As April approaches, the debut of the long-awaited Mortal Kombat digital series draws ever nearer. Director Kevin Tancharoen debuted the original Mortal Kombat Rebirth project back in June, and since that time Warner Brothers took an official interest in the short film, wishing to develop a series with the cast and crew. Recently, the director sat down with MovieWeb to answer a few questions regarding how the series came to be, specifics on a few of the episodes and an expected release date of the first episode.

Of interest, details about the Scorpion and Sub-Zero themed episode was revealed. Unlike in the Rebirth short, this version of the iconic ninjas stories will most likely follow the games more closely. Earlier in the month, we were treated to a teaser featuring Ian Anthony Dale as the ninja spectre [full story].

We're going to do an episode with Scorpion and Sub-Zero, but it takes place in ancient Japan. The whole episode is in Japanese and you see the depth of Scorpion's family and clan and how they got murdered, etc. That one is going to be very epic, because of the iconic characters.

Shane Warren Jones and Peter Shinkoda will play the parts of Cyrax and Sektor, respectively and the episode featuring them is one Tancharoen is most fond of. He confirms the story will show them both as human and cyborg, and it seems the two will be in opposition of one another as a fight sequence between them was mentioned.

They talk when they're in human form. Then they get changed to robots, and there's a pretty epic fight scene when they're robots. We did full motion-capture for that and we're starting to put the layers on it now, and texturing and shading it and all that good stuff, to make it look photo-real and make it look like it's gigantic. That's one of the most intense visual effects episodes, because it's robots on robots. There's a certain level of expectations you have with fighting robots, because the material is out there already. We're just trying to make them as polished as possible.

He mentions that if there is enough demand, a DVD and/or Blu-ray release, with extras, may be eminent once the series completes it's run. The expected release date was not conclusively mentioned, but a WB rep that phoned in during the interview said the goal was early April, with an episode planned to follow each week after one debuts. Tancharoen notes that at least one episode will take place before the April 19th release of Mortal Kombat (the game).

To read the remainder of this interview, please click here.

For more information on the Mortal Kombat digital series, check out our comprehensive coverage detailing the known cast and crew of the project, including the active Twitter accounts of many. Don't forget to follow @KTANCH on Twitter to see more of his Twitpic teasers in the new future. @MK_Online will continue to report on all things involving the digital series as well!