Summary: Investigating a burglary in Central City, Green Lantern and the Flash discover the mastermind to be Grodd, a super-intelligent gorilla and fugitive from Gorilla City. Teaming up with Solovar, a detective from the hidden city, the duo must stop the simian criminal, who uses his super-science to shroud Central City in a cloaking device and manipulate the populace using mind control. Meanwhile, the rest of the Justice League, discovering the city's disappearance (and an unusual energy signature emanating from its original location), investigate, which leads them to Africa, and an area exhibiting a similar phenomena. In the end, the two teams must work separately to achieve a common goal: stop Grodd and prevent him from destroying Gorilla City with a nuclear missile.
JL Roll Call:
Green
Lantern, The Flash, Batman,
Wonder
Woman, Hawkgirl, J’onn J’onzz
Featured
Character:
The Flash
Villain:
Gorilla Grodd
Cartoon Network on “The Brave and the Bold”: “The Flash and Green Lantern team up to save Central City from the mind control of an evil super-genius gorilla named Grodd" (courtesy of Cartoon Network).
Dwayne McDuffie on "The Brave and the Bold" #1: "I had done a few Statics, and I got a call from Rich Fogel, who was the story editor on Justice League, asking me if I wanted to finish a Justice League script that Paul Dini couldn't finish because of a hand injury, and—my lawyer says that I can't stress this enough—I can prove I was nowhere near Paul when his injury occurred" (courtesy of Write Now! Magazine).
Bruce Timm on “The Brave and the Bold”: “Circumstances resulted in the story being handed off to Dwayne McDuffie, and thank God it did. That was my first time I’d read any of his work and I instantly fell in love with his take on the characters and his dialogue especially. I realized that this was a guy we could use, to the point now where he’s been promoted to producer on the third season and he’s in charge of the story department.
“Taking a cue from the comics, the [Barry Allen] Flash and the Hal Jordan Green Lantern were always like best buddies back in the day. With the new personalities we’ve got for our Green Lantern and Flash, we thought, ‘What kind of friendship would these guys have?’ It’s almost an Abbott and Costello, oil and water, movie buddy cop relationship. I think they’re a great comic duo when they’re together; they’re perfect foils for each other.
“And then there’s Gorilla Grodd. If you’re a fan of DC Comics at all, then you have to love supervillain gorillas. I thought he was an interesting character and we were super-excited to have Powers Boothe come in and play him. Come on, we’ve got Powers Boothe voicing an evil mastermind gorilla. It doesn’t get any better than that, so that was way cool.
“The thing that James Tucker and I were really surprised at was how well the climax works. That’s one of the episodes where it’s paced properly, so at the end when the nuclear missiles are flying towards Gorilla City and our guys are racing to stop them, that climax just accelerates until the final moment. I just think it fires on all cylinders at that point.
“In the script, there’s a bit where Batman is digging for Diana—he thinks she’s dead and it turns out she’s not. I improvised on the storyboard this little bit where she looks down and sees that his hands are burned from digging through the rubble and gives him a little peck on the cheek that’s saying, ‘Aww, aren’t you sweet?’ That’s all it was intended to be, but the fans went crazy on the Internet. They were like, ‘Oh, there’s something going on between Batman and Wonder Woman.’ We’re like, ‘No there isn’t, it’s just a nice little bit,’ but then we started thinking about it. What if there was something between Batman and Wonder Woman? So we started flirting with the idea of them flirting; it’s kind of given us one little extra shade to play in the overall dynamic of the series" (courtesy of RetroVision CD-ROM Magazine).
Dwayne McDuffie on “The Brave and the Bold” #2: “Probably the most fun thing about that was in the moment when Flash is mind-controlled where he has this acid flashback where [he] turns into a gorilla, gets real fat, sees mirror images of himself—all of which were from ‘60s DC Flash titles. I just went through every copy of Flash I could find and found the freakiest covers and sort of strung them together. The Flash always had great covers: ‘It’s the Flash, but his head is really big! It’s the Flash, but he’s immensely fat!’" (courtesy of RetroVision CD-ROM Magazine).
Dwayne McDuffie on "The Brave and the Bold" #3: “The episode features Flash and Green Lantern bickering incessantly as they join forces to battle Gorilla Grodd, who is a super-intelligent gorilla bent on world domination. You can’t make this stuff up" (courtesy of Comics2Film).
Images
Screen Grabs from "The Brave and the Bold"
Commentary
"Flash,
don't heckle the supervillain!
Green Lantern (to the Flash) in "The Brave and the Bold"
Commentary coming soon!
Image courtesy of
Toon
Zone.