"Beware the Batman" in 2013! New Animated Series

[kirk55555]

I think some people judged it for not being BTAS instead of taking it on its own merits.

I agree. True, it paled next to B:TAS, but it wasn't awful, just relatively mediocre for the first season or two but with some interesting aspects, and improving over time.

And I think a lot of people had trouble letting go of Mark Hamill and judging TB's Joker on his own merits as a character. I think Kevin Michael Richardson did an amazingly good job as Joker -- very different from Hamill's (though there was some Hamill influence on the voice he used), but a virtuoso performance in its own right. As amazing as Hamill was in the role, Richardson has one of the most astonishingly versatile and mutable voices in the business and he was able to give Joker an extraordinary performance range. There was one episode where Batman used VR to go inside Joker's mind, manifested as a virtual Gotham whose every inhabitant was an incarnation of Joker, and each one had a different voice and personality even though Richardson was playing every one. It was amazing, and for all his talents, Hamill could never have pulled it off as well.

(And yes, in this show it was "Joker," not "the Joker." Since it was "the Batman" rather than just "Batman," I guess they wanted to maintain the contrast.)

TB also had an interestingly creepy take on the Riddler (played by Robert Englund) and made much better use of Hugo Strange (initially played by Frank Gorshin until he passed away) than B:TAS did. And the direct-to-DVD movie The Batman vs. Dracula is a fairly good film, much more intense and adult than the show was able to get.

First I just want to say, I don't hate this because its not B:TAS. I hate it because it was horribly designed and written. I might have been able to get over the designs if it was written better (except Joker, his design looks like a very bad practical joke), but it wasn't. It was medicore at best, atleast with everything i've seen. I've seen an ok amount of episodes (mostly from the first two seasons, but a bit from after that), and all I remember that was positive about the show was thinking that Batgirl wasn't a horrible character, and was definately better than Batman. The villains were all bad, I never saw an episode that had any of the villains being the least bit interesting, much less threatening. I did watch The batman vs. Dracula. It was very bad, and I remember thinking it was worse than even the normal show.

I suppose Joker from The Batman could have had a good voice actor, I don't remember his voice to well. I just looked up a video of clips of him from The Batman. The voice acting seemed decent. He still has the worst Joker design I think is possible for someone to draw and still be barely recongniseable as Joker. I also seem to recall him actually engaging in a lot of fighting and jumping around like Marvel's Batroc the Leaper (with out the french accent) but its been awhile and I could be wrong about how often he did that. Still, I've liked other versions of Joker that had nothing to do with Hamill's one (which I think is the definative Joker in any media), so it definately wasn't a bias toward B:TAS Joker that makes me hate The batman's villain they call the Joker.

Also, from looking up clips, I just saw they actually used Harley Quinn in The Batman. She looked stupid (although stupidest female design for that show goes to Catwoman, who looks hilariously idiotic) and was apparently a failed TV psycologist. It honestly surprised me that they used her at all, and the clip I saw had her being as mediocre as everyone else on the show. Harley has always been one of my favorite villains, so it sucks that she was on that show. It makes me wonder who else they messed up with that show. I guess I'll have to see if BTB using villains nobody has used because they suck is better or worse than The Batman's way of taking famous bat villain's names and powers and sticking them on characters who (both design and just writing wise) are barely recognisable as the characters they are supposed to be.

 

[publiusr]

There was a Superman cartoon of sorts at the same time as Superman Returns, namely Legion of Super Heroes, which featured a young Superman as a cast member. (It was going to be Superboy and the Legion of Super Heroes, but they ended up not using the Superboy name. It's unclear whether that was due to the legal disputes over ownership of the title at the time or done in order to tie into Returns. But it premiered 3 months after SR was released and ran for two years.

They had him really thin. I think in the second season they had an edgy superman clone of sorts...

 

[Kelso]

This looks fine. I'll check it out.

 

[kirk55555]

I think some people judged it for not being BTAS instead of taking it on its own merits.

I agree. True, it paled next to B:TAS, but it wasn't awful, just relatively mediocre for the first season or two but with some interesting aspects, and improving over time.

Just requoting this because, even though i've said a lot about the show, I did just order season 4 from Amazon. Most of my memories of the show are from the early seasons, and a lot of the reviews I've read (even from poeple that hated it in the beginning) were praising it starting around season 3. Plus, while looking up clips a few days ago, there did seem to be some interesting stuff I never saw. So, when I saw S4 on Amazon for a good price, so I ordered it. It was between that and Spectacular Spider-Man Season 1, and I went with this. I like superhero shows so much I figure I should atleast give The Batman's later seasons a chance (I'll probably pick up Spectacular Spider-Man eventually, it gets so much proaise that, regardless of the weird art style, i've decided that I should give it a chance). I went with S4 over S5 because, even though all the team ups sound cool, S4 had some very interesting sounding episodes (plus apparently Paul Dini wrote Harley Quinn's intro episode for this series, and that definately played a role in my getting this season). So, it could go either way, but I'll watch S4 with an open mind.

 

[Christopher]

^Good choice. The show was pretty mediocre for its first couple of years, but definitely improved later on, since some DCAU veterans joined its staff once Justice League Unlimited came to an end.

Although one thing I regret about the later seasons was the abrupt changes they made in the storyline. The show had been doing some unconventional storylines, focusing on mostly original police characters, particularly Detective Ellen Yin (Ming-Na). Those story and character threads were going somewhere pretty interesting by the end of season 2. But then at the end of the season, all that stuff was abruptly and unceremoniously dropped in favor of introducing Commissioner Gordon and other familiar characters like Batgirl and Robin. It smacked of a change imposed by the network or the studio, maybe out of fear that audiences weren't responding to the new elements and wanted the old familiar stuff. One thing that annoyed me is that they dropped the concept of the Batwave, an advanced electronic monitoring network that sent an alert to Bruce's phone when a crime was reported, in favor of the Bat-Signal, an idea that's a relic of the 1940s and should've been long ago abandoned.

Not that the later seasons' writing staff didn't do good work with the new characters, but I would've liked to see what they'd do with Ellen Yin and Ethan Bennett and Chief Rojas. I wish those characters hadn't just dropped off the map altogether. (Well, Bennett did return briefly.)

 

[kirk55555]

I remember the Batwave, and thinking it was really goofy. Maybe it makes more sense if you want more realism, but I've never been a fan of people trying to make superheroes more "realistic". The bat-signal is just awesome, and the batwave just seemed like a weird gimmick that was just kind of there. It wasn't really a factor in what I thought of the early parts of the show that I've seen, but hearing they got rid of it is nice.

 

[Christopher]

The Bat-Signal never made much sense. It only works on a cloudy night! Although sometimes the comics have had it shine on the side of a skyscraper, but that kind of defeats the purpose of a searchlight; why not just put some kind of signal light on top of the skyscraper itself, like the colored lights they use on the Empire State Building to commemorate various things?

And Batman's always been on the cutting edge of technology. Maybe a searchlight signal was cutting-edge in the 1940s, but not in the 21st century. It makes sense that he'd have something like the Batwave, an AI agent that monitors police bands, news, and such for signs of criminal activity and alerts him electronically. I liked it because it added something new and believable to the mythos rather than just wallowing in nostalgia for the sake of nostalgia. Although the actual design of his Batwave pager was kind of silly, with a big Batman logo right there on the front of it. Not a good idea for a device that Bruce carries with him and pulls out of his pocket in the middle of crowds, as he was often shown doing.

 

[RJDiogenes]

Why not just the "Bat App?"

 

[kirk55555]

The Bat-Signal never made much sense. It only works on a cloudy night! Although sometimes the comics have had it shine on the side of a skyscraper, but that kind of defeats the purpose of a searchlight; why not just put some kind of signal light on top of the skyscraper itself, like the colored lights they use on the Empire State Building to commemorate various things?

And Batman's always been on the cutting edge of technology. Maybe a searchlight signal was cutting-edge in the 1940s, but not in the 21st century. It makes sense that he'd have something like the Batwave, an AI agent that monitors police bands, news, and such for signs of criminal activity and alerts him electronically. I liked it because it added something new and believable to the mythos rather than just wallowing in nostalgia for the sake of nostalgia. Although the actual design of his Batwave pager was kind of silly, with a big Batman logo right there on the front of it. Not a good idea for a device that Bruce carries with him and pulls out of his pocket in the middle of crowds, as he was often shown doing.

Well, I don't know. I just thought it was goofy for something that looked like batman's cell phone to vibrate, show a flashing Bat signal, and then he'd go to work. It was not a big deal (especially with all the other problems the episodes i've seen from the early seasons had) and it wouldn't have changed whatever my opinion of season 4 turns out to be. I'm just not a fan of the batwave.

 

[Christopher]

^As I said, I agree the design was goofy, but I don't see why it should be goofy for Batman to use modern technology to get called to action the same way a doctor would get summoned to the hospital if there were an emergency.

Besides, the Bat-Signal can only exist if the police cooperate with Batman. In the first two seasons of this series, the Batman hadn't yet won public acceptance and the police chief was hunting him as a fugitive. So there had to be some other way of alerting him to crises.

 

[Mr. Adventure]

Wasn't the Batwave connected with the toy line? I thought they'd respond to the Batwave when it was on TV.

 

[Admiral_Young]

I believe this is the first in depth interview conducted with the series producers so far.

http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=46586

 

[Christopher]

Actually, ComicsAlliance did an interview on Tuesday -- I kept forgetting to post the link.

http://comicsalliance.com/beware-the-batman-glen-murakami-mitch-watson-interview-producers/

These both have me considerably more intrigued about the show. The '70s-detective/procedural focus, the choice of villains based on what they can reveal about Batman's personality, the plan to have the characters evolve and change over the series... most of all, as discussed in the CA piece, their willingness to take risks and not play it safe. It sounds like this has a lot of potential.

 

[davejames]

I like the idea of a more minimalistic, Trent Reznor-style score for this show. I just hope it doesn't veer too much into the industrial rock style of Batman Beyond, whose music got to be really grating after awhile.

And the CG animation is starting to really grow on me as well.

 

[Admiral_Young]

I'll be checking this out tomorrow.

 

[Christopher]

I like the idea of a more minimalistic, Trent Reznor-style score for this show.

I don't know who Trent Reznor is, but minimalist musical "soundscapes" do not appeal to me at all. I like melody, darn it!

I just hope it doesn't veer too much into the industrial rock style of Batman Beyond, whose music got to be really grating after awhile.

I hated that music from the get-go. It's one of the reasons I was never really that fond of BB.

And the CG animation is starting to really grow on me as well.

The jury's still out for me. I'll have to see more of it.

 

[Admiral_Young]

Trent Reznor is the lead vocalist from Nine Inch Nails. In recent years he has co-collaborated with Atticus Ross for the scores to both David Fincher's "The Social Network" and "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo".

 

[Christopher]

That still doesn't help me, since I don't listen to that band and I haven't seen those movies. (Though I probably should see The Social Network at some point, since it's Aaron Sorkin. I'm just not that interested in the subject matter.)

 

[JD]

We've got our first clip online now. It's hard hard to judge from such a short bit, but the voices and music seem good, and I actually kind of like the animation style now that I've seen it in one continuous scene.

 

[Christopher]

^So far Batman's voice doesn't impress me much -- kind of one-note. Although it's hard to judge from such a brief clip, and maybe the actor will get better as he adjusts to the role.

It sounds like they're following Michael Caine's precedent, giving Alfred more of a working-class accent than usual. (And I bet it turns out to be Katana that he's calling.)