People who have closely followed all of Gerard Way's moves post-My Chemical Romance will find plenty to love in the first trailer for The Umbrella Academy. The weird sensibilities of the comic book from Way and Brazilian artist Gabriel Bá translated well to the Netflix series but it's clearly accessible to anyone unfamiliar.
The trailer does an excellent job of onboarding new fans. The live-action rendition (featuring Mary J. Blige and Ellen Page) quickly runs through the way the superpowered characters were adopted by an eccentric figure and trained to save the world. Somewhere along the way, the pseudo-family splintered only coming back together at the death of their father, and then learning that they have to save the world.
Way admitted in an interview with Billboard that the Academy's vision of the apocalypse came from 9/11, but he sees how people could find impending doom relevant today.
"That apocalypse really exists because of what I witnessed with 9/11, which is kind of another reason why I started [My Chemical Romance]. I was writing Umbrella Academy when we were working on The Black Parade, and that very first video that Sam Bayer directed ['Welcome To The Black Parade'], it kind of looks like 9/11 and Ground Zero. And then when you see the apocalypse in Umbrella Academy when Number Five goes back there, it kind of looks like Ground Zero. Reflections of real-world stuff," he said. "And yeah, you’re totally right, people are probably afraid there might be an apocalypse at some point given the state of the world, so in that way, yeah, a decade later, it’s really relevant, the end of the world."
The trailer also features a new song from Way and MCR's Ray Toro. It's a cover of Simon & Garfunkel's "Hazy Shade Of Winter" in the style of the Bangles. Check it out up top.
