Justice League Unlimited

Fifty characters in episode one, a handful in most of the rest

The rebrand came with the episode format attached: Cartoon Network wanted the two-part stories gone and the standard half-hour in their place. At Warner Bros. Animation, the League opened up alongside the new name, and well over fifty characters turn up in the first episode alone.

Producer and story editor Dwayne McDuffie called the result a disguised anthology: small stories, one or two newcomers at a time, with little in common beyond the shared headquarters and the idea of the team itself. The second episode, aired on 7 August 2004, adapted a Superman story that Alan Moore wrote and Dave Gibbons drew in 1985. Moore, who had his name removed from the film versions of V for Vendetta and Watchmen, let it stand on this one.

The Story

Roughly two years after the events that close Justice League, the team is no longer a private circle of seven but a standing organisation recruited from across the DC catalogue. The usual shape of an episode is a small team assembling around one situation, which leaves the rest of the roster off screen.

Underneath those standalone hours, a conflict between the League and Project Cadmus, a secret government agency, builds across two seasons and resolves in four parts at the end of the second. McDuffie has said the arc emerged from the anthology structure instead of being planned, and that the older format could never have carried it.

The Ideal Audience

Thirty-nine episodes across three seasons, rated TV-Y7 with a fantasy violence flag, and Common Sense Media puts it at seven and up: drawn fighting throughout, no strong language, and the guide's only other reservation is a crude aside and the revealing costumes. The half-hour format invites picking episodes at random, but the second season is better watched in order. We would recommend it to anyone who knows these characters from the comics and wants to see DC's second rank finally get an episode.