• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

"Beware the Batman" in 2013! New Animated Series

Anyone still following the new episodes?
I would have liked to, but I couldn't find the episodes on the CN website, I don't have a DVR, and I'm not staying up/getting up until/at 2:30AM to watch it. I'm hoping I can remember to find the DVDs/Blu-Rays when they come out and watch the rest of the series that way.
 
This week's episode, by Greg Weisman, touched on Batman's origin, showing a flashback to Crime Alley, and they made the mistake that (as an article I recently read pointed out) a lot of adaptations make, including the upcoming Gotham: namely, depicting Crime Alley as a literal alley with dumpsters and everything, raising puzzling questions about why a super-rich couple would need to take their kid through a dark alley instead of just having a limo waiting for them right outside the movie theater. "Crime Alley" is actually supposed to be a nickname for Park Row, which was an upscale street at the time of the Wayne murders but has gone severely downhill since then.

Right. A number of 70's stories did excellent work portraying this scenario--contrasting the Crime Alley of Batman's present with his memories of the past.
 
This morning's episode, "Game," was one of the best this series has done. A puzzle/riddle story in the vein of late '50s/'60s Batman comic books, it held my interest until the end and utilized the CG nature of the show pretty well, especially when detailing the connecting element of each character's involvement in a nicely handled bit of exposition in the end.

When I read Slott's excellent Arkham miniseries that first introduced Humpty Dumpty to the Batman mythos, I never imagined him sounding like Badger from Breaking Bad but Matt Jones' voice work here has won me over. This Humpty episode was MILES better than the previous one.
 
It was fairly interesting, but the premise was kind of contrived. How did Dumphler manage to overpower the mayor's and commissioner's respective security details, Tobias Whale's thugs, and Batman and Katana? Any one of those would be an impressive feat, but achieving them all seems beyond the capabilities of this one chubby guy working alone. It would've been nice if we'd been shown that he had some assistance -- maybe a tag at the end showing Anarky helping him out, to tie it into the arc that seems to be building lately.

It was kind of appropriate that Humpty was defeated by having a great fall. And I like the idea that he fancies himself a crusader for justice, a champion of those who've been wronged by the system. That's an interesting angle for a villain. A number of Batman villains, particularly in B:TAS, have been motivated by retribution against individuals who wronged them, but Humpty's unusual in going after the whole system, both the law and organized crime.

I wonder where they're going with this identity crisis Batman seems to be having. He seems to be getting too caught up in the Batman persona and losing sight of Bruce Wayne. I assume it will take Alfred's return to help snap him out of that.
 
I wonder where they're going with this identity crisis Batman seems to be having. He seems to be getting too caught up in the Batman persona and losing sight of Bruce Wayne. I assume it will take Alfred's return to help snap him out of that.

But is that the way it's been in some of the comics though? Given rise to the line "Bruce Wayne is the mask Batwman wears"?
 
^Maybe, but it's been evident for a while (partly from interviews the producers gave) that this show is playing up the duality between Bruce and Batman, and the risk it poses to his sanity. Their approach is not that Bruce is simply a disguise worn by Batman, but that he actually thinks of Bruce and Batman as two different entities.
 
I liked the last two episodes. Educational too, I always thought it was pronounced gahlem instead of gohlem. :) I liked Adam Baldwin's voice work on Metamorpho though the straightforward story has been done many times before.

And the Game episode with Humpty Dumpty was a well done take on the murder mystery. I like the different layers of the riddle and that each of them was indeed complicit in the fate of the captain. Tobias Whale cracks me up.
 
At least they're airing all the episodes. That's something. I just hope my DVR gets them all. Or that they show up on demand.
 
Just finished binge-watching the last run of episodes. They did a decent job with the story arc, but unfortunately it set up a lot of things we'll never see the payoff for. Mainly, we still have no clue who Anarky really was. Maybe it doesn't entirely matter for the character as portrayed, but it might've added some substance to the character if he'd had a backstory rather than just being this random, all-powerful nemesis.

Also, Bruce Wayne is still believed dead as of the end of the season. They never bothered to restore the status quo. We'll never know how they would've brought Bruce back. Kind of sloppy to leave that dangling.

Harvey Dent's story arc was handled in an odd way. Usually Harvey is a good guy in his DA days, so that when he goes mad and becomes Two-Face, not only is it a tragic loss but it creates a duality between his good and evil sides. But this Harvey was just a shallow political opportunist. He was "two-faced" in the sense of putting on a public act of being tough on crime and privately not really caring one way or the other, but we never really got any indication for why he'd suddenly come to think of himself as two people once his injury occurred. So that was kind of random.

And sure, bringing in Slade Wilson as Batman's nemesis was a decent idea, seeing that Deathstroke is often seen as a sort of anti-Batman character. But having the Gotham Special Crimes Unit publicly endorse a masked mercenary named "Deathstroke" as their champion of law and order just... didn't work. Don't they have any PR people?

And while it was a nice idea to culminate the arc with bringing the "Outsiders" together, it's weird that the only actual Outsiders they used were Katana and Metamorpho.

All in all, I think Beware the Batman was a nice try, but ultimately it didn't hold together as well as it could have, and the awkward 3D animation often worked against it. And I certainly won't say that the use of previously obscure villains worked against it; after all, Batman: TAS did wonders with hitherto-obscure villains like Mr. Freeze and Poison Ivy, and BtB didn't really handle the prominent villains like Deathstroke and Two-Face that much better than the obscure ones. So it wasn't about the choice of characters, just about the general storytelling. Magpie was handled extremely well in her debut (except for her random, never-explained ability to survive what should be fatal injuries), but terribly in her return. Some villains, like Pyg and Toad, Anarky, or Humpty Dumpty, never really gelled. And Batman himself was a little too unsympathetic. I'd say the most effective characters were Katana, Alfred, and the Gordons. (Tara Strong playing Barbara Gordon is pretty much guaranteed to be awesome.)

I wonder what the odds are that we'll see another Batman series in animation. Cartoon Network doesn't seem to be interested in such things anymore, unless they go an outright comedy route like Teen Titans Go. But who else could show it? Maybe Netflix?
 
^I'd agree with most of those points. My primary criticism is that the show just lacked a sense of energy. I don't think it was the use of CG since the equally short lived Green Lantern show didn't lack in that area. Maybe the tone just didn't mesh as well with the the technology? I get the feeling that had it been 2D animated that it would have been presented as much more stylised and moody, whereas in this medium it'd often come across as sterile and more than a little lifeless. That's all aesthetics though and at least the show had a much stronger sense of it's own identity than say 'The Batman', which to me always seemed schizophrenic.

Although the villains were largely hit-and-miss, they at least did a fine job in characterising the protagonists. Particularly Katanna who I felt was the real star of the show.
 
I binge watched it as well. Saturday night is my night to veg out.

. Mainly, we still have no clue who Anarky really was.

A way to do Joker stories without the Joker. He's about done.



. And while it was a nice idea to culminate the arc with bringing the "Outsiders" together, it's weird that the only actual Outsiders they used were Katana and Metamorpho.?

It all gave the series a different feel than B:TAS or what we got with Brave and the Bold--still my fav'
 
I haven't quite finished it yet but in the beginning of the second-to-last episode Batman had the Dale Lisslow anagram on the Batcomputer it looked like an homage to the cryptographic analyzer from the Arkham games. At least I like to think it was.
 
Whereas I find it rather ridiculous that a mind as keen as Batman's couldn't tell instantly that "Dane Lisslow" was an anagram. Even without having heard of Slade Wilson, it's the kind of odd name that just screams "anagram." And Alfred, who knew Slade and had intelligence training that probably included some cryptography, should've recognized the anagram readily -- not to mention that he should've found Lisslow familiar when they interacted.

And really, a skilled operative like Wilson should've been able to come up with a better alias than an anagram of his own real name.
 
Apropos of nothing, but did anyone else think Dane/Slade/Deathstroke looked like Race Bannon from Jonny Quest?

Sincerely,

Bill
 
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top