The Movies and Shows That Inspired ‘Lanterns’

Lanterns is an adaptation of the long-running DC Comics series, and it draws obvious inspirations from several different periods of Green Lantern and Green Lantern Corps comic books. At the same time, the show, created by Chris Mundy, Damon Lindelof, and Tom King, doesn’t look, feel, or sound like most monthly DC comics.Neither of the show’s core Green Lanterns, Hal Jordan and John Stewart, wear anything close to a Green Lantern uniform. There are no masks. There are no capes. There’s a lot of talk in the pilot about outer space, alien worlds, the Guardians of the Universe, but none of that actually appears on camera. Instead, almost the entire pilot episode takes place in the little town of Rushville, Nebraska (where, fun fact, Tom King’s grandmother is originally from).As such, the show is dusty and dry; it looks like a neo-Western with marshals who wield all-powerful jewelry. At a press conference for the series premiere of Lanterns, Mundy, Lindelof, and King confirmed that they took their cues as much from the work of people like Gil Kane as crime, detective, and western films and TV series. And then they rattled off a couple of titles that each served as inspirations for Lante...