always exceeds my expectation, and Milo is incredible with the storyboard guys. I’ve always said this, as a writer for animation, our job is just to give the blueprint and then let the people make the house. I can’t tell you how many times they exceed our expectations, every time, because these are artists and creatives that will take a joke and make it a better joke. [Chuckles] Visually, they make it a better joke and they make something so much more dynamic. In this one in particular, it was so reliant upon what they were doing to get across that, “Oh, this is kind of a funny send-up, but also a great, fun adventure.”
You can also check out our interview with Constantine — The House of Mystery and Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth! director Matt Peters.
DC Showcase: Blue Beetle is available to buy on Blu-ray and digital platforms as part of the Constantine — The House of Mystery collection now.
