Harley Quinn premieres today and this marks the Gotham City Angel's first headlining solo cartoon, a milestone which apparently took years to make. Speaking to CBR.com, the series' showrunners Patrick Schumacker and Justin Halpern discussed their original pitches and why fans actually had to wait a little longer than expected.
"Animation is just a very lengthy process," Schumacker said. "We do all of our actual production overseas in Korea, so every episode takes, I think, about 18 weeks to get back from a locked animatic the finished color animation."
Apparently, the show was first pitched around the time of Suicide Squad's release about three years ago, but both Schumacker and Halpern had prior commitments which did not give them a lot of time to work on Harley Quinn. The two had been working on NBC's Powerless and after the show's cancelation; they were finally able to pick up where they had left off and started officially working sometime in November of 2017.
The show is also the two creators' first animated project and according to Schumacker, was initially pitched as "Mary Tyler Moore, if she were a killer." In the same interview, he further explains and says: "In the first season, as Harley's trying to rise through the ranks of the criminal underworld in Gotham, it's like Mary Tyler Moore, a girl doing it by herself in the big city kind of thing. I think she's a character who has a lot of contradictions, interesting contradictions, and that makes her complex and interesting and she's fallible, and I think people really appreciate that."
Harley Quinn stars Kaley Cuoco, Lake Bell, Diedrich Bader, Alan Tudyk, Rahul Kohli, Christopher Meloni, Tony Hale, Ron Funches, Wanda Sykes, Natalie Morales, Jim Rash, Giancarlo Esposito, Jason Alexander, and J.B. Smoove.
Related: DC Universe's Harley Quinn Won't Pair Her Up With Poison Ivy Right Away
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