How The Scarecrow Became Gotham's Boogeyman | Batman The Animated Series

the creative team behind Batman the Animated Series is famed for their work revitalizing Batman's foes stripping back Decades of accumulated nonsense and Distilling the villains into their purest forms we've discussed this at length in my other videos but there's one villain that started out as a pretty vanilla copy of his comic book counterpart but over time he became something far more Sinister and that character is the Scarecrow before we look at how he was implemented in the show let's take a look at his comic book Origins first appearing in 1941's world's finest three we're introduced to Professor Jonathan crane a teacher of psychology who specialized in the study of fear crane was widely mocked by his peers for his unusual looks shabby clothes and love of old books during one of his lectures on fear crane discusses the gangster's protection racket intimidating people in exchange for cash and the cogs in his mind begin to turn with his expert knowledge of fear he could start his own protection racket to get Respect power and money to buy more books leaning into the insults thrown his way crane decides to adopt the identity of the Scarecrow and start a campaign of fear and intimidation aside from the costume the initial version of the Scarecrow bore little resemblance to the villain we know today his methods of causing fear tended to involve jumping out at people and shooting them it was a simpler time I guess the scarecrow's ability to artificially induce fear wasn't introduced until the 1960s although it took various forms over the decades a chemical spray a mechanical skull that radiated a fear wave and the more widely known fear gas sometimes distributed through the snapping of a straw when it came time for the character to make his way to BTS it seems like the show's creators decided that if it wasn't broke then it didn't need fixing sure they made some changes they simplified his fear toxin delivery method to just being a gas or powder but he was mostly unchanged from the comics making him one of the most authentic to the comics villains in the show the only slight change they made is that he was now driven by a desire for Revenge rather than greed then burn the rest red boss this isn't about money it's a prop Revenge yes he is stealing money from the University but only to force them into bankruptcy in later episodes the Scarecrow would commit crimes to fund his experiments after all you know the cost of chemicals these days while both the comic and animated series version of the character were fired from their position due to their unethical experiments in fear the comic book version of the character is quite accepting of this rejection and takes it as a sign that he should dedicate himself to a full-time career as the Scarecrow betas's version of the scarecrow has little interest in money instead he's motivated by an obsession with studying fear for what purposes yeah it's never really said now I know that I said that at first glance the creative team didn't deviate from the comic book version of scarecrow very much and that is true when it comes to Batman the Animated Series however things were really shaken up when Batman the Animated Series became the new Batman adventures when tnba launched almost every character went through a fairly radical redesign to match the simplified more anime inspired art style but no one went through a more radical transformation than the Scarecrow perhaps the creative team realized that they had missed an opportunity to put their own stamp on the character as they had with so many other villains and as such they completely changed several aspects of the Scarecrow now the Scarecrow does have the distinction of being the only character to be redesigned twice through the course of BTS and tnba there are three distinct phases which I call baghead pumpkin head and zombie the original back head look from nothing to fear strongly resembles his look from the comic books but it isn't particularly frightening you can't really get a wide range of expressions in that mask which is likely one of the reasons why crane unmasked towards the end of the episode imagine this scene playing out with the expressionless mask being worn instead wouldn't be anywhere near as effective in response to this the Scarecrow second phase pumpkin head was introduced in fear of Victory this new mask allowed a greater variety of expressions and at times could look quite freaky but it still wasn't that frightening Minor Adjustments were made to this mask over time mainly to the straw hair and the shape of the face but overall The Mask remained the same for the rest of that initial series it's worth noting that while the design changed his characterization remained entirely the same throughout the entirety of BTS now it wasn't until the new Batman adventures that the Scarecrow was given a truly frightening look his new mask was less expressive true but it resembled Rotting Flesh with Jagged teeth it cut noose sits around his neck and his long gangly arms are exposed with pale gray looking flesh he basically looks like a reanimated corpse similarly his characterization changed gone were Henry Pollock's Transatlantic accent and multi-syllabic speeches hi professor crane good evening child worship me fools worship me instead we are presented with Jeffrey kuhn's soft menacing whisper fear is power and today it will also be quite expensive if you want the antidote this dramatic change in appearance was never really explained in the show but it was explored in some of the tie-in comics the Batman Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures comic explains scarecrow's radical transformation as being a response to an encounter with the crang so traumatized was he by his time in dimension X that scarecrow decided he needed to be scarier than ever now your mileage may vary but I don't like this explanation very much the master of fear intimidated by some wobbly brain creatures from another dimension nah I think there are far better explanations out there take for instance the legacies of the dcau an unofficial fan-made webcomic that provides a potential origin for the scarecrow's new look in their Story scary things they put forward the idea that the Scarecrow committed suicide while incarcerated and was resurrected as an agent of Hades it's pretty grim and you can see why they'd never touched that in a kid's show but I think it's quite a valid idea a more official version of the origin comes to us via Batman adventures writer and artist Ty Templeton who explained to comic book resources that Jonathan crane had been found guilty of murder and sentenced to death by hanging only for the Rope to snap crane now believes himself to be deceased some sort of zombie and his new look was designed to match his demeanor we get a very brief glimpse of crane outside of his new costume in Batman adventures Volume 2 number one and we can see that there's definitely something wrong with him physically I mean just look at that word balloon now the canonicity of tie-in comic books is uneven at best there are multiple events in these Comics that directly contradict the events of the show hello mullet Superman but some of these tie-in Comics are considered Canon like the time Batman teamed up with etchum to stop Rachel Gould from summoning a demon of his own so take this origin with a pinch of salt especially because it was never even published the thing that I think is really cool about this design however is that it Harkens back to foes seen in one of Batman's earliest appearances Hugo Strange's monster men from 1940s Batman number one these Abominations are human beings forever warped by strangers experiments into hulking mindless brutes and Batman dealt with them in a particularly gruesome way one specific monster man was hung by Batman from the Bat Plane and dumped from a great height see the similarity to scarecrow's new costume they're practically the same I enjoy callbacks like this even if the monster man and scarecrow are completely unrelated at least as far as we know the fact that this new look was never given an official origin story has led to an array of potential backstories being discussed by fans and creators alike he's almost become a mythical Boogeyman in that we're never sure if he's alive dead or even the same person that we saw in BTS for all we know there could be more than one scarecrow out there and that's the beauty of this design [Music]

Channel: Serum Lake

Views: 112,409

Keywords: BTAS, TNBA, scarecrow, origin, comic, first appearance, redesign, change, adventures, animated, series, cartoon, animation, anime, voice actor, explanation, essay

Id: aPBoTTidPlA

Length: 8min 35sec (515 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 03 2023