Summary:
Wonder Woman returns to Themyscira to find that sorcerer Felix Faust has attacked
the island and turned everyone into stone. In
order to save her mother and fellow sisters, Diana agrees to help Faust recover pieces of
an artifact that will help him attain Ultimate Knowledge.
However, all is not what it seems, and Faust has an ally…
JL
Roll Call: Superman,
Batman,
Wonder Woman, The Flash, J’onn J’onzz
Featured Character:
Wonder Woman
Villains:
Felix Faust
Cartoon Network on “Paradise Lost”: “Returning home to Themyscira, Wonder Woman finds that a powerful sorcerer named Felix Faust has turned her mother, Hippolyta, and the rest of her Amazon sisters into stone. Faust promises to free Themyscira from his evil enchantment if Wonder Woman agrees to help him find the lost fragments of a mysterious ancient relic" (courtesy of Cartoon Network).
Rich Fogel on
"Paradise Lost" #1 (circa 2002): “We will finally get to spend some time with Wonder Woman and
learn more about her Amazon heritage. […] This is also a very emotional story where
Diana is tested at every turn. No
one will ever view Wonder Woman the same way after they've seen 'Paradise
Lost'"
(courtesy of [website
name removed]).
Rich Fogel on "Paradise
Lost" #2 (circa 2002): “The story turned out
great and, as director Dan Riba points out, it plays like a Ray Harryhausen epic
with lots of monsters and lots of magic. This
story also puts Wonder Woman squarely in the spotlight.
When her home on Themyscira is threatened, she is forced to make some
hard choices. Susan Sullivan is
wonderful as Hippolyta, Wonder Woman’s mother.
When Part Two came back from overseas, we were blown away by what our
friends at KoKo had done. It’s
amazing! This show should be a treat
for anyone who enjoys adventure, myth, and magic" (courtesy of Toon
Zone).
Rich
Fogel on "Paradise Lost" #3 (circa 2002): “I
wanted to do a magic-based story as a change of pace from all the sci-fi epics
we’ve been doing on Justice League, so Felix Faust seemed like a natural place
to start. I also liked the structure
of the original Silver Age Faust story from Justice League of
Joseph Kuhr on Wonder Woman in "Paradise Lost": “With bigger-than-life characters I think it's important to let some of the air out to make them easier to relate to. For example, in 'Paradise Lost,' Wonder Woman decides to go home for the first time since leaving Themyscira against her mother's wishes. The princess loses her ‘superior-than-thou’ vibe when, like a high schooler who took mom's car and stayed out all night, we see her desperately trying out different stories to tell mom when she gets home" (courtesy of Toon Zone).
DarkLantern on Wonder Woman in “Paradise Lost”: “Even an inborn power like flying can take a lot out of you; a jet is good for long distances. [Which is why], even though Diana can fly, she traveled back to Themyscira in the Javelin-7 in ‘Paradise Lost’" (courtesy of Toon Zone).
Bruce Timm
on the Wonder Woman / Superman fight: “Probably
the big centerpiece of Part One is the big Wonder Woman / Superman fight that
takes place in the second act. This
goes back to taking a hint from the comics:
there was a large size comic that came out in the 1970s; it was Wonder
Woman versus Superman and it was, basically, kind of a hokey reason for them to
get together and fight. That’s
something that comic book fans have a tendency to talk about amongst themselves
anyways, so you’re always wondering who’s stronger or who would win in a
given fight. You know, it’s like,
‘Oh, if Plastic Man and Elongated Man fought, who would win?’
So, we thought that it would be really fun to do and we came up with a
very clever way of getting them to fight each other without knowing that
they’re fighting each other.
“I know,
some of the fans on the Internet were saying, ‘Well, how could Wonder Woman
beat Superman?’ She doesn’t
actually—we never actually come down and say what exactly their respective
power levels are, but we’ve always kind of assumed that she’s almost in his
class. I mean, she’s a pretty
strong character and she has a lot of the same power levels and abilities that
he does: she flies, she’s
super-strong, she’s super-invulnerable, [and] super-tough.
You know, we certainly thought that they would be a pretty even match in
a fight. It’s
important to realize also that—at a certain point—he realizes what’s going
on and holds back. So, it’s pretty
much a draw, even though she gets…the better of him [a little bit] during the
fight" (courtesy of the Justice League: Paradise
Lost DVD).
Bruce Timm
on “Paradise
Lost” (circa 2003): “Especially
early on, we really wanted to…push the widescreen, Hollywood movie kind of
feel and have big, earth-shattering events and, y’know, once these guys go
into battle, we really wanted to rock the house.
At the time, this was the largest scale fight scene that we had ever
attempted and we were actually really, really nervous about it because some of
the things that we called for on the storyboard.
I mean, when you see the army of the dead come rising up and it’s
literally an army—it’s hundreds of zombie warriors [and] every single one of
those zombie warriors has to be drawn by hand.
So we were very, very nervous that the show would just fall apart,
animation-wise. We looked at the
board and went, ‘Wow, this is going to be great, but can they animate all
this?’
“We all breathed a huge sigh of relief when the show came back and it…they literally pulled it off. They didn’t skimp on anything—I mean, they probably used their computer to double the size of the army, or quadruple the size of the army, but there’s a whole lot of pencil mileage going on in that big action set piece" (courtesy of the Justice League: Paradise Lost DVD).
Bruce
Timm on “Paradise Lost” (circa 2005): “The
little montage flashback sequence to Hippolyta and Hades was quite nice, but the
thing that I remember most about ‘Paradise Lost’ is that we were trying to
step up the spectacle level, in the third act especially.
When I saw the storyboard, what the artist had done, I kind of gasped and
thought, ‘There’s no way they’re going to be able to pull this off on a TV
budget,’ but the story really needed that kind of huge scale.
So we took a deep breath, shipped it off to
Bruce Timm on re-using footage from “Speed Demons”: “You’ll notice that right before the ‘re-use’ footage, Flash is running away from Faust. We needed to have him coming towards Faust, but just didn’t have the shot, and asking for all-new animation that late in the game is pretty much out of the question, gets very expensive. ‘Paradise Lost’ was only the [fifth] Justice League episode, so we had very little footage to choose from, but remembered that shot from [the Superman episode] ‘Speed Demons,’ plunked it in. My film editor and I were worried the shot stood out like a sore thumb (the film grain is a dead giveaway), but we ran the footage for several people including the episode’s director, Dan Riba, and nobody noticed it, even on repeat viewings. The eagle-eyed fans, however!
“In hindsight, we probably shoulda just gone with the iffy continuity, left out the ‘Speed Demons’ footage. Ah well, live and learn" (courtesy of Toon Zone).
Images
Screen Grabs from "Paradise Lost"
"Paradise Lost" Image #1 | "Paradise Lost" Image #2
Commentary
Commentary
coming soon!
Images courtesy of Bat313, Cartoon Network, and Toon Zone.
