Fox Developing "Gotham" Young Jim Gordon Series

Because Gordon is a character we've never seen or even heard of?

 

Chris Sims wrote an article about this over at Comics Alliance and I agree with much of what he says. He also suggests that there's a far more interesting supporting character to explore in an origin show - Alfred.

 

Ben McKenzie To Star As Detective James Gordon

 

Oh god.

He's not going to grow the stache until the final episode 10 years upstream.

 

Some might remember him as a young Bruce Wayne in the DTV "Batman Year One"


[YT]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h21M8y9VjsY[/YT]

 

Tweet from McKenzie:

 

So Batman is playing Gordon? I don't think that's happened before. Although we have had incarnations of Jim Gordon played by Lex Luthor (Lyle Talbot, Batman and Robin 1949 and Atom Man vs. Superman 1950), Perry White (Ted Knight, '60s Filmation cartoons -- also the Flash for Super Friends), Superboy (Bob Hastings, '60s Filmation and B:TAS), Superman (Danny Dark, Challenge of the SuperFriends), the Spectre (Gary Cole, Under the Red Hood and DC Showcase), and Kanjar Ro (Kurtwood Smith, Green Lantern: First Flight and Beware the Batman -- also Agent Bennet in Batman Beyond/The Zeta Project).

 

McKenzie made a really good rookie cop in Southland and was very good in Year One. My initial scepticism about this project is fading.

Now, if Ben can be Batman in YO and then Gordon in this, I think Bryan Cranston can be Gordon in YO and in the next live-action Batman film.

 

I am the hardest of hardcore Bat-fans and I cannot express how much I don't care about this series.

At least Smallville was an honest-to-goodness genre show. This is a cop show pretending to be part of the Batman mythos. It won't deliver enough to satisfy fanboys like me, and the mainstream audience (who won't notice or care if they name-drop Edward Nygma or Harleen Quinzell) will see it for what it really is: A dime-a-dozen, cookie-cutter cop show.

A few weeks ago, on Kevin Smith's "Fatman On Batman" podcast, Smith and Paul Dini laid out an idea for a Batman prequel series that would be AWESOME. Too bad it'll never happen.

 

He seems like a good actor, so I'm not to worried.

 

Wouldn't many of Batman's villains be about the same age he is? Do we really need to see a 10 year old Eddie Nigma?

 

It looks like this take on Batman will have many of his villains be at least 10-15 years older than he is with the usual sequence of Batman emerging and then the villains following flipped around.

 

Have they cast Joe Chill?

 

Since it is, of course, an alternate reality from the comics, they are free to reinvent the characters however they wish. Henri Ducard and Ra's al Ghul were two separate people in the comics, but that didn't stop Nolan from combining them.

And really, I don't see any reason why someone like Riddler or Penguin or the Mad Hatter couldn't be 10-20 years older than Batman.

 

I wonder how Barbara Gordon will figure into this.

 

Do you mean the Barbara who was Jim's first wife in Year One? Since I doubt the future Batgirl would be much more than a toddler at this point.

 

I was thinking of Batgirl Barbara. She's a good character but they couldn't use her because she'd either be too young or not born yet. I suppose they could make her more of a precocious young girl like Penny from Inspector Gadget if they wanted to though.

They could do something similar with Dick Grayson. I was wondering about him too.

 

^ He still could. Both would be in their pre-Batman and pre-Batgirl roles respectively.

The Barbara Gordon thing was just a thought. It'd be a shame to have a Jim Gordon series and not have "Batgirl" there in some capacity. I don't know how much they can compress the age differences or what plans they have for the show but Smallville managed to include a lot of elements from the Superman mythos despite being about Clark's younger years.