Hey, I hate to be a downer, but The Animated Series set the bar that high. Seriously, all other animated Batman shows will forever be compared to Batman: The Animated Series. And odds are, they are going to fall short. It was a cartoon that an adult could get into, and it holds the gold standard for what a Batman animated show should be.
The show not only portrayed Batman and his cast of characters splendidly, but it also redefined how some of his villains were perceived, giving them more depth than they originally had. While some bats will fly off into the caverns of pop culture past, forgotten and disregarded, this one will remain one of the best and most influential incarnations of everyone’s favorite emo bat hero.Batman: The Animated Series holds a treasured spot in the hearts of Batman fans. executives even dreamed of streaming platforms and cinematic universes, “Batman: The Animated Series” pointed the way forward for what was to become one of world’s most ubiquitous franchises. It adapted characters and plots from the comics, drew tonal inspiration from the Burton films and then went on to influence Batman properties that followed.īatman is an onscreen staple at this point: Pattinson’s “The Batman” arrives next year, but Affleck’s Justice League Batman and Bale’s Batman are hardly distant cultural memories (not to mention Will Arnett’s sidesplitting Lego Batman).īut years before Disney and Warner Bros. “Batman: The Animated Series” was canny about how it mined the hero’s lore. (He went on to voice the character in nearly every subsequent DC animated spinoff, including the beloved 1993 film “Batman: Mask of the Phantasm” and the stylish cyberpunk sequel series, “Batman Beyond,” both on HBO Max.) Stately without being stiff, playful without being juvenile, Conroy’s performance captured the gravitas of the character without ever losing track of the fact that he’s a billionaire playboy who runs around in bat-tights at night. Kevin Conroy’s voice work showed a range not every actor in the role has been able to replicate, distinguishing Conroy, for many, as the one and only true Batman.
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(A few years later, Arnold Schwarzenegger offered a saccharine take on the character in the widely maligned “Batman and Robin,” from 1997.) It also introduced a villain that has become fundamental to the Batman mythology, Harley Quinn, who somersaulted her way into the canon and, decades later, into her own irreverent television series and film. Freeze, who was given a sympathetic back story. The series revamped some villains from the comics, like Mr. Mark Hamill’s rollicking laugh in his performance as the Joker became one of the character’s most definitive qualities. (It could have skewed darker: One episode script, about the gun that killed Bruce Wayne’s parents, never made it to the drawing board because the network found it too bleak, according to the writer and producer Alan Burnett.)Īs in most “Batman” iterations, the villains were what shined most. Some episodes, like the stunner “Perchance to Dream,” in which Batman is trapped in a dream version of his life where he isn’t the dark hero, dive into the dark psyche of the character. The show featured mobsters with guns and knives and tackled difficult themes involving murder, revenge, poverty, greed, exploitation and more.
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Unlike his TV predecessors, the hero in “Batman: The Animated Series,” which debuted in September 1992, fought real crime and took himself seriously. But the haunted, violent version of the character that dominates pop culture now sprang largely from the comics writer Frank Miller, whose groundbreaking work in the 1980s, including the series “Batman: The Dark Knight Returns,” is an obvious influence on “Batman: The Animated Series.” The viewing public got its first look at a moody Batman when Tim Burton stamped the bat with his signature gothic style in “Batman” in 1989.
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