Black Panther Cartoon Debuts! (sorta...)

Marvel has been teasing the release of a cartoon for the Black Panther produced by Reggie Hudlin (who was writing Black Panther and was an executive at BET at the time) for a minute: I posted the teaser trailer on Youtube in 2008, and the comments ranged from "OMG I can't wait" to "worst animation everrr"...  nevertheless, with Hudlin gone from BET and no longer writing the comic, I figured the show was dead in the water. how wrong I was...

Since then, they have replaced the voice actor playing the Panther in the trailer with your man Djimon Hounsou (Gladiator, Amistad, Push, Constantine), whose likeness has already been immortalized in the sword and sorcery comic Thulsa Doom, now his voice gets to embody the King of Wakanda. Jill Scott supplies the voice of Storm from the X-men (that's Queen Ororo to you, buddy!), longside Kerry Washington (Lakeview Terrace, Ray, Fantastic Four) as Shuri (the Panther's sister, currently the new Black Panther in the comic) and Alfre Woodard (The Family That Preys, The Forgotten, Love and Basketball, Crooklyn) as the as T'challa's moms (she also voices NSA secretary Dondi Reece).

If you lived in Australia, you would already know all this, of course... since Black Panther: The Animated Series debuted on Aussie station ABC3 with an hour-long T'Challa-fest featuring episodes 1 and 2 of 'Who is the Black Panther' this past weekend.   While Hudlin insists that the show would not be just a glorified animatic or motion comic (like people were fearing based on the trailer), and that there are scenes and characters in the animated series that did not appear in the comic, I can't confirm the quality of the final animation, yet. still no word of when the show will drop here in America either, but once I hear something (or catch some bootleg BP:TAS video), I'll pass it on to you.

holla!

-samax

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