What Is Bruce Boxleitner’s Lantern City?

By David Wharton | Updated

This article is more than 2 years old

Bruce Boxleitner has the honor of being a geek icon twice over: first playing the heroic program Tron in the movie of the same name, and then later playing Captain John Sheridan in Babylon 5. These days he’s returned to the role of Tron in both the TRON: Legacy film and the animated spin-off, TRON: Uprising, as well as doing voiceover work in games such as Spec Ops: The Line. Apparently, however, Boxleitner has something else up his sleeve, a secretive project called Bruce Boxleitner’s Lantern City.

Boxleitner announced the project himself via Twitter last week. At the moment there’s little else to be found about Lantern City other than an official website that includes a snazzy log, an option to sign up for email updates, and the hint that it’s an “exciting new steampunk series.” That may not be much, but it’s definitely enough to catch my attention, sucker for steampunk that I am. It’s unclear at this point if it’s supposed to be a web series, a regular television series, or perhaps something else entirely.

A bit of Google research turns up this interview with Boxleitner that provides a few more clues:

A project of my own that I’m working on is a series that I’m coming out with to try to bring to the web something like Babylon 5 was. It’s a Steampunk alternate universe series because it’s about time it was brought out in to the mainstream. It’s called Bruce Boxleitner’s Lantern City. We just need a place to go with. Especially Steampunk, Hollywood really doesn’t know what it is yet. They have to see it and we’ve got a very exciting and intriguing storyline. It’s in a saga type format and it’s in an alternate Steampunk universe. Not dabbled with like Sherlock Holmes, but done straight on.

It sounds like it would be a long shot for network television, but the entertainment landscape is changing at warp speed these days. With people like Bryan Singer and David Fincher working on online series or original content for providers such as Netflix, there’s a good chance we’ll get to see what Lantern City is all about, even if it doesn’t show up where we expect it.