A fair point. But the whole thing felt kind of like an afterthought to some degree.
Technically it was since they really didn't expect to get renewed. So they did well considering and it helps if you think of that season as something of a coda.
That wasn't a problem in the first season. Almost all his foes there were corporate baddies, particularly Powers and his lackeys.
Which was fine and they ended Power's story before it became too implausible and ended up having him as the stereotypical super-villain who's constantly thwarted but always comes back. Like with Freeze there has be be a good reason for him to be around.
If they had continued in that trend then you'd still be complaining that the show was repetitive. Don't get me wrong, season 2 did push it's luck, but no more than any other show IMO.
Not really. There were some corporate baddies (Ferris Boyle, Roland Daggett), but they were usually the ones whose callous actions created the primary villains. Your classic Batman villain is often an outcast from society, someone with a grudge against the system that ruined their lives, and while Batman may have found the corporate types contemptible, he was often placed in the position of defending them against the monsters they'd created. In BB's first season, the corporate types were the primary villains, in keeping with the '80s/'90s cyberpunk milieu the series sought to emulate.
Actually I was referring to how many of the villains had a link to or specifically targeted either big business or the rich socialite crowd. Both of which were worlds in which Bruce spent his off hours in the real world.
Likewise Terry's world outside of the cowl was home, high school and out on the town with Dana and Max.
But these same creators did such a good job enhancing Batman's rogues' gallery, giving new life and substance to characters like Mr. Freeze and Clayface, brilliantly handling classic characters like Joker and Two-Face, and making worthy new additions such as Harley Quinn.
Very true, but for the most part they took something existing making it better by streamlining the origins, cherry picking the best bits from the existing material and adding their own spin. I think Freeze was the only one where they just took the gimmick and built a whole new (and much much better) character around it. Though Harley Quinn is a great character and an original creation, at the end of the day she came from the idea of making an interesting recurring character out of the Joker's usually faceless henchmen, so there was already a foundation to build on there.
They proved they were capable of creating rich and complex villains. But on BB they didn't even seem to try. By their own admission, they just took a bunch of drawings their character designers did and came up with stories based on them. The BB villains started with their technological gimmicks, and usually ended with them, rather than being grounded in character motivation or psychological quirks. It'd be one thing if a different group of creators had failed to live up to the same level as the B:TAS crew, but these were the same people and they didn't live up to their own past performance.
In all fairness I'd say that while BTAS unquestionably had a lot of "hits" with it's interpretation of characters and it's development of new ones it also had it's fair share of "misses" that are mercifully forgettable.
Plus they never really did dial in on a version of Catwoman that worked very well and the design and character of Scarecrow seamed to change every time he appeared, so they still struggled in places.
I don't mean to be down on the show, by any means but as I see it, while BB certainly wasn't as successful at creating new characters, it had the added impediment of them having to be actual new characters that had to be developed within a new narrative framework.
Inque was initially just a weak Clayface substitute, another of the crop of first-season villains with no personality and no motivation beyond being bad or getting rich. They did finally get around to giving her a personality, and that was a worthwhile episode, but it wasn't until her third appearance. Which is a bit above the run of the mill, since most of the villains never got any real personality or motivation at all, but it was still put off too long.
I wouldn't go that far. Clayface was always the tragic figure alternating between self pity and resentment towards a world he blamed for all of his problems.
Shapeshifting aside, Inque was always had a much more self assured, intelligent though mercenary type of personality and was consistently play as a significant threat. Out of all the various villains she easily came the closest to actually killing Terry (and Bruce) on several occasions.
Derek Powers was a decent villain, though he was basically Lex Luthor crossed with Dr. Phosphorus and he was killed off too soon. The "Big Time" character from the third season was fairly interesting because he had a past relationship with Terry and provided him some angst. But the only other characters who stand out for me are the classic villains who returned -- Mr. Freeze, Ra's, the Joker. Although the Jokerz gang from the ROTJ movie was memorable, particularly the Dee Dees. Unfortunately they were only in the movie and JLU, and the other Jokerz weren't as interesting.
I think the Jokerz were just an easy analogue for the 30's/40's style mob gangsters from BTAS and were only really there for colour...with of course the added bonus of being an Akira reference, which was on it's own a huge influence on the show.
That highlights the other main reason I don't like BB as much as the others. I hate that headbanging techno music or whatever the hell you call it. It just couldn't compare to the rich orchestral scores of B:TAS and S:TAS, or even the pseudo-orchestral synth stuff in JL/JLU. That's another reason why ROTJ is head and shoulders above the rest of BB -- its music is a blend of the old orchestral style and the hard-rock/techno stuff, and that makes it more palatable.
Well that type of music isn't normally to my taste either, but in the context of the show I think it was suitable and worked well enough. But yes, the ROTJ score was a much better balance.
Except I have a hard time buying that Bruce could actually live that long. It seems far more likely that Batman would die in battle while still fairly young.
A sentiment shared by the man himself as I recall. The world can be funny like that.
As for Gotham, I found it too uniformly futuristic. Cities don't grow by completely tearing everything down and replacing it. You always find newer buildings existing alongside buildings that are a century or more old. True, there were occasional glimpses of parts of "Old Gotham" (like in the episode where Shriek was trying to drive Bruce insane, which revealed the unlikely fact that the police HQ building with the Batsignal was about a block away from Crime Alley), but overall the city just looked too uniform in design.
Part of the corporate, mass produced prefabbed construction, or at least that's how I took it. As for the near total absense of "old Gotham" I always got the implication that something big happened that necessitated most of the city being massively rebuilt or heavily industrialised.
Back in the day half the city seamed to be made up of slums, dilapidated warehouses and abandoned carnivals and factories, so either way it's no wonder most of it was bulldozed in favour of new, mostly automated (hence the oddly deserted feel in places) industrial complexes.
I liked Max better than most of the other characters in the show. She was smart, she was sexy, and she had Cree Summer's voice (a major component of the "sexy" part). And it's cool when the hero has someone he can trust and confide in. I thought Max was a great addition to the show. And frankly I don't know why Terry hung around with that boring, shallow Dana when this smart, hot, curvaceous babe he could trust with his secret was there for him.
I have to say I never took Max as "sexy", but then that's never a prerequisite for me liking a character so I tend to ignore it when it's not relevant to the character.
As for Dana, I wouldn't call her boring exactly but she had so little to do but get stood up and occasionally put in peril it's really hard to say either way. The fact that she put up with Terry running off so frequently is certainly a mark in her favour.
