I’m one of the few fans of The Legend Of Vox Machina who has no interest whatsoever in watching Critical Role’s actual roleplaying podcast. As someone who plays tabletop RPGs and has since I was a kid, whatever time I have to spend tabletop gaming is spent actually gaming (or designing games) rather than watching multi-hour long sessions of other people playing, even when they’re talented voice actors like the cast of Critical Role.
However, I absolutely fell in love with Vox Machina, which is based on the first Critical Role campaign. I love the characters – Scanlan and Pike and Grog and all the rest – and the action-packed, stories of magic and mayhem, and the humor and the heart. And Scanlan’s music.
I also really love the fact that episodes are about 25 minutes long, which fits my schedule a lot better than three-hour podcasts. Vox Machina, which is geared toward adult audiences with its ribald humor and occasional nudity and blood and gore, is one of the shows I point to when I argue that more fantasy should be animated rather than live-action. The First Laws novels by Joe Abercrombie, for instance, would make a perfect adult animated series.
In any case, I (purposefully) know very little about The Mighty Nein, the new animated series based on Critical Role’s second campaign. I’ve heard it described this way: If Vox Machina are The Avengers, the Mighty Nein are the Guardians of the Galaxy. I’ve avoided spoilers because I want to go into this series as blind as I went into Vox Machina.
Amazon has just released the first trailer for the show – we’re being bombarded by new trailers thanks to the New York Comic-Con, including this amazing trailer for A Knight Of The Seven Kingdoms – and it looks great. Obviously there are lots of familiar voices since the lead characters are all voiced by the Vox Machina gang—Laura Bailey, Matthew Mercer, Marisha Ray, Liam O’Brien, Ashley Johnson, Taliesin Jaffe, Sam Riegel, and Travis Willingham—and the brand of humor looks very similar even if the party is all new faces. Here’s the trailer:
The Mighty Nein guest stars include Academy-Award Winner Anjelica Huston (BBC’s Towards Zero, Lionsgate’s From the World of John Wick: Ballerina), Lucy Liu (Rosemead, Presence), Nathan Fillion (The Rookie, Superman) T’Nia Miller (The Fall of the House of Usher, The Peripheral), Felicia Day (Supernatural, Eureka), Graham McTavish (Outlander The Hobbit Trilogy) and Ivanna Saknho (Ahsoka, M3GAN 2.0)
The NYCC panel also included a surprise appearance from Wayne Brady who was revealed to be joining Season 4 of The Legend Of Vox Machina as Taryon Darrington. The Mighty Nein debuts on Amazon Prime Video on November 19th.
