Ron Clements and John Musker are legends in the animation field. They’ve worked on Disney classics like Aladdin, Hercules, and The Little Mermaid. In addition, they helped usher in Disney’s ’90s comeback in animation and oversaw the transition to digital animation from 2D in the 2000s.
The two men are now lending their talents to DC Comics and teaming up with Celeste Ballard, a writer on Space Jam: A New Legacy.
The all-star team is working on a show called The Metal Men, a longtime DC property. The heroes in the show date back to 1962. The story centers around a genius scientist named William Magnus, who made six incredibly advanced robots with personalities based on their metal types: platinum, gold, mercury, lead, iron, and tin.
The Metal Men were fairly popular in the ’60s and appeared sporadically in DC properties over the ensuing years. There have been a couple of attempts to get a TV or movie project about the group that never materialized. At different points, producers from both X-Men (Lauren Shuler Donner) and Men In Black (Barry Sonnenfeld) were reportedly attached.
This won’t be the first time Metal Men has been animated. In 2013, they appeared in short on the Cartoon Network as a part of the DC Nation block a few times. Take a look below.
The show comes from Warner Animation Group (WAG), a relatively new company that started about eight years ago. WAG’s first feature was 2014’s The Lego Movie, a commercial and critical smash. Reports say the company will be leaning more on DC properties to produce more content in the future.
The first of these is the upcoming DC League of Super-Pets, set to release on May 20 of 2022.
