Warner Bros. Animation continues to glean beloved characters from DC’s expansive library for their DC Showcase line of animated shorts, this time opting to elevate Constantine, Kamandi, The Losers, and Blue Beetle in their 2021-2022 compilation release.
While Kamandi: The Last Boy on Earth!, The Losers and Blue Beetle have previously appeared as enhanced content on past DC Universe Movies, the extended-length Constantine – The House of Mystery makes its debut as the anchor for this shorts compilation. The quartet are produced by Rick Morales (Mortal Kombat Legends franchise), Jim Krieg and Sam Register.
Ahead of the DC Showcase’s release, STARBURST caught up with Batman: The Long Halloween and Superman: Man of Tomorrow screenwriter Tim Sheridan to speak about penning The Losers, a story about a rag-tag team of World War II outcasts who find themselves marooned on an uncharted island overrun with dinosaurs. Milo Neuman directs.
Tell us about the inspiration for this short, and what titles you turned to for research.
Tim Sheridan: I have to say – and I’m fully telling on myself here – that when I was growing up, DC’s war genre comics weren’t readily found on the spinner rack. I was pretty focused on the Justice League, and Batman, and Superman, so I didn’t come across this particular genre until later in life, which was really when I was working on the Sgt. Rock Showcase Short with Bruce Timm and the Simonson’s. That’s when I started picking up Weird War Tales, Sgt. Rock, Creature Commandos and of course, The Losers.
That was where I was really introduced to these characters, and I couldn’t believe that there was such a long history with them. Obviously, there had been attempts to reboot and rebrand them with Vertigo Comics, but there was something about that original band of brothers story that really worked. And for somebody like me who doesn’t necessarily gravitate towards World War II genre stuff, I always expected that these were not comics for me.
But as I did that research, I found that I was just completely wrong – they were a great read, they were fun, they were character-based, had huge stakes, and infused with elements from different genres. And that’s also what we did with this short: it’s not just a war movie, it’s a sci-fi, horror, and mystery. In an earlier draft, there was also something of a romance. It’s almost like, in the same way that Dinosaur Island is a nexus point for time and space, this short is a nexus point for different genres of storytelling.
Beyond trying your hand at a new genre, you also tackle a group of characters that are relatively obscure – particularly when compared to the previous DC superstars that you’ve handled. Does treating a lesser-known property change your approach to writing?
Tim Sheridan: They are less known as characters, even though they have a huge history within DC – and by the way, a 15-minute short film doesn’t give you much room to grow these characters! But there’s something about these characters that are fairly archetypal; they exist in the zeitgeist, and you don’t need to be an aficionado of war movies to understand the code. We understand who they are right away. We don’t need to spend a lot of time explaining who they are.
So in one sense, you benefit from the fact that these are very familiar archetypes, but because they are not well-known as DC characters, I do feel like there’s not much opportunity to put my own spin on them. What the mission becomes for the storyteller is to figure out how to realise these characters in a way that feels authentic to their comic legacy. Especially in what is ostensibly their final story – I mean, The Losers is designed to be their last adventure and that creates a responsibility to really get it true to the comics. There’s something freeing about that, creatively.
It’s interesting that you call it their last adventure because I found it very open-ended. Given the chance, would you consider writing a sequel?
Tim Sheridan: Maybe I should be careful about how I phrase that! It is designed as if it was their final adventure, but as you say, there are threads in the conclusion of this story that would lead you to wonder what’s happening next. There is something of a cliff-hanger built in there. We like a little record scratch at the end.
If somebody asked me to come back and work on these characters again, I’d love to have a little bit more time with them. There were other characters that we had considered and some that we had scripted originally, who we then had to cut along the way. And so, I would love to get to go back and explore some of those other dynamics and we’ll see what else we could do with these guys. I also think that if people enjoy this short, there’s a long history of stuff that we can mine from and explore and bring to the big screen for the first time. I hope to see it happen.
You’ve touched on scrapping a romance element, as well as several characters. Can you talk us through what the exact changes were, and why they were made?
Tim Sheridan: There was an earlier romance angle between Johnny Cloud [voiced by Martin Sensmeier] and Fan Long [the inimitable Ming-Na Wen], and there was a French Resistance fighter Marie who’s a very famous character in DC that we had to cut. She was a lot of fun on the page; everything she said was really interesting and funny, but ultimately it didn’t get us to the next thing in the story. And with a short film such as this, there are really hard choices to make to ensure everything is directly involved in the plot.
Other than that, though, we had a pretty clear vision about how it was going to play out. Certainly, the ending stayed the same – these are guys who think of themselves as losers. There’s an element of pride to the fact that they’re born to lose and what’s amazing is that they still hold out a measure of hope. Even when it looks very bleak, they still try. That’s what makes the Losers such an enduring group of character, and that’s what we convey with this short film.
It’s interesting that you wrote this short on the tail end of The Long Halloween, which was a huge contrast given it was stretched over two full-length features. Do you find the short format frustrating, or is it more of a welcome challenge?
Tim Sheridan: It was definitely challenging. I’m the guy who will write you what I think is a great scene between two characters, but that ultimately tells you just one tiny piece of information. And it’ll be really interesting, and the dialogue will be very intricate and full of banter – it’ll be great. But ultimately, you could probably have gotten that information out in just one line of dialogue. I love to put characters in a room and let them talk to each other for a while and see what happens. That’s the way I like to find the thread when I’m writing. But you give up that luxury when you’re doing a short film like The Losers, because it really just becomes about having a good structure. Thank goodness for Jim Krieg was there to just sit down and work through the story, figure out what we wanted to do and how we wanted it to begin and end. We were able to put that together, and I hope we were able to bring a little bit of magic to the Losers!
DC Showcase Animated Shorts 2021-22 releases to Blu-Ray on May 2nd, Digital Download on May 3rd.
