Avi Shankar's Guardians of Justice on Netflix

Just watched this and i really need to know others have seen this thing and that i didn't completely imagine this in some kind of drug-induced fever dream

I feel like this producer was like you know what, Zak Snyder isn't HARDCORE and EDGY enough at all and let's get a bunch of animation students and like do the entire history of the medium in my own version of Watchmen meets Scott Pilgrim, but also starring a bunch of professional wrestlers, a ton of semi-known C-list actors and the lead from You're Next

A layer cake of bad taste with Ready Player One-density of video game and comic book references but probably also outdoes actual comic book events of recent times (lookin' at you, Doomsday Clock!)

There's a lot to unpack - but basically -- this is one of those Adult Swim-type things that is kinda super terrible (but with a better budget provided by Netflix) but has so many layers of terrible than it turns out genuinely good?

in particular Diamond Dallas Page's performance as Night Hawk feels SO intentionally hammy and bad but by the end, I grew to love it

i'm feeling conflicted and want to know if i'm the only one (and i really do love how they seemed to try to put almost every style of American animation in the past century into this)

Some background: https://www.polygon.com/22954817/guardians-of-justice-netflix-adi-shankar

Well, I finished it this morning, and also have basically have no idea how I feel about this - especially the back half, which at least adds a lot of new wrinkles to what I thought was going to be a pretty Watchmen-lite plot.

The sheer... amount? volume? of aesthetics made it a pretty compelling watch, though - definitely had to be paying attention to actually keep up.

Found this playlist on his YouTube channel that explicitly lays out most of the influences on this - not hard to guess them, but I appreciated that Shankar took the time break down each of these things, why he loves them and how he applied them to the series. Kung Fury, Speed Racer (2008), Verhoeven, Carpenter, all make sense.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIEIzxlknp8o19ru4AT9TplyCYYl_NEJ0

And I agree, the back half is where things got a little more interesting, though I would bet he has read at least some of the other famous authoritarian what-if superhero comics like Authority, Ultimates, Miracleman, The Boys and so on

I think I'm warming up to this in my mind over time, or maybe reacting positively to the sheer energy of the whole thing