From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to the treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. It was probably 45 years ago this year that the Guardians of the Galaxy first

made their debut in Marvel Superheroes, number 18. Wow. I'm sitting across from the man who brought

the Guardians of the Galaxy to the big screen, James Gunn, or writer-director. First of all, thanks so much

for being here, James. Hey, I'm really happy to be here. And it's an interesting that it ends up

being the anniversary of the characters. Yeah, well, I didn't know that until you just told me that now. And it's what's so funny is my agent just

gave me that particular comic book the other day as a gift, you know, when the release of the film

came out. So it's cool. That's really cool. It must have been interesting for you read that

too, because it's really a very primitive sort of telling of that story. I mean, actually, you know, there's been a lot of iterations of the Guardians of the Galaxy over the years.

And the one that we used as our primary inspiration was a 2008, Andy Lannning, Dan Abnett, run, where they basically kind of redid who the Guardians were.

They took a bunch of Z-grade superheroes, you know, that had been around for a long time.

I mean, Grute has been around since 1963.

He predates the real Marvel era.

He was like basically on those quote-unquote scary Stan Lee stories.

Yeah, exactly.

It was like a monster.

I am Groot from Planet X is what the cover says.

He's a, you know, just a monster movie sort of character at the time.

You know, Rag of Racco Raccoons from the early 80s.

And so they've all been bouncing around and none of those characters were ever taken

too seriously.

And they took them and put them into this comic book together.

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