Batman Beyond - The Classic Nobody Wanted | IGN Inside Stories

it's difficult to overstate the legacy of batman beyond there's a real sense of family between the audience and these characters he was just a kid terry was a kid i think for a whole new generation it made people go wait i can be batman with a type of sustained enthusiasm from fans it's enjoyed for the last two decades a batman of the future seems like an idea everybody can get behind but the story of batman and the neo-gotham of 2039 nobody actually wanted to do it bruce and allen had always tried to push it off you know there are no bad ideas but the the network always seems to pick one the network in this case was the wb and they had one more idea make it a teenage batman in the future you're just a guy so how did a network exec's unwanted idea turn into a beloved animated series with its own unique legacy how did batman beyond's producers create something from such a specific ask that not only lived up to the established bat cannon but also expanded and enriched it this is the inside story about finding brilliance out of necessity about a classic batman that nobody wanted from the best-selling critically acclaimed comics to the live-action and animated television shows to the blockbuster movies okay maybe not all the movies the caped crusader has found its audience no matter the decade or the medium if you'll excuse the obvious pun bruce wayne has a pretty good batting average by the late 1990s batman was king of the animated hill on the heels of batman the animated series executive producers bruce tim and paul dini followed up the genre defining hit with the new batman adventures refining the distinctive animation style of batman the animated series that became known as dark deco this new series focused more on the bat family than on bruce wayne and his lonely crusade airing on what was then known as the kids wb the new adventures of batman was a hit fans loved it the ratings were strong and the addition of an entire bat family to model action figures from made the toy companies happy but after barely a year on the air new adventures would have its plug pulled i was not sure i could adequately describe it it was uh surreal and disappointing and and shocking and they had the rug pulled out from under us it was just like oh crap seriously why was the decision made well you can at least partially blame dawson [Music] at the time the wb network was teen central thanks to shows like dawson's creek buffy the vampire slayer and felicity the network had a stranglehold on younger viewers so they told the batman production team they wanted a new batman cartoon for the kids wb with a teenaged caped crusader i don't know if this was like toy line related or what but i think buffy was doing really well for them so i think they wanted a version of batman similar to buffy the producers all just knew that teenage batman would be a nightmare because it's well established in comics canon that teenage bruce wayne had not yet become the dark knight and it didn't fit into the mythology of the animated universe they had spent the 90s building and so in a meeting with wb executives bruce timm turned to an idea born of desperation so i said so if there was some way that we could come up with a teenage batman show that was still in continuity that's still built off of the shows that we've already done i thought the only way to really to do that is to go forward into the future and introduce a new character some batman if the idea was a desperate hail mary fortunately wb network executive jamie kellner was there to catch it jamie's reaction was it was kind of odd i remember this specifically he said he said yeah so it's like it's like like the new generation of samurai passing his sword onto his protege and i thought well i don't really know what that's about but yeah yeah like that and he said he said great let's do that but you've got a green light because i want this show for next fall and we're just like what and hollywood getting a green light is usually cause for celebration and there's no industry where being your own champion is more necessary so the first hurdle to clear was tall and glaring the producers weren't sold on their own pitch like oh i don't want to do this stupid show i don't want to do teenage batman blah blah blah like i want to keep doing the show we're doing even though we knew that was pretty much a lost cause and so we just kind of walked away grumbling you know not really very enthusiastic about it and i remember bruce coming back from the meeting and telling me about it [Music] and uh i said that sounds cool we should do it and i think bruce said he wasn't sure about the idea until he pitched it to me he said yeah futuristic show teenage batman and we can kind of do all that spider-man stuff the torture hero you know he's got he's got to balance his school work and his in his love life and being a superhero we can totally come up with our own stylish version of futuristic gotham and it's like yeah i think it would be fun and i kind of like well yeah okay you're kind of talking me into it tim was slowly coming around to the idea of the new series but an enormous problem still remained getting a show from pitch to production in a matter of months is unheard of in animated television in short it was time to start panicking [Music] part of bruce tim's initial hesitance with the request from the wb was the fear of losing an established and popular continuity a brand new show and a brand new branch of the legacy was a perilous way to proceed something that was not lost on every member of the crew including voice director andrea romano we were creating a series that was not based on established material whereas batman was superman was teen titans even was based on existing material this was something that we were kind of going to create ourselves so in some respects out of a desire to not be vilified by bat fandom the team had to be sure the series was tied to their cannon and one actor was able to do that by himself casting kevin conroy as old man bruce was a no-brainer using the definitive voice of the dark knight confirmed batman beyond's place in the same continuity as batman the animated series but like everybody else conroy took a little convincing they said well we want to do a new batman show and i thought oh great this is great another show i said but you're not going to be batman i said wait a minute that doesn't sound so good while conroy rooted that series in their established canon the network mandate for a fresh and futuristic take on the dark knight still needed a dressing we were still using the same bruce wayne just as a much older character so there had to be some similarities and yet some differences there was a veritable stampede of young hollywood stars looking to nab the role of terry mcginnis but it was will fridell an actor from abc's tgif sitcom boy meets world that quickly got everyone's attention to be honest with you i think the thing that i did other people might not have done which might have been one of the things that gave me a little bit of a leg up on getting the role which was i loved the in the the um michael keaton batman's you know this was obviously pre-christian bail so the michael keaton batman's i thought he really paid respect to the fact that batman and bruce wayne were two very different characters distinctly remember doing half of the audition as terry and then half deepening the voice and doing it as as batman to conroy bruce's decision to permanently turn the suit over to someone else and accept that his hero days are over is one of the triumphs of batman beyond and an aspect of bruce wayne that has rarely been portrayed in the mythos that's that shows extraordinary growth on bruce wayne's part oddly it becomes the most fulfilling relationship he's ever had is the one he has with terry mcginnis it's like a son it's it's the it's it's that fulfillment that a parent has with a child but even with conroy sold in the all-important futuristic teenage batman cast bruce tim faced yet another issue the writers were still struggling to wrap their heads around the initial pitch writers had trouble scripting a batman show where bruce wayne wasn't batman literally most of the shows literally all their cases were about bruce wayne and i was just like you know what i love old man bruce wayne i think he's fascinating and fun because he's ancient and he's cranky and he's more of a bastard than he ever was but he's not the star of our show the the bedrock of the show was terry mcginnis and so it wasn't bruce wayne if you look at the heart of that show with terry mcginnis bruce wayne is kind of long for the ride all of our freelance writers nobody understood it nobody could get it so we literally had to break like all of the stories in-house ultimately they did get help from writer stan berkowitz a member of the dc animated family that had moved to live-action drama after his emmy-winning time on superman he returned to script the back half of the two-part series premiere of batman beyond titled rebirth which aired in prime time on january 10 1999 and he made it clear he had no intention of writing terry as just another young bruce wayne it would be impossible for me to imagine a character a teenager that dark that damaged the whole point of doing the series was to do one you know have a hero who is younger and could appeal to younger people well you make him someone who thinks he knows a lot and he's got he's got the raw material you know like no you didn't know that much and you made a mistake here you made a mistake there but you're learning while the writing team sorted out the foundation of the show the production and design team was dealing with problems of their own all they had to do was create a whole new world complete with a brand new group of villains for a show they had to start making right now [Music] as the sprint to deliver the hastily pitched and approved show on an unheard of schedule began there was still work left to be done on the new batman adventures and superman the animated series it's kind of all a blur to me because at one point we were finishing superman finishing batman and doing batman beyond at the same time we were like in on a machine with that other show and they basically said we have to produce a whole new show and also it's set in the future so none of the stock designs that we use on superman and batman will apply we just had to generate a lot of artwork really really quickly we would kind of go into a meeting and we would like sort of throw out a bunch of drawings and then we would start shaping what the show was as the two main characters terry and bruce were the backbone of the show but a batman is only as good as his rogues gallery batman beyond needed bad guys time was short and tim was adamant about not simply recycling the classic villains once again what seemed like a problem turned out to be a huge opportunity for the show's staff who soon set out to create an entirely new roster of baddies and bruce told all the artists who could do it into a room and said we need film he basically just threw it out there basically developed the show in a room and we were just throwing out ideas out there and literally just drawing that frenzied method sketch first concept later led to the creation of memorable foes like ink and shriek at least in one case that i know that you know the noise guys shriek basically glenn would glenn drew the picture and then i was just handed you know the picture and said and alan said here glenn just did this it has something to do with sound figure out something i wanted this show to be terry's show i didn't want terry necessarily to be fighting all of bruce's villains i didn't i didn't think that was interesting more than just updating the villains for the show's new dark knight batman beyond modernized the batman mythos thematically as well exploring the dark side of technology and science's impact on society and there's no better place to showcase a sweeping stylistic shift than a show's title sequence and batman beyond was a stunner putting the series cyberpunk influences front and center the titles are a breathtaking montage of multimedia images designed by the late great cartoonist darwin cook darwin assembled it all in after effects back in the days when it took forever just to render a single scene it's just like kind of mind-blowing and look back on it now like it's a pretty sophisticated piece of film for 1999 technology there's a james tucker shot there's i designed a bunch of stuff so it was uh it was definitely a collaboration that shot of batman standing and he turns with the jokers that's a action figure that bruce like kit bashed into batman beyond it's on like a little lazy susan kind of thing bruce kind of moved the camera and rotated it and it's just two pieces of artwork that are doing this as the batman is rotating in the center that's that's all it is best shot of bruce wayne that everybody thinks is cg that's literally a sculpture that the 3d sculpture i stuck that literally on a lazy susan on my kitchen table and thundered around and shot it with my home video camera darwin took that that image and and digitized it and it gives it that weird kind of cg kind of look in a lot of ways it's really low tech but i think everyone thinks it's really high-tech the show was coming together mixing the demands of the network with solutions that made the concept more and more intriguing to the creative team the idea that nobody wanted to make was sounding better all the time to them but what about the fans from the minute we announced the show was going to happen all of our fans were just like they already wrote it off they were just like oh my god this sounds horrible this is going to be terrible teenage batman it's going to be for kids if keeping the continuity from their previous shows was important keeping the audience from those shows was crucial they had a lot to prove right out of the gate and to do that they had to start with a bang the series premiere features an aging batman in the year 2019 while trying to stop the kidnapping bruce grabs a gun as a last resort the act of desperation convinces him to retire the dark knight never again the first two-parter everything about that show is so much more adult and darker and uglier than pretty much anything we've done in any of our shows up until that point so it was kind of like we knew that when we had that shot of batman retiree age batman pointing a gun at a criminal we knew that was like the best way to like to slap those guys upside the head and say nope this is a good show you're gonna love it the story jumps ahead 20 years from there and neo-gotham has risen terry mcginnis is attacked by the joker's street gang only to be saved by an elderly bruce wayne terry soon discovers the old man used to be batman and after terry's father is killed by the jokers as retaliation bruce offers to train him to become the new batman gotham needs as the show premiered even with the banger of an opening the response wasn't exactly positive at first it wasn't overnight by any means and it was all hate it first by the end of our first season people would be grudgingly going oh okay and yet by august 2000 warner brothers pictures had hired remember the titans director boaz akeem to make a live-action adaptation of beyond batman beyond co-creators paul deeney and alan burnett were even hired to co-write the film and while the project ultimately stalled it's clear that studio execs saw the appeal the character had to fans after three seasons and one feature film the series came to an end in december of 2001. nearly four years later what was essentially the series finale of batman beyond aired on justice league unlimited the episode epilogue retconned using some serious superhero science that bruce wayne was actually terry mcginnis father however beyond that there has been no real movement on a possible batman beyond revival but fans keep asking anyway i get that a lot from people these days like oh when are you guys going to bring back beat as or we're going to do more batman beyond it's just kind of like whoa you know it's always tempting to go back to those worlds but at the same time it's also kind of like oh man you don't want to go back and screw the pooch you know you don't want to like disappoint people with you know they have so many high expectations for those shows at the same time if i got a really good opportunity to do something more in those worlds i probably would not be able to resist the temptation to do it despite its unlikely origin as a project nobody wanted today batman beyond is a beloved part of the dc animated universe and that means something different for everyone involved in the creation of the show but one thing seems to be true for all of them it validated their commitment to taking a big risk at first it was something we were dreading and then it became something we really got into and loved and we thought of it as something where we were actually contributing to the batman myth of something unique something that didn't exist before the network wanted a new batman a teenage batman like buffy only from the future bruce tim and his team didn't even want to make the show at first it was an idea beyond saving they thought but the more they worked on it the more they came to love the concept as did the fans a teenage future batman with an old bruce wayne as his mentor hell yeah in the years since the show went off the air terry mcginnis has persisted in comics games and of course on dvd blu-ray and streaming and with the constantly changing state of the dc film universe the future of batman beyond is always filled with hope [Music] this is unbearably cool [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: IGN

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Keywords: DC, WB, IGN, shows, batman, Feature, The WB, animation, Animation, bruce timm, bruce wayne, kevin conroy, will friedle, batman beyond, Batman Beyond, warner brothers, the new batman adventures, batman the animated series, top videos

Id: NCrzlYoMUE4

Length: 18min 36sec (1116 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 05 2020