Varking: Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Green Lanterns podcast. I'm your host as always, Will Smith of Sector 2814. And on today's episode, we are going to cave and we are finally going to cover all of this drama circling Damon Lindelof on the project Lanterns. Now for those of you completely unaware as to what has been going on for the past few days here, this all sort of starts with some controversial statements by Grant Morrison, who is a former Green Lantern writer himself. On Grant Morrison's sub stack, he wrote a new sub stack article, whatever you want to call it, and the title of it, 15-3, Woke War 3. Regardless of how much you enjoy Grant Morrison's work, I think you can see that there is a little bit of a slant. being chased here in terms of wording. If the opening that people are going to see when they read your sub stack is about woke war three, I don't believe that this is that serious. And I believe what has happened is Damon Lindelof did a comedy podcast interview well over a year ago and they got clipped in the middle of it, a spot where he said that they changed the title from Green Lantern to Just Lanterns because they all agree that the green was stupid. Was it potentially a stupid thing to say? Maybe. As a former comedian himself, it didn't bother me one bit. It felt like he was playing up a bit on the actual podcast. There's comedy littered all throughout this thing. They tell a bunch of jokes. They have the crowd constantly laughing. But let's see what Grant said and then let's see what Damon replied with. So as we scroll down, let's get to the part specifically around Damon Lindelof. What Grant Morrison wrote here is TV writer slash producer Damon Lindelof's comments notwithstanding the green in Green Lanterns, green is not stupid. Why does a writer attach himself to this kind of narrative if he thinks it's fundamentally stupid? You don't hand CSI scripts to patronizing writers who condemn forensics experts and their haircuts as stupid. So why hire people who are ashamed and in denial about the comic book material they've been assigned to develop? Why don't they turn down jobs they're not suited for? Not like he needs the money and Lindelof has proven that he can come up with his own ideas. What is this jocke-ish dismissal of superhero conventions intended to prove anyway? Does Lindelof imagine it makes him seem less nerdy? It's a bit too late for that. So what's it all about? The only people who give an F about the Lanterns TV series are Green Lantern fans. Why alienate them at the start? That feels more like stupid. So that is, that's sort of where he has the hot take, right? In his next paragraph, it's less hot take and I think it's more valid. You know, if we're just being honest here, he says, Green Lanterns is much more evocative and dramatic title than Lanterns, just as Raise the Red Lantern is a better movie title than Raise the Lantern. And anyone who can't grasp why that is shouldn't be anywhere near the superhero stories. The show might even be good. How much better could this stuff be if studios were willing to hire the right people for the job instead of phoning their embarrassed friends to water the source material down? Hollywood will die of insularity and inbreeding. OK, just my own take here. I think that he has good points throughout this. I think in general. There's stuff that you can follow here and you can get behind the reasoning. What I don't like is when like it comes across that he's assuming that Damon Lindelof himself is a patronizing writer who condemns forensic experts ⁓ and their haircuts is stupid while handing in CSI scripts. That he actually believes that green in Green Lanterns is stu- It makes it come across when he gets to the point where he says, so why hire people who are ashamed and in denial about the comic book material they've been assigned to develop? Why don't they turn down jobs they're not suited for? It's hard for me to look at Damon Lindelof's career and say he's not suited for any job for television. But he's also, in my opinion, taking this this quote from Damon way out of context here. when he's saying that he is ashamed of the source material that he's supposed to be adapting. I don't think that's true for one second. The rest of this blog or source, whatever this is, a sub stack aside, which is tremendously long, let's get out of this and go to what Damon Lindelof wrote in response. Damon Lindelof took his Instagram to write I have upset Grant Morrison, which means I have now pissed off most of the brilliant British slash Scottish comic writers I grew up idolizing. To quote the Bard, Otis Redding, this is nobody's fault but mine. I made a dumb joke on a comedy podcast. I'm not going to bob and weave about context. The joke was dumb. The fandom is not. I owe them an explanation and genuine reflection of my actual feelings. The first time I appeared on a Comic Con panel was for the Lost Pilot back in summer of 2004. I wore my favorite t-shirt as I had long grown out of my favorite underoos, those being the uniform of Hal Jordan, Green Lantern of Sector 2814. For a quiet, uncoordinated kid, there was nothing cooler than a hero whose superpower was his imagination. And green is not stupid. It is my lifelong favorite color, and I have a questionnaire that I filled out in third grade to prove it. Green is effing awesome. More importantly, it would be a betrayal to everyone I worked for and alongside to say anything other than it was an absolute More importantly, would be a betrayal to everyone I worked for and alongside to say anything other than I was absolutely honored to be a part of this team that manifested the incredible construct that is lanterns. Because it was. I was sloppy and careless with my words, ironic considering how much... Ironic considering I care so much about Hal, John, and the entire corps I can and will do better to be worthy of the oath. Until then, I'll let the show speak for itself and I can't wait for you all to hear what it has to say. Which for me feels like a very mature response. It took accountability. didn't point fingers anywhere else or blame. was just all, what can I do better going forward? I admit that my joke was dumb. At the end of the day, we were talking about a joke here that was to me very clearly a joke. And what was Damon wearing at that Comic Con that was tied to this? That you can see on screen, is Damon Lindelof wearing a pretty awesome Green Lantern shirt, one that we've all seen before, and I put green arrows on there pointing to him. So if you have a hard time looking at the screen, you can see who he is and what he is wearing back in 2004 at Comic-Con. will say it was cool to check just a little bit ago and see that there was some love and support from some of the folks who have either worked on the show or over all this. Nathan Fillion chimed in and said, the joke was funny. No harm, no foul. Keep up the great work and we appreciate you. And he's got like a green high five emoji at the end of it. Lindelof saw that and said, you are a fantastic Guy and an even more fantastic guy. Is the joke dumb? Not for me to say you guys interpret jokes however you want, but I also think that this is pretty witty. Who else? After Nathan Fillion, I saw James Gunn leave a green heart, which I feel like is stealing the emojis that I use for Green Lantern when I want to say something nice to somebody. I do the green heart too. James Gunn stole it, whatever. Nice to see him also support his guy. And then Jason Ritter also showed up in the comments an hour ago from when I was recording this close to midnight. And he used, you know, two boxes in a circle to kind of make it look like a GL logo if you were to turn this on its side. It just, it's nice to see some people showing up and supporting him in a time where there's a lot of people on the internet attacking him over what was a pretty harmless joke. In all honesty, it's a very hard- he said the green is stupid, so we just named it lanterns. The same- person who has written a show where Hal Jordan in the teaser already says Hal Jordan, Green Lantern, and they mentioned Green Lantern a couple times and have you... It just seems like the internet does what the internet does and that is blow everything out of proportion. So to the meat of it all, like where did this come from? This came from Daman Linda Lof being on a love it or leave it. And I have some. I've got some things circled here and you can see that this is from. September 9th, 2024, it's not like this was just shared a month ago, so it's making the rounds. People went and sought out this clip. from September of 2024. I'm not gonna do like the quick math, it's like roughly... I'm not trying to do quick math, but we're talking about almost a year and a half. A full year and a half from when this was shared. And it's only blowing up now. And in the description, you can see here, it says that they break down this week's biggest news and make fun of whatever BS came... Make fun of... The idea behind the podcast is for them to have a good time, tell some jokes, tell some fun stories, get the live crowd to laugh, because he does have a live crowd for a lot of this, and just genuinely have a good time. Now, here's a photo from the actual podcast. And again, I know that this is probably really hard to see, right? So I put some green arrows on here to point to Damon Lindelof up on stage for this podcast. And not only while this is while he's saying that the green is stupid, while he's saying it, what color shirt is he wearing? I'm partially colorblind, but that looks like a green shirt to me. And you can't see it in this photo here, but his shoes also have green on them. The man is clearly telling a joke. He would not be saying green is stupid and be wearing a green shirt with green and black shoes. If he were being serious, come on. I decided I was going to take a second photo of this so you can see the green and black on his shoes. But this is literally like a second and a half after he says the green is stupid. He literally laughs at his own joke because he's not trying to be serious. So it makes you wonder like the people who continue to go to old videos, find clips like this and try to rush them out to the internet where they only put a certain portion of this online or they only put the text online. Like what, what is their goal when they do something like that? Clearly the goal is clearly the goal is to get some level of engagement that they would not normally have. But it is 2026. And I thought we were at the point where when people put a statement up, people go look at different sites, different sources, and ideally it would be linked with the original post of whatever it is. But that you do your deep dive to verify that the person really said the thing in the context that is being shared in before you go and spread it further. I've literally seen people in discord make comments that because of this interview that Damon Lindelof did and because there wasn't a whole bunch of green in the teaser that this is like character assassination of Hal Jordan and it shows that I'm not joking. They say the entire creative team working on the show does not care about Hal Jordan because of this and because of the teaser. Like the audacity, the ridiculousness of a statement like that to lump in everybody when you didn't even know everybody who's working on the show. In the writers room or like producers and executive. To just be like, yeah, nobody cares about him. And then when they're called on it, like they stand on it. They're like, no, this clearly proves they have no care for how Jordan what like it is so crazy to me. The Internet discourse over a joke from 2024. from 2024. ⁓ Now, lastly, I just want to show off this cool picture that Chris Mundy took with a bunch of other creatives who had worked on the show. Clearly, the ladies got the Green Lantern shirt as a perk for working on the show. But you can see here the hat that I'm wearing. That I got from a buddy who I'm not sure if they want to be mentioned, but they are more than welcome to hop in the comments and share that I got it from them. You can see this lady in the middle next to this lady who's wearing black and has glasses. She's wearing the same hat. And right beneath her, there's a gentleman next to the pixelated thing that maybe is Ch'p Maybe not, we don't know. But, they're both wearing this hat. And the reason I'm wearing the hat is it's twofold. It's one, in the past when I've asked DC if it's okay or HBO if it's okay for me to wear this on screen, I was told no originally. But now that it's out there publicly, it shouldn't be a problem. But this hat was given out to crew members by Damon Lindelof, the guy who doesn't care about Green Lantern, supposedly. And on the hat, I'm not going to show it, but there's a message that comes from Lindelof to the team, thanking them for the work that they've done. And I read it and I read his Instagram post and I see the pictures in the past and I know people who have talked to this man who have talked to him about Green Lantern in the past. And I just can't sit here and believe that anybody truly believes that this dude does not care about Hal Jordan or doesn't care about Green Lantern in general. I think that at the end of the day, this show is going to kick butt. I think it's going to do numbers good enough to hopefully get multiple seasons. And ideally, at the end of the day, hopefully it makes both casual fans the hardcore fans proud enough of what gets put out that we don't have to keep talking about how bad most of the world thinks that the 2011 movie or any of the more recent animated movies are. And we've got something new to talk about and something new to look forward to. And again, hopefully it's good enough that when Aaron Pierre joins Man of Tomorrow, you know, to make the big screen debut for John Stewart. A lot of those fans roll over from Lanterns Man of Tomorrow and then maybe we get our own solo Green Lantern movie where, you know, Pierre as the lead and then we get the other corps members in there. That's the hope. You know, I get it looks like I'm doing a lot of defending of Damon, but I think most reasonable on the internet who are willing to look further. than just the text shared on Twitter or Reddit or whatever, and look further into what was being said, why it was being said, when was it being said, and then look into Lindelof's past history, including his body of work on other shows, including other superhero shows. Watchmen. It's just weird to see all the disrespect and slander that has gone towards this man's general direction. and towards the team that has worked on Lanterns. I think they have an all-star cast both in front of the screen and behind the screen. I can't wait for the show to come out. I can't wait for us to be able to put all this drama behind us. ⁓ Let me know what you think. Do you think that Damian Lindelof took a very mature, level-headed approach to all this and was accountable? Or do you think that he could have continued to handle this better? Or do you think that maybe... Grant Morrison was speaking a little bit out of pocket here and he took it a little bit far, little harsher than it needed to be. Either way, let me know what your guys thoughts are in the comments below and I'll catch you guys on the next one.