Marvel’s Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, premiering Friday at 8 p.m. ET on Disney Channel and streaming on Disney+ starting February 15, is a stylistic, poppy debut for super-smart Lunella Lafayette and her new prehistoric BFF.
The animated series, based on a Marvel Comics series of the same name, features Lunella (Diamond White) as a 13-year-old scientific genius who accidentally brings the great red devil dinosaur (Fred Tatasciore) into the present through a portal she creates. She manages to befriend the creature and the two team up to fight crime in the Lower East Side neighborhood of Manhattan.
What’s particularly refreshing about the show, at least in the episodes I’ve seen so far, is that Lunella isn’t gifted with fantastical powers. She’s like a kid-Batman, inventing all her own gadgets, and she loves making new scientific discoveries that help her in both her crime-fighting life and her school life. Lunella’s debut comes as Marvel spotlights more black and female protagonists throughout its live-action lineup, which debuted recently. Riri Williams by Dominique Thorne In Black Panther: Wakanda Forever ahead of his next Ironheart series.
White said in an interview that she hopes Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur can show kids that it’s very beautiful to be the smart kid in the class.
“You can love quantum physics and STEM and all that stuff,” White said.
The actress said she reconnected with her 9-year-old self to create the character, who is also fiercely protective of her neighborhood and family.
“You really have to care about that,” White said. “I’m from Detroit, and I really care about Detroit, and I’d do anything for it. … The show is about friendship, community and love, and she has her 10-foot dinosaur helping her through that.”
For Lunella (center), her family is just as important as protecting Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
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Tatiasciore must convey through dino growls the friendliness her character creates with Lunella. The actor also notes that the dino comes from an extremely different world.
“He comes from a very difficult place in time and space and now he is in this place that is not built for him,” Tatiasciore said, adding that Lunella is able to help him s fit while providing muscle for their patrols on the Lower East Side.
Judging from the three episodes I screened, the show puts a lot of emphasis on both its hand-drawn style and its energetic soundtrack, which makes certain sequences feel like a video clip. Each episode also focuses on a superhero conflict that resonates with a more grounded conflict.
This approach — somewhat reminiscent of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer formula while being much more kid-friendly — allows the series to tackle topics like Lunella’s neighborhood feeling overlooked by mainstream authority. This more realistic issue is paired with a corresponding villain who is also obsessed with stealing power from the neighborhood. Another episode focuses on the insecurity Lunella feels about comments about her hair, which opens the episode up to a candid discussion of the discrimination black women sometimes face about their hair. Meanwhile, on the more fantastical side of the episode, a new antagonist is literally made of hair.
Moon Girl and her sidekick Devil Dinosaur are focused on protecting their local community, which sometimes gets overlooked.
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Actor Laurence Fishburne is an executive producer on Moon Girl, alongside host Steve Loter, and when it comes to the show’s art and music, they wanted to make sure the visuals and soundtrack reflected their experiences growing up in New York.
“You see a lot of New York artistic references. You see Andy Warhol’s screen printing process. You see Basquiat. You see graffiti, which was really important, and New York street mural art,” Loter said, noting that it was all mixed with a hand-drawn cartoon style then.
Musical influences, Fishburne said, included hip-hop, reggae and Latin, to reflect the sounds of the city while traveling from neighborhood to neighborhood. In addition to being behind the scenes of Moon Girl, Fishburne provides the voice of the Beyonder, a character who injects a bit of Marvel’s cosmic side into Lunella’s adventures.
Fishburne offers a more flamboyant and bouncy take on the character, which is a unique angle considering that in Marvel comics, the Beyonder often raises the stakes by getting involved in larger, universe-defining projects. . Secret Wars Events. Although the Moon Girl show appears to be separate from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Beyonder’s appearance is also prescient, as an Avengers: Secret Wars movie is slated for 2026.
Along with Moon Girl, Fishburne is one of the few actors to have played two different roles of Marvel characters spanning the mediums. He portrayed Bill Foster/Goliath in the 2018 live-action Ant-Man and the Wasp. Fishburne noted that the opportunity to take on the role arose during the development of the animated series.
“There was no intention on my part to voice a character in Moon Girl,” he said. “It was really Steve’s idea, and when he showed me the rendering of the character, I said, ‘Let’s do it.’ The Ant-Man thing was a scientist. It wasn’t that hard – I just had to be really cool with Michael Douglas. It was the hardest part. “
Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur are set to air weekly on the Disney Channel, and the show’s first six episodes will arrive on Disney Plus on February 15. the second season has already been greenlit.
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