Marvel’s Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur is coming soon on the Disney Channel and Disney+. Its heroine, Lunella Lafayette, is already an icon—and exactly the kind of character that voice actress Diamond White wanted to see when she was a kid.
At the press conference for Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, we asked White, who plays Lunella, if she sees any of herself in Lunella’s character.
“A lot of myself. I grew up being African American,” White replied. “When I was seven, all I wanted was a character like this to come to life. So it’s cool to have someone of my skin tone and of my hair texture really be there. The representation means a lot to me.”
Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, based on the Marvel comics of the same name, follows Lunella’s adventures as a roller skating girl genius in New York City’s Lower East Side. When Lunella opens a portal through time and space, she’s joined by Devil (Fred Tatasciore), a big red T-Rex with a heart of gold. Together, they face off against villains and anti-heroes like Aftershock and the Beyonder. Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur also stars Libe Barer, Alison Brie, Laurence Fishburne, and Gary Anthony Williams.
Along with bringing a Black heroine to the screen, the creators of Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur set out to recreate the vibrant world of the Lower East Side. “We had a lot of conversations about backgrounds and about the environment,” says Fishburne, who’s also an executive producer for the show. “Graffiti, for example, [is] one of the elements in our backgrounds and textures for New York and the Lower East Side. It’s just kind of a joy for us to be creating this kind of show which, as Diamond said, is a show like we’ve never seen before.”
“I grew up in New York in the ’80s and ’90s,” says executive producer Steve Loter, “and I was there kinda at the beginning of graffiti art. It was New York prior to gentrification, so I was there at kind of the perfect time where creativity, imagination, music, art, poetry, and books was still very vibrant and alive in New York. We relied on a lot of New York kinda artistic benchmarks—the Andy Warhol silk screening process, Basquiat graffiti art, street art murals—to kind of find the flavor of New York we wanted to capture.”
Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur comes to the Disney Channel on February 10, and Disney+ on February 15.
(featured image: Disney+)
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