James Gunn doesn’t just love superheroes. He loves silly superheroes. Over his career, he has turned Rocket Raccoon, Groot, the Polka-Dot Man, and Peacemaker into not just household names, but also three-dimensional characters rich with pathos. But he has yet to clear the highest of bars when it comes to live-action adaptations of superhero wackiness, a bar set by none other than Legends of Tomorrow on the CW.
EW has confirmed that Gunn will produce a spinoff of Superman starring Skyler Gisondo as Jimmy Olsen of the Daily Planet. Written by Dan Perrault and Tony Yacenda of the well-received Netflix mockumentary American Vandal, the first season will reportedly feature an investigation into the Flash villain Gorilla Grodd.
Of course, the Jimmy Olsen show won’t be the first time that Gorilla Grodd has appeared in live action. The mainstay Flash villain famously popped up in an episode of The CW’s time-traveling series Legends of Tomorrow, busting into the dorm room of a young Barack Obama. The clip immediately went viral, and still serves as a stand-out moment in what became the craziest of the Arrowverse TV series.
While Jimmy Olsen has some catching up to do with the CW, at least in terms of live action, such absurd exploits are well within the character’s comic book history. Jimmy Olsen first appeared as an unnamed character in 1938’s Action Comics #6, but wasn’t properly named until a 1940 episode of the radio series The Adventures of Superman, and that name wasn’t applied to the comics until Superman #13 in 1941.
While he initially served as the equivalent to Superman’s teen sidekick, a cub reporter and photographer who went on assignment with Lois Lane and Clark Kent, Jimmy eventually got his own weirdly wonderful series in 1954. Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen arrived just in time to foreground the absurdity of the early Silver Age, when sci-fi and romance comics were still outselling superheroes. As a result, the series found Jimmy going on increasingly odd-ball adventures, mutating into a giant turtle kaiju or gaining stretchy abilities and joining the Legion of Super-Heroes. Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen also became the series through which Jack Kirby introduced the New Gods, with the all-powerful Darkseid debuting in issue #130 from 1970.
Unsurprisingly, Gorilla Grodd first appeared as part of the wacky Silver Age era, in 1959’s The Flash #106. Created by writer John Broome and Carmine Infantino, Grodd is a citizen of Gorilla City, a hidden African metropolis filled with intelligent primates. Given telekinetic powers by a crashed alien spaceship, Grodd regularly seeks to bring power and glory to Gorilla City by conquering the human world. And sometimes, that involves going back in time to attack Barack Obama.
Certainly, Gorilla Grodd is the type of character who fits within Gunn’s aesthetic. The director already gave us a supergorilla in the first season of Peacemaker, a primate that gets killed via chainsaw by John Economos, and the intelligent internet chimps in Superman. The time is right for him to bring Grodd into the mix. But until he can do something as audacious as set the super-ape against one of the most beloved world leaders in recent history, James Gunn still trails behind the CW.
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