The Story of Batman The Animated Series | The Heart of Batman

okay this is from uh the directory that this is from the complete directory of prime time tv shows uh and this is their little uh capsule summary of batman the animated series gotham city's caped crusader returned in primetime television in this animated series that was much more somber in tone than either the 1960s live-action batman or the animated versions that had run in the 70s and 80s this animated series was produced by tim burton i don't think that's true batman the animated series really changed the way people were making animated drama this was not the usual fare for kids entertainment [Music] we weren't just reinventing batman batman's villain gallery was all being reinvented fox did not give us a lot of notes they had some overall general notes but at least at first they were pretty hands off i always look back at this series and i am stunned at the stories that we got away with telling we did push back aggressively because we felt like we kind of had to there was many many days when i would drive home and think oh i'm going to get fired tomorrow [Music] we got an education while we were producing this series and it really was like watching these mini movies we didn't treat them like a tv show we treated them like a motion [Music] picture [Music] [Music] we knew what we didn't want we didn't want the show to seem like every other adventure show on tv we wanted the show to be appealing to kids because we knew that it was you know they were our primary intended audience but at the same time we wanted to show that we ourselves would watch as adults every single project is a puzzle and every puzzle has only one set of right pieces and batman the animated series every single piece was the right piece to the puzzle this was a a big paradigm shift in animation this batman series everybody looked at superheroes differently everybody looked at cartoons differently the challenge was it was in the beginning and and convincing the powers that be that this look and the edginess of it could be successful that um oh it's so dark yes that's what it's good that's what's good about it and everybody was like i don't know so getting over that hurdle to the point where they'd let us go that way that was the biggest challenge fortunately you know eric and i were kind of in the right place at the right time you know we happened to be working at warner brothers when you know that the prospect of doing an animated batman show came up and you know it was you know jeans like dangling that brass ring we're like okay grab it [Music] there's there's just uh artistic integrity that was inherent to this series and and it was absolutely because of all of the people that really cared about what they were working on and put their whole selves into it and it just shows in the work and the fact that it resonates with people and fans as long as it has is a testament to it there's no explanation other than that because it's just an animated show but the fact that it had that impression for me is a result of the fact that you know that passion lives within the you know the entire creation of that of that experience so to be part of that collective is just truly unique [Music] the 66 batman show with adam west was actually my first exposure to batman as a character it was like my gateway drug it was a show that we could watch with our parents and everybody was entertained it was very cartoony so it was all that pop pow kind of warhol pop art kind of way of viewing the story there was just something about it you know the the whole larger than life aspect of it you know the costumes and the sets i was really invested in the show because for crazy villains like the penguin and the joker and everything it really did seem to be sort of life and death stakes and then a year later there was a scene where batman is singing i'm called little buttercup to robin and i'm going like that i'm out i can't take this seriously people love that show but it's not at all what bruce tim was going to be going for in this show and i liked the comedy of it i liked the silliness of it it didn't scare me but then we made a cartoon series that was pretty damn scary [Music] once you got into the mid to late 80s obviously there was a seminal change in the type of stories that we're told some of the most iconic batman stories of all time came out at that point with year one dark knight returns killing joke the thing that that really changed for me was the dark knight returns uh graphic novel by frank miller i think for everyone there were new edges for the kind of stories you could tell with batman and it really redefined batman's stories ever since the late 80s was it was time for batman the whole world was saying we want some batman and that was well even before the movie came out before tim burton's movie came out you know when i first got into the business when i got into the animation business it was a pretty dark time for the industry as a whole there were the three networks that was all you had and this the animation was all saturday morning and a lot of it was because they had a requirement to film to fill a certain amount of children's programming it was always very children oriented even the action adventure shows and they were very formularized you had to have a an interesting sidekick all the time and and almost always you had to have a funny animal character so when you did a show like super friends or something it you know as somebody who had grown up with dc comics it was like well not not the way i would have done it [Music] the network had a very skewed vision of what they felt kids wanted to see so it's all shows about kids and kid issues and it's not really funny i started animation in 81 to hannah barbera the landscape was that animation was pretty much dedicated to kids 2-11 and almost all of it was on saturday morning [Music] they always had in mind whatever the show was is this going to be okay for two euros and that's what held back for me a lot of creativity they had to worry about making sure that the toys were sold but also keeping the various pressure groups off their backs and there was plenty of that uh not just like the pta but there were various action for children's television you know a lot of these people were constantly being called up to congress you know to explain themselves children's programming back then it was really rough congress got involved and you know how great things are when congress gets involved the answer is no they would say make it goofy make it wacky make it zany but they had no idea what that was it was never funny it was just sort of on [Music] we had a wonderful broadcast standards woman on the show avery coburn she understood this was an afternoon show and that we would be appealing to an older bunch of kids that there would be guns and there would be fist fights if there's something awry she would have an answer for us i've had to do this at countless parties what do you do bsmp what is that and i usually i tell them and they still don't get it and then i wind up saying you know i censor the shows [Music] but really i don't think of it as that i think of it as an editor would work with a writer on a book she is an unsung hero of this thing because if we had had a normal broadcast standards person from like the 60s or 70s um i would have i would have been flayed alive you couldn't have someone hit someone with a frying pan [Music] because a chat would have access to a frying pan you know you'd have to show seat belts when a child rode in a car all of these examples of a general policy to keep kids safe the idea came to try and create a saturday morning network that was that was going to be the very first one created since the very early 50s we have to have cartoons we have to have advertisers we have to have eyeballs but what about the content how's the content going to be different um because now you're talking 1990 and not 1952. we decided that we were going to do something different and it would be a show aimed at comic book lovers in their tweens we would go over every scene and all the action and talk about standards i definitely had great respect for those people that were producing this show i started working in the 80s and uh the very first show i worked on was was a very it was a puppy show for abc [Music] you know they had the wuzzles and uh gummy bears so we're talking fairly light fair the early part of the 80s we were pushing the wheel and we were doing what we could in saturday morning but it was very restrictive with the programming rules with broadcast standards it began to get hard to come up with stories that would interest me the writer as well as the kids because of the bsnp pressures i had to make shows that were essentially you know action shows but the action had to be so toned down that you could hardly call an action show you ended up with having the hero standing around talking a lot you won't get away with this you're rotten rug jackie don't worry general we'll take care of him we had the army in there but they weren't allowed to have weapons no guns were ever allowed they could have shovels i worked on the last incarnation of super friends with alan burnett at hanna-barbera and it was very frustrating trying to tell a superhero story at that time uh on the networks be careful robin one slip and we're done i was about five shows into it and i said you know i'm going to have somebody shrink the superheroes so that they fight small things and that that's a sign that there's trouble when you shrink your superheroes because that's you're desperate for stories you won't be bugging me much longer we have to see where robin kicks a spider off a table that's gonna attack them and uh and we got the bsnp note is the spider okay we have to show the spiders is okay and so we had a panel put in the storyboard where you see the spider crawling away that first year on super friends was just i i don't even wanna i've never gone back to see them i'm sorry dr gulliver but there's got to be a better way than shrinking people my introduction to the superhero world in animation was the super friends which i just thought was goofy as hell forgive me it just was the drawings were not good the voices were god awful and the scripts are really pretty bad you were really had your hands tied in terms of how the stories worked out you could not have conflict you could not have violence of any sort they didn't like punching i mean i'm talking about superman hits a wall instead of a person but that was too violent the standards and practices were so restrictive that i remember in the last season of super friends we introduced dark side into it and there was a great deal of conversation about whether or not we could use the name dark side or whether it was too scary that was the climate that we were in the industry just wasn't thriving [Music] a lot of the earlier generation of the you know the famous nine old men the star animators from you know going back to like the snow white days a lot of them were you know retired retiring or dying off and there wasn't there didn't seem to be like a whole new generation of people who were being mentored and um you know brought into the business to to further that there was really nobody in the middle age range doing animation there were young guys like myself and bruce tim and tom i think is a little older in our 20s and we were just starting our careers like 79 80 81 and then there were the guys who had been on the original disney features and at warner brothers and they were all in their late 70s and 80s and they're looking to retire and then here at warner brothers in 89 i think is when we we first started doing um tiny tunes um that was our first big show as a as a newly revamped studio for for tv cartoons uh unfortunately it was a huge hit i met gene mccarty when i was working at hanna-barbera and i had been there for a number of years i've done a lot of scooby but jean mccurdy was my boss there she was in charge of all the writers at hanna-barbera and at some point she said i can't do this anymore i'm out of here [Music] she was gone and she was over at warner brothers and they had no real production facility going on at all at warner brothers steven spielberg and uh terry semel of warner brothers got together one day and they said hey let's make sort of a junior version of looney tunes i came to warner brothers it was late in november it was right around thanksgiving and the first week in january of 1989 there was a press conference with spielberg announcing we were going to produce 65 half hours i had been there what six weeks [Music] and they went to mccurdy who was in charge of the animation department which was really inactive and they said who do we get to make this they said you know what what's it what's it going to take to put this together because at first they were talking about forming it out to hb and i went no no no no you can do this here and she said she had the nerve to say why don't you let us do it why don't you let me start a division of animation and they said well that's pretty chancy let's give it a try i know some really good people it's so it was like how am i gonna do this i'm not real sure and you know thank god for tom ruger who i'd worked with at hanna-barbera tom was willing to come on board and take it on and really had a vision for what it should be i was fortunate enough to be the first hire and was asked to come in and do development on tiny tunes at that point warner brothers they just wanted to please steven spielberg spielberg was at his peak so warner brothers was all in on getting stephen or maintaining steven's happiness please mr spielberg we don't care if the show's a piece of junk i don't care if this is on budget or over budget don't care if it's you know a hit or a failure we don't care if it's a disaster all we care about is keeping steven spielberg happy but if steven's happy at the end of the process we'll be happy because we'll have this great relationship [Music] you know he was a big part of why tiny toons had a lot more money thrown at it than previous cartoons for tv they were so supportive in terms of money time all of that and stephen attracted talent and the fact that we wanted to be really competitive and we're willing to pay to be competitive um really made a big difference we got good people i had a really decent sized budget we had a decent sized schedule and of course you know the writing and animation was all really good it was good tiny tunes had happened at warner brothers and that was kind of the golden age of like the new revival of animation in the 90s frank miller's dark knight had come out as a comic and then the michael keaton tim burton batman came out so things were pushing in a different direction batman wise and comic wise there was a revolution going on that was changing the movie industry that was changing the television industry that was changing the comic book industry and the two culprits behind this were our first batman live action movie in 1989 followed by batman the animated series and you can't talk about one without also talking about the other tim burton's batman feature film was a monster head just huge it was it was like printing money the revolutionary aspects of this were amazing tim had to wrestle with the concept that any move he made could wind up having people unintentionally laugh at the movie at batman at the situations that was pretty terrifying but he figured it out and i'll never forget the day he said to me you know michael in order to do this seriously this movie is not going to be about batman and i said what are you talking about he says nope this movie's got to be about bruce wayne it was very popular with kids the stage was really set for batman to appear in some form or another warners wanted to make the cartoon fox wanted to air it and they realized that it was different than than what had gone before every single genre movie since 1989 i don't care if it's a superhero if it's a general comic book movie if it's sci-fi whatever every single one is still to this day being influenced by the vision of tim burton there was a lot of other adventure shows on tv they were pretty much all of them were all toy times prior to that a lot of the influence came out of companies that wanted to capitalize on brands that may have had some life in theatrical and to build on that they could do an episodic series which basically advertised the toys for a series so that the focus on quality entertainment and storytelling was not at the forefront one thing i remember coming into work on the batman animated series was a sense of relief that it was a new day in in animation i remember the other writers and artists on the series talking about this this opportunity that that batman presented that kind of the uh the cuffs were off i think even to us working on it was not we didn't believe they were actually going to do anything like like we ended up creating when we were finishing up the first season of tiny toons my boss gene mccurdy had a big meeting with uh with with the entire crew and basically said yeah you know we're we're probably gonna do another second season we're still waiting for you to pick up on that and in the meantime we're gonna develop other new shows and one of the things we're thinking about developing is batman as an animated property warner brothers is doing a new batman well i've heard that one before oh boy here comes another super friends these guys have been doing tiny tunes i love tiny tunes but it's goofy comedy it's tiny tunes it started off very experimental at the beginning jean mccurdy wanted to see who on the crew would be interested in doing a batman show and eric radomski came up with this really stunning uh background uh design where he was using very vibrant colors on black paper to sort of mute the look and give it a darker look because of the tim burton influence i chose to present the piece i felt was influenced by the dark noir sort of beginnings and picking up on tim burton's direction of that first film his influence on my sort of perspective of the character was probably the most influential because i wasn't particularly a comic book reader as a as a kid eric's not really a comic book fan he is not like me he's not like a lifelong comic book fan but all he knew about batman was the adam west show and the tim burton movie and he was not even a fan of the adam west show when he was a kid growing up to see adam west and you know the campy uh television series you know kind of left me uh uninterested but he loved the first tim burton movie i mean that's why he was intimate doing the batman show yeah it's true the opportunity to bring some influence into animation that could at least be in line with what tim burton's movie was was just unique and that's kind of why my direction came out the way that it did in the very beginning was that was the main the main influence for me for what this could be and if they were willing to to consider that that was the only piece that i had submitted [Music] bruce tim is the hero to those of us who love and care about batman because he was the right person at the right moment in time he was able to see the door opening and jump in and pull it wide open and bruce tim i think he's been drawing batman all his life he in some form or another and he just went to his office drew a model sheet within like about an hour so i filled up an entire eight and a half by eleven page of just different batman designs so the next time gene had one of these big meetings i showed up with this sheet of batman drawings and she went wow that's really cool he brought it to me you know i did he's the one who said here this is what i would do okay that looks good you know it wasn't hard it isn't hard to recognize something that's working um and he was working it was good it's like yeah if we do a batman cartoon that's exactly what he should look like and she said yep that's him why don't you and eric work together they were both great and and they were it was an interesting pairing because they were very different personalities and styles but but each very passionate about what they did bruce tim and eric radomski barely knew each other they you know they had seen each other but they were working on different things jean literally called us together basically said we like both of your take on uh you know at least an art direction for this show she took eric's background concepts and married him with my character designs said yeah i want you i want you guys to make a batman short would you be interested in producing a sample piece uh that we could you know see what this might look like as a show you know like two minutes long whatever two three minutes long here's a certain amount of money go for it you know do exactly what you wanted to do and um and we'll show it to fox and hopefully they'll get a lighter fire into them and say yeah let's make this show i remember bruce with his you know tiny tunes storyboards and and him being very happy that he could now do this instead i remember that i think it was uh maybe six weeks to animate the whole piece and then we did uh just a very basic mix on it with the existing music and sound effects and bruce and i participated by recording some of the fight sequences because we couldn't afford real actors at the time so we were in the booth doing our grunts and groans and fisticuffs and by the time we got it done they had already signed the deal so but what was good about it was that it gave eric and i kind of a calling card wow it was i'd never seen anything like that and nobody had seen anything like that with the cinematic quality of it even though it's just a you know a minute or two long it captures everything about batman everyone took a real liking to it we can do that on a weekly basis that would be awesome out of the blue gene had called eric and iron door off and said how would you guys like to produce the show i think both of us didn't really know what the producing job was i was a storyboard artist on on tiny tunes when when that meeting happened so at that point um i really had no deeper ambitions or wider ambitions than just you know art directing you know the batman cartoon if if it came to be you know we were certainly dumbfounded at the same time it was like yeah sure okay so you know it's like it was yeah i'd have to be stupid to say no until you walk out of the room and literally go how in the hell are we going to do this we've never produced a show we don't know certainly don't know budgets and schedules and what's going to be involved and who's going to be involved and what is our real role because we're literally two artists that were just production artists uh you know yesterday and today they're asking us to produce this series we had a green light and we had a deadline so we had to kind of get going because we were i think too new to realize the potential disaster it could have been we just trudged forward i ended up working with a lot of people that i'd never worked with before but you know we had to take chances and unfortunately a lot of it paid off the art is useless if the stories aren't any good and when we first started we didn't even have a story editor gene was able to step in and understood where we were coming from and actually that brought us alan burnett in the beginning because we needed bruce and i neither of us had experience as writers alan is just a god gene mccurdy and i go back a few years i was a page at nbc and got an internship at children's programs and the person who hired me was g mccurdy who's the manager of children's programs at that time alan burnett has been part of my life my entire creative life i suppose her television life so when i got to hanna-barbera allen was there as a writer and one of the shows that we were going to develop and try to sell with super friends dedicated to true justice and peace and alan and i both felt that it needed to be serious that it should be that it couldn't be adam west that we needed to do something that was really took the characters seriously so we tried to convince abc that this would be the way to go and they didn't want to do that i had another vision of what kids would like [Music] she knew that he was a big comic book fan and specifically a big batman fan and she had since i think from the very beginning of the show had tried to get him over to come work here and he was over disney you know doing one of the duck shows and i kept saying to him that's ridiculous you shouldn't be doing that wait a second duck tales really come on you know it's like i mean i like duck tales but are you kidding me it wasn't until he got the assurances so that we would be able to tell the kinds of stories in an honest way that he committed to come on board gene mccurdy promised me i'd have guns and i'd have fist fights because i wouldn't come over otherwise and i didn't believe her i really didn't and and then they had a trailer and those guns are going off and fissile heading is great and and i said even then i said to gene are you this is okay we can do this and she said yes yes you can almost we had a policy against showing gun use we never showed impact but you hear the bullets and you see the reaction it was very moving very dramatic but more mature more adult than you would see in any other show up to that [Music] stop [Music] i wanted allen and he was like no i'm into contract but i did not come over to warner brothers until the very last i didn't make a decision until the very last day of my deal and i finally said okay i'm going to come over and so i was glad that i did he's made his move and so he took a chance and and came on board um and from that point on um it pretty much saved the show his vision of the show was was really really close to what what what eric and i both wanted it to be and it was true i could finally have a noirish show with guns and fights impactful stuff he seemed to have a vision of the show that was very sharp and very smart and it was really the words to bruce's uh visuals and to eric's uh you know stylizations it really was like the missing piece he was a little older than us and had more experience and obviously had his career as a writer prior but he understood what we were trying uh trying to do with the series as well as he was a huge batman fan so he uh i think he was able to assure the executives at the time that we had a solid team it wasn't just two rogue you know young uh first-time producers saying leave us alone let's do whatever we want to do so thank god for alan he put the whole thing he put all the pieces together and got it up and running and and and humming like a fine machine and so the rest is history we you know we were hiring people like kind of not off the street but people who didn't have much experience or whatever um glenn murakami was a guy who he had never worked in the business he'd never he'd never actually held a a paying art job before but he was a comic book fan and he worked in a comic book shop i will say it's the first time i felt like i found my people i mean growing up and being into comic books and movies and illustration and stuff like that i think that was the first time i found a collection of people who all saw all of it the same way that i did i think everyone was striving for the same goal everyone wanted to make the best kind of show that they could so that's pretty unique i was too kind of naive to know any better it came as uh you know as just a team effort to say we've got to get this thing done i've got ideas you've got ideas that clearly like what we did together let's see what we can do [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] do [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] the shock of my life was i was sitting down and bruce shows me that trailer that they did and i was like you got to be kidding me you're doing fleischer superman you've got to be kidding me you know just just sign me up warner brothers had seven minute fleischer shorts of superman that i thought were awesome yeah gene gene liked those uh fleischer cartoons and she watched them on moviolas down in the warner brothers basement they were dramatic and the look of them everything about it eric and bruce wanted to make a series like the placer superman but they wanted to make it for the 90s they wanted to make it even darker and i think maybe i said something about fleischer to them i probably did because pleasure was always something that haunted me i don't know why but it just did it was funny because eric and i were both really big fans of the fleischer superman cartoons but we didn't actually want to just recreate that look we kind of wanted to put our own spin on the superhero world you know in incorporating film noir and german expressionism and art deco but we specifically were trying to do something that wasn't exactly fleischer inspired and then one day we were meeting with eugene mccurdy and she kind of said you know the show should look like a fleischer superman cartoon it was like yes it should it's like yeah we were trying to not do that but it totally makes sense to do that so yeah why fight it so i may have mentioned fleischer to them but i mean it's so bruce tim those designs that i he would have done that that way anyway but you know i don't know that i had to say it out loud he knew what he wanted to do i thought it was an upgrade of the fleischer stuff and i thought damn that's good that's great visually that thing was handled bruce and eric and the entire artistic staff and the director i mean they had this thing visually it was like uh it was poetry in motion i mean they they know how to tell a story without dialogue without sound dark deco is a term that i came up with on the spur of the moment one is just because it was combining two different things the dark look of the show was something that eric and i were both really into trying to achieve we both wanted to bring like a kind of an old-timey film noir kind of sensibility to the visuals and that meant dark that meant like you know just having the show take place almost all you know all the time at night working with a lot of silhouette was going to be part and parcel of the show the darker setting lends itself to just the the graphic side of what a comic book is and eric had come up with this brilliant plan of doing all the backgrounds on black paper on blackboard i really liked it i mean the idea of doing everything on the black paper was very stylish it really looks like it's painted on black velvet and it's just beautiful you're not pulling drawings out of the light you're pulling the the drawing out of the darkness which is of course where batman lives having been a painter for the past you know the two years prior to paying i was like i want to paint that entire city over and over and over again and especially at night because all of that dark imagery you've got to paint in so it just occurred to me what if we started with a dark environment and we just brought light into it and the deco aspect of it came basically just from me being a fan of architecture of that era batman was created in the 40s so it's almost like it just never stopped being the 40s there's cell phones and there's vcrs but it's art deco it's like batman lives in this forever art deco world so that's the way we handled it i mean the cars some of those cars look like they come from the giant cars of the 40s but then there's helicopters in the sky that don't look like they were from the past at all but something from the future they turn on the tv and it's black and white you know so it's like it's black and white but yet you have this incredible batmobile and batwing and these you know very high-tech gadgets there were computers and portable phones and there was technology of the time but done and executed in a way that was more kind of reminiscent of this you know very classic look and feel a lot of film noir this was the feeling we wanted to have with all the heavy blacks and the shadows that high contrast photography though especially in the 30s and 40s and orson welles was like the king of it just where you'd get that shadow just jet black black we did that it was the universal monster movies and and cabinet of dr caligari and fritz lang uh metropolis as well as m and citizen kane the whole concept of film noir that all influenced the writers and the artists and the editors of batman comics all of that were just as influential on the people involved with batman the animated series and you can see it you can see it clear as day we definitely were informed by noir fiction and pulp stories and hitchcock was kind of a guiding light of how to tell a visual story how to tell a clean visual story how to deliver mood with camera this was a warner brothers gangster movie show that had a superhero in it and noir not just stylistically but thematically where we were focusing on villains and focusing on somebody who felt wronged and wanted vengeance and sympathetic people that actually were the criminals and that's a very nuanced rate it's not just about dark shadows and and and cool buildings uh it it's about the people and and and and the darkness in society it's really cool we early on decided we wanted to have individual title cards for each episode this is something they used to do back in the old days in classic cartoons when they would have those wonderful lobby cards you know and and going back even further than that hand-painted lobby cards you know so that that kind of stuff was a great throwback [Music] we thought okay why not you got nothing better to do there's a little bit of time left in those 24 hours of every day why not throw in a title card as well so unfortunately eric was really into the whole idea and uh he ended up designing i would say most of those title cards himself hats off to him because those are those to this day are still like some of the coolest title cards you've ever seen in a cartoon when we came down to uh designing the title sequence for the show eric and i i don't remember whose idea it was but but between the two of us one of us said well why don't we just redo that that that pilot film that we did that sold the show with batman fighting some thugs on a rooftop kind of thing it was dark and gritty and scary it's all shadows you don't hardly see anything until batman's lit up by a bolt of lightning i think all along we had planned at some point to put you know batman as a title you know a series title on it and at some point we were just like well what image do we want to cover up with that title because they all look cool i don't think we need the title you know who that guy is on that building the lightning's around him yeah you know who that is it just said this is something you've never seen before and you almost had to do it because it was so compelling and so that title sequence is it still holds up it's phenomenal i think a lot of people think to adapt a comic book into animation they're trying to achieve the look of the comic book previous uh attempts to try and do comic book things uh in animation uh they tried to emulate the models from the comic books very closely that had a lot of anatomy in them a lot of muscles a lot of curves and everything like that and one of the genius things that that bruce and eric did and bring this to the screen was they simplified it bruce was aware it needs to be animated it needs to move around a lot how simple can we make everything every line you draw has to be duplicated you know thousands and thousands of times and then you're painting them all uh this is back when we were still doing cell animation oh my gosh so uh it really behooves you to simplify your character design so they don't have a lot of muscles and rendering and all that stuff voila we do that 19999 more times and we have a 20-minute show [Music] the villains all had their own unique design challenges some of them i had a pretty clear idea of what i wanted to do with the two-faced character i pretty much nailed him right out of the gate [Music] the most obvious thing i did with the two-face was to simplify his clothes because in the comics he traditionally has like like a purple suit on one side and like an orange suit on the other and the purple side has like you know like like plaid because in comics you can do that you really want to like you know emphasize you know that how different the two sides of his personality is and so i was looking at that in the comics and i went well i'm not going to animate i don't want anybody to try to animate plaid that's just way too many lines to animate and purple and orange is really ugly to look at as a color combination which is intentionally ugly but it was just it was just i couldn't couldn't stand to look at it and i thought well wait a minute you can't get any more opposite than black and white so i'll make his bad side you know dark and i'll make his supposedly good side you know blindingly white and um it was such an obvious idea it was kind of like in retrospect kind of like surprised that nobody had ever done it before but it worked really great for our show the funny thing about the bruce tim style it is so appealing and so many people seem to think they can get it it's it's a very tough thing to actually do when i looked at the characters and saw how simple the designs were i thought well you know i guess i don't i guess this will work i don't know we'll see ultimately it was a brilliant stroke bruce tim's style really is you know it's it's curves against lines i mean it's people at disney we're doing that for years and years and your own feature we just utilized it down in tv animation i was working at the the don bluth studios in the early 80s on the video games and on the secret of nim the whole don bluth aesthetic was very much classical disney that's where i first heard concepts like straights against curves and talking about you know the different masses and stylizing the shape so they'll animate well and uh etc people loved it they ate it up the interesting thing about bruce tim though is you know bruce tim is self-taught that's the thing that i just find wacky and remarkable and and maybe that's what's made him so unique um that he didn't have anybody telling them how to do it or what to do which is also always an issue with bruce for years when i was just drawing from my own amusement i was uh i pretty much taught myself how to draw from um mostly from like uh you know copying my favorite artists in comic books later on um when i got into the animation business dan de carlo was one of those artists who got passed around a lot and i really started paying attention to his his comics and and the way he drew uh girls especially um their their facial features and so there's a definite a little bit of dna dan de carlo dna in the way i draw um the female characters in the batman show i think you can see it in the smiles and the kind of heart-shaped faces etc alex toth was another artist that i um kind of got to later in in in my career he had designed a lot of stuff for um the hanna-barbera cartoons in the 60s you know specifically space ghost when i eventually got to design batman for animation he was kind of a subliminal design in the back of my head i wasn't specifically trying to draw like alex toth but there's a ghost of an alex toth drawing a space ghost drawing underneath my batman drawing even though i wasn't consciously you know channeling alex toth but it was just kind of there and i just kind of it kind of came out with his animation expertise and his comic book background of people like kirby and toth and his experience of belief you know all melded into this this bruce tim's style and once i eventually got to do the batman animated show all that stuff kind of all kind of just kind of rushed together and became the batman style it wasn't your typical filmation look or hannah barbara it was a design look that had never been seen on saturday morning i used to have nightmares of my nightmares were very literal my nightmares were taking artwork to bruce's office to show him here's my design bruce had a bruce had a long a corner office and uh he kept it very dark and back then he could smoke in the office so you'd knock on the door and the room would be filled with smoke and you'd have to walk across this long room to get to him at the end of his desk and it was filled with toys but it was dark and stuff like that and smoke and he would look at the drawing and he would sigh and then he would reach down and pull a piece of paper and put it over my drawing and like redo my drawing and then i'd look at it and i'd go okay like he'd make it better and then i'd have to take that walk of shame back to my desk to redo the drawing but he was right i mean that was like a um a good learning experience and little by little i think he could see that i was getting it and then little by little he would start going okay don't do this okay do this and um i apprenticed you know i graduated up but i think that's rare to apprentice like that i mean i learned a ton just by going through that process there was just so much of the show to design and before i had my own in-house crew to help me design the characters and we had to kind of get going quickly i actually enlisted some of my favorite comic book artists i just reached out to them so i had nothing to lose so i reached out to both mike mignola and to kevin nolan whom i i didn't know either one of them but through dc comics um you know we were working with on the show i got their phone numbers and i just called them up and said hey i'm doing this this batman animated show i'm a big fan of your work would you like to do some design work for the show and they both said okay sure mike ended up designing mr freeze the designs he came up with for you know mr freeze is very much an old-school kind of robotic you know to me it looks like um lon chaney in the old man-made monster movie you try and scrape off all of the barnacles of the storytelling that have accumulated over the years because there have been so many stories told about these characters and try and get back to the essence of what they are all that anybody knew about mr freeze at that time was that he was the jokey guy in the old batman show who made weird ice puns you know and he was either you know dry as ice george sanders or he was you know crazy auto premanger i said but what if we took a character like that and added emotional depth to it you look at heart of ice in episode that paul wrote season one it's one of the best episodes if not the best episode of the series and it took a character mr freeze that previously didn't have this origin didn't have this emotional story and when paul did what he did there it changed the landscape you know it changed people's understanding of mr freeze and the depth with which we were looking at these villains forever [Music] i didn't know paul well i hardly knew him at all we passed down the hallway and i knew him from the fact that he worked for lucas everybody knew that everybody that was a big buzz that pauldini's writing the ewok show because everybody wanted something like that and he was he was disenchanted at the time for various reasons and was thinking of making career move leaving warner brothers and i wanted him to stay on because he's a good rider i was sort of over on tiny tunes and sort of somewhere else and i kind of left the studio for a while to work on some other stuff and and i wasn't really sure if i wanted to go back or to what degree i wanted to go back and i said don't you want you can't go there's got to be something you want to do he said well i have this idea this idea for mr free's story and he told me a sentence or two and i said right do it a day or so later he came back with the outline i'm reading this story and it was heart of ice and it was just great it was exactly what i wanted and so he started writing it then he was in he was in he was back in by that time he said you know just come back and start writing and it's like yeah all right this is this is great now it's it's a lot of fun and thank god because he wrote uh some of the most important scripts for that show [Music] mr freeze has never been been more understandable more relatable to they found a human-ness in the villains they found a why and they let us know the why how much can you feel for a character like victor freeze can you empathize with him can you love a character like harley quinn who makes bad decisions and still keeps going back to this maniac can you empathize a little bit with the riddler and his ongoing need to try and prove himself over batman the idea is to make every character human even the bad guys part of that was paul part of that was alan and part of it was the two of them made sure that they had a lot of writers who were inclined to take the character seriously and not write in stereotypes you know not have just you know some crazy villain doing crazy stuff the villains wanted things they wanted thing human things those make you care about the characters a little bit more and you know it's important because that sets it up for the next generation they can take it a step further and and to make the characters a little more human a little more funny a little more interesting in our show we were able to end something without necessarily a happy ending uh the villain gets his comeuppance but because we've related to the character and and we felt sorry for them it's it's a tragedy again very noir very very noir [Music] all the villains are not just treated as like toss away characters it was a soap opera and it opened up the possibilities of animation not just being for children that you could really get involved into the characters harvey dent that was such a great character one of the fastest storyboards i've ever done was the ending of that one where grace is coming down the hallway and he screams it's richard mall doing that death defying scream when i i saw that played in an audience at a convention once and at the end when grace like goes harvey and he turns to the camera i heard this girl in the audience just started sobbing uncontrollably like it is it's so sad it's so tragic [Music] villains suffer not because they're villains they suffered because of something they wanted and it's not just some cheerful happy ending usually goodbye grace [Music] one of the things that was unique about the working environment on the batman show was that we were working as a unit that we were all together the writers and the artists were all together and that made a huge difference um it meant that if there was something that was unclear in the script the director could come down and say hey what did you mean by this so there was a lot more interaction between the art and the writing staff than there were on most shows the show was just it was a juggernaut it was just huge and we were putting out i think three scripts a month something like that oh it was chaos we i mean we we really were you know flying by the seat of our pants it's sherman oaks this is the animation studio for warner brothers where they put together the batman cartoon and as you can see batman himself kind of beating up on one of the animators warner brothers started at the sherman oaks galleria um the large it was an imperial bank building is the way we refer to it as like a 14-story building right next to what used to be a shopping mall it was basically just an office building um it was uh i heard a lot of people used to complain it was just like a ratty old dump and i don't know i'm used to working in radial dumps almost every studio i've ever worked in um they were all kind of kind of low rent we shared the floor with a real wild group of people i mean i remember there was a fist fight one night uh yeah yay it's a big you know bunch of offices and there's a big bullpen area where there's just a lot of cubicles and stuff it looks like it could be you know any any corporation you know except that there's you know usually a lot of artwork tacked up all over the walls everywhere everybody was making it up as we went along i mean that was part of the fun of it was figuring out how to do it and how to how to get the best out of people and and to let people i was a real firm believer in letting people work on what it is that they wanted to work on what they liked and because that's when you're going to get good work there is a lot of fun there is a lot of discord at times there are a lot of fights because everybody cared about characters animators and cartoons i think they're very rebellious and they need something to rebel against and in order to help feed that creative juice i don't like this and it's kind of stupid i mean look at having jumping out of a third floor window and he's walking away no no why don't we have him sit there and break his ankle and he had we see him in a cast there you go well they wouldn't do that he said why not you know and then maybe we get something else out of it that's that's completely unrelated to what we were even talking about that just evolved from that discussion but the important was you would have those discussions there was a lot of that type of sort of creative energy that was fun it was fun we had a good time as we had so many strongly talented people on on the series you know playing pranks on people while they're working keeps him seeing images of uh dan reba uh stumbling down the hallway into these booths in a batman costume you know get in a fight with eric you know stupid stuff like that this is generally a very congenial place people here really get along it's lots of fun well oh you saw this last hour there they go again it's batman and the writer and you know it's funny we finally built a you know fancy studio over at sherman oaks over there that's when we started to lose it i think because um it was better when it was still sort of the termite terrace field just we weren't successful you know you kind of want to be the scrappy scrappy kids and we always had disney as our foil um you know we always thought we were much better we made a very good series i'm not bragging i'm telling you after the fact that everybody put their heart and soul into it and worked together and we succeeded in making a series that i'm so proud of let's go 38 to 47. we had andrea romano as our recording director and uh and she also cast the show the real secret of the show was the casting andrea studied acting uh in college uh in new york and then she became a stage manager i think and then she became an agent and then she eventually became a director of animation but so she understands what actors go through she understands the process so the recording sessions were always really wonderful wonderful experience that everyone would look forward to we you know had a meeting with her and kind of told her you know the kind of overall feel that we wanted the show to have that would be you know very much you know realistic and straight um and serious and uh not not high pitched and super high energy you know like like say tiny tones i think we even mentioned that we said yeah ideally it would sound like a movie from the 1940s you know that kind of fast-paced but realistic you know kind of naturalistic and she seemed to get it immediately she was good i know exactly what you want for a show like batman i need killer actors ideally actors with stage credits because it's that energy that's needed i had never done an animated voice before i had never auditioned for an animated voice before i was a stage actor i went to juilliard i worked on broadway i worked off-broadway work for joe papp at the public i was a new york actor for the single character of batman itself i know i listen to well over 500 voices well over so many actors we didn't fall in love with anybody and when you're casting something as awesome as batman for a series called batman you want to fall in love with him you really want to fall in love with him i had done commercial voice-overs in new york so i had a voice-over agent and he said they're putting together a new show over at warner brothers i know you haven't done any animation but why don't you go over give it a shot it's batman and i said no i said batman's been around forever it was on when i was a kid i didn't go with any preconceptions i didn't go with any preconceived notions or anticipation of who i was going to meet i didn't know who bruce tim was i didn't know who andrea romano was i was just an actor going into an audition so we bring him in on the callbacks and he walks through the door and he asked a couple of very intelligent questions and then we let him audition for the voice of batman and it was truly the eureka moment that you wish for bruce and i looked at each other and just you could see the stress of months of auditions just fall from our faces because we had found batman it was remarkable the trick over this long arc has been to not let it get stale and i learned this early on batman is not the disguise batman is who he went to is what what he became because of the tragedy of his childhood it's where he found safety it's where he is most comfortable in that cave and the suit of armor he puts on the role he plays for the world is bruce wayne that's the performance and so once i found that about the character it really made sense to me it kept the batman voice from sounding artificial and it kept bruce wayne from it made him such a different persona kevin conroy is just phenomenal but it's not just him i remember my agent called and left a message on my answering machine and he's like oh my god you're her you're the girl you're the girl that's the bat you're batgirl and he was screaming and i was screaming and i was like oh my god like it was just such a huge thrill to to book it i was excited about it but it was really like this is a really good job a really nice job and i hope it lasts you know that'll be nice to do a few episodes you know here we are talking about it 25 years later we're still talking about that show had no idea had no idea that something like that was going to happen andrea romano was able to you know she's amazing in terms of not only her ability to figure out who who to put where but to get to them and to convince them to do it every week there'd be some incredible guest star an ephram zimblis jr and of course arlene sorkin it was just an amazing magical time who thinks of going to paul williams to be the penguin it was perfect and it just sounded like a weird place because they were pulling guys ephram zimbalist jr was a great idea you know the guy had a voice but it's like he wasn't a voice actor up until that point and neither was mark hamill actors all live to a certain extent in a fantasy world and to me doing batman was a lifelong dream in the sense that i always thought that the character actors had the most fun oddly enough as fate would have it tim curry who was voicing the joker for me was not a favorite of one of the new producers who came on the show and truth be told i never would have replaced tim curry i loved tim i thought he was doing a beautiful job but i could never please this producer so now i have to find the joker but we're at least two or three maybe four episodes into animation with tim curry's voice so the animation is done the mouth flaps exist there's an energy there's a performance there's a timing that i have to find an actor who can bring their own joker to it and voice mouth flap match tune and sing because the characters say in the christmas episode so i auditioned audition audition people and i'm like you know what i've got to give mark a shot at this this might just be the answer to our prayers mark hamill oh my god do you think we can get him mark walked in and he was incredible one of the things that said at the top of the of the audition script don't think nicholson what a what a relief that was because i figured if you're going to just try and imitate jack nicholson you're going to really suffer because as wonderful he is in the movie jack is jack all we can do is imitate and that's not something i wanted to do i remember hearing his audition for the joker and it was the laugh once i heard the laugh i was going like oh god that's that's it you're really sick you know that boss it just sent goosebumps down my spine he is so inhabited that role and and it would just sort of physically take over his body as he did it it was it was an amazing transformation to watch if the world decides to build a mount rushmore for the joker it's going to be jack nicholson heath ledger and mark hamill because mark is the definitive voice of the joker the joker that you hear today on the cartoon by mark hamill is exactly the joker he did for us when he walked in and auditioned for us it was manic it was funny and there was a little element of tragedy to it there was just a little bit of like this this guy is a lost soul and he doesn't care and that's what made it scary it was as if from childhood he had thought about how he would voice the joker if he ever got the chance to do it everyone was doing these incredible villain characters arlene wonderful as harley i i brought her up and said hey you know i'm kind of basing this character on my friend she's a comedic actress how about getting her to do the voice and andrea was saying like okay i'll give her a shot she came in and she had this sort of warped billie holiday quality to her voice and the fact that she hadn't done voiceover that made her want to experiment and try different things and and she brought in a newness to to uh through her performance into that character and it really clicked harley quinn is a great example what a character created by uh paul dani and bruce tim and here she is this this sort of zany sidekick to uh the joker that it came from batman the animation series and now they're warner brothers is thinking of giving her own movie franchise i mean this thing really did create some lasting uh images and some lasting characters so it was fun to have actors of that caliber you know and we had like almost the entire crew lined up um like a like a radio play a great thing about recording for warner brothers um and andrea romano specifically is they really like to get all the actors together in a room i can't say that i insisted upon it but i i really tried to always make that happen on every series i directed because a major part of acting is reacting so you have the other actors to bounce things off of i wouldn't be nearly as good in what i do if i didn't have mark hamill feeding me as the joker so typically when there's a group cast record all the actors will be in a semi-circle facing this the booth so that we could see the director everyone's in the room together and it's just one big room and you have music stands and you've got a microphone and you've got headsets on so we would all be sitting there all of it except for mark hamill who would always stand i always knew mark was in the show because i'd come in and there'd be one microphone stand standing i said oh mark's in this episode you're really listening to each other and playing off each other it's a very collaborative world i would say a line and maybe the other actor would pause before saying something and that would give me pause and make me think about what are they thinking this is what you do in every realm of where good acting is involved and that that situation where we were all in the room together that lent itself to that i wanted to make sure that there was a sensitivity to these pieces and that's why you'll see where there are emotional scenes that are played i i let them breathe i wanted them to breathe i wanted to take more time i wanted the actors to make me cry and they almost always did and if they didn't i felt like i hadn't done my job right andrea knew what to say to get the actors to give the performance that she and the other people in the booth were expecting or envisioned so feel free to ask questions as we go along i'll describe the action that i think is important for you to know and we'll just go scene by scene so remember the animation is done later we do the voice first and all we get is a script with words on it when we record it's up to andrea to paint the pictures for us and that's what she would do she would really paint the pictures of what was going on because she'd seen the storyboards and she would tell us you know uh okay you're you're in a helicopter and and the mountain is coming right at you and you know these kinds of things you you you couldn't necessarily picture or get from the script there would be brief descriptions but she would really paint the picture of it and if it wasn't quite the right sound especially like uh you know in the fights you know there are different kinds of fights you know there's a difference between an uh and an oh so she would say okay now you're getting kicked in the stomach you know and she sees the storyboard no you're getting really kicked hard in the stomach so you know those are you know those are things that we would not be able to do unless we had you know a wonderful captain at the helm that she you know was and is i would never ask an actor to do something that i wouldn't do so i was right there with them i would cry with them i would angry with them i would yeah with them i would do everything i would do it first so that they could see that it's okay to to do it that broad it's okay to you know to cry to yell to be you know all those things these are super real authentic emotional pieces that we were working on and that's part of why the show was so well loved by the fans they felt that authenticity it was very collaborative how we came to the energy of the show and where the quiet moments needed to be and and those are the moments that i really love to direct where you just take that breath that moment and then a huge fight scene happens [Music] bruce is very upfront he did not want a wall-to-wall music on his shows you know at times sometimes i wish that we had just a little bit more but he was right in saying that we need breathing space absolutely especially in these types of shows the film noir sometimes you just need a simple sound effect you know the dripping of the water you know a rat scurrying across a sewer line or something you know that's all you needed you just let the echo take it and that's that's the music that little sound effect carrying over an echo plays as music because it does serves the same purpose music was equally as important and as wonderful and brilliant as all of the other elements that came together and to say that we you know we knew that would happen would be a complete complete lie because all of those things made made the series become the iconic series that it has become [Music] for the first time in almost any animated show like that we had real orchestral music it wasn't a synthesizer [Music] it was real instrumentation and we had shirley walker who was just one of the greatest composers ever in my mind she was such a delightful person as well she was phenomenal she came up with a theme for batman that is just haunting to this day it's a haunting theme when we did tiny toons we need to make the music really important and steven wanted to spend all the money on the music we were spending a fortune steven said to me well we have to have a full orchestra for these cartoons and i was like oh nobody does that you know you record these little sound bites stephen and then you just cut them in where you need them and you use them over and over again and he was like no we're not gonna do that and i was like oh okay you know i wasn't sure what that meant well i made a lot of money and so when we started batman there was like well we have to have an orchestra i mean that's what we do that is now what warner animation does we do full orchestra you know so it was like and so thank you steven god is the orchestra shirley walker wanted this batman animated series very much she really kind of stepped forward and and said you gotta let me uh score this series she was just she was oh god makes me get teary she was really a gift she was something else talk about a strong woman you know in that business and she had worked for danny hoffman and god the talent and the sound that comes out of her was something else [Music] i have very very specific memories of the very first time she conducted an orchestra to our picture over at the lot eric and i went over there and we're sitting there in the control booth and she's out there you know conducting the orchestra she runs the film and we hear the orchestra you know power up and it's playing you know that that dynamic opening music to the first episode on leather wings and it was like you know trombones and strings and it was like really dark and spooky and gothic and it was just like wow it's like this sounds great i've never heard a tv cartoon that sounds like this it's like yeah it was it was something [Music] she then whispers to me she's like over half of these people are la philharmonic players and this was a day job for them and you just i don't even know what how you describe that other than to go how did i get so lucky i mean this is just incredible and then of course they start into the music and it's just chills [Applause] [Music] when i heard the score for that first episode it i i mean i just brought tears to your eyes it's just so beautiful and it's just i i couldn't believe that they had like they assembled like an orchestra it's like one of the great moments of my life the first uh episode we got a tape it was a vhs tape sent to dc's offices we all stopped working and we went to the conference room and we watched on leather wings like regular people and we were thrilled because it took the comics seriously and translated it in a way that we weren't embarrassed by and that is not always the case so we were nervous to watch it but and we didn't know what a bruce tim was or a pauldini was at that time but we were just thrilled and we just then after that we would watch them as they came in and just enjoy the show as fans and there's nothing better for us to be able to watch something and say we don't have to apologize for this at all and that again does not happen all the time all shows have a lifespan you start to run out of stories you start to run out of a new vision it is very hard to sustain something too long and and it'll become detrimental when you do these have life spans i believe the period of time when we were doing this series this was where you wanted to be in animation this was where everybody wanted to be in animation and the big reason for that is jean mccurdy she was the best animation executive bar none i started as a secretary and 30 years later i retired as president of the animation division i think i was the first division president female division president of warner brothers i'm proud of that you know i have more appreciation for that now being out of it than i did when it was happening and you're having you're just doing your job listen i had a great time i have no regrets i worked with fabulous people and generous people jean had our back all the time all the damn time we could not have made the show without her running interference for us yeah she was the enabler she was the good parent and there was no disciplinary parent just do whatever you want we amused her i think we were like little little clowns that amused her we were all so young you know i mean we were all young and there's something to be said for that that there's a a juice there and a need to make your statement and and you have you have a real fierce feeling that you're right yeah even when you're not uh-huh and sometimes it works out we got a lot of pushback from people you know saying yeah who who are these who are these two young punks you know telling us this is how they want to do the show it's like well that's not how you make a show you got to be gutsy you gotta break your own rules and and see where they get you and take some chances and risk upsetting a few people but you know more often than not you'll you'll come up with something kind of fun the thing i miss the most are the people and the interaction the interaction not only with the people themselves but with that creative process it's um watching people wrestle with the concept and visualizing it and bringing it to life that's a rush that is a real rush and i mean i definitely miss i don't miss all the peripheral shenanigans that go on around choking but that part of it i missed i got to work so closely with such creative people as alan and sydney and it was just wonderful to um to be creative in my job and to work with these people who were at the top of their form and had this vision these visions of you know what animation could be and yeah it was a highlight of my career for sure people think of cartoons or comic books as oh that's just a cartoon or a comic book that's it's disposable it's kid stuff and we just played it straight i think we were all fans of it and we loved it i'm trying to make it not a big mystical thing i think we just played it straight when entertainment is done well it works on a level for kids and adults i really think it's something that it has embraced and and carried throughout the years you know i see people at conventions all the time they're people who are like in their 30s you know saying oh yeah you know when i was a kid your batman was like that's why that was my first exposure to batman and it's like well that's kind of cool because like my first exposure to batman was adam west you know so it's kind of neat to be kind of somebody's first and when i go to cons it's another opportunity for me to give back and say thanks and they get so excited to meet me i mean i've had people pass out cry and shake all the time you know i was at a con about six months ago and there was a girl talking to me and i looked over and i saw her mom like really crying and again i've seen people cry many times but there was something unusual about her so i went over and i said are you okay and she said my daughter's autistic and she hasn't spoken in five years when she knew you were coming she wasn't shut up for two weeks and i was like wow like that's heavy that's heavy that knowing she was gonna meet me brought her back out and i take that real seriously i'm happy and amazed that the show has had the lasting power that it has that it's still popular we have learned over the years that other people can come in with other creative perspectives on what a superhero should be or not be and they're not always quite as successful or true to the integrity of a character so often you have artists who have the vision who have the foresight and want to break the molds and then you also have people who are trained in the world of business not wanting to rock the boat when you have a formula that has proven successful in the past so you've got a resistance to change to boldness into daring and it is only when both sides of the gemini coin come together and listen to each other and be prepared to take risks calculated risks that innovative things get done so until somebody breaks the mold and gets the ability to do something new and different it doesn't get done it's not successful that is why this is so important why the batman animated series broke through boundaries and these were hefty boundaries and got people on the other side of the coin to say okay let's give it a go let's try it you are making a compelling argument we appreciate your vision and we want to be supportive of your vision let's take a calculated risk on this and go with it and the rewards were incredible they always say this is regarded as one of the best adaptations of a comic book ever done you know or or the best in many cases a lot of people feel it is and it's an incredible honor to have worked on that you know and to know you were part of it and hopefully in some small way contributed to that a child grows up with it there are certain elements that they really like they you know they'll take with them into their college years they'll have a job and then they'll see a figurine of a character and they'll put it on their desk at work i wonder if any of the shows that that are that have been on over the last maybe 10 years we'll have that will have generated that kind of passion a quarter of a century from now i don't know whether that will happen i call a lot of the stuff today tonnage it's forgettable and it's not the fault of the writers it's not the fault of the animators but i do think it's the fault of people who are above them who are in marketing and merchandising and are fearful they second-guess the writers they second-guess the artists most importantly they second-guess the audience and you can't have a successful show if you're second-guessing your demographic because you'll you'll never achieve anything of merit it was great to see words that we had come up with you know written down on a page and hear those those lines come to life and it's amazing how often people will say to me that it's what got them into not just batman but into comics you know they become comic book fans that was like you know the batman animated series was their gateway drug so i was like well that's kind of cool um but as to why i don't know like i said it was i think you kind of had to be there when you embrace the fact of the amount of talent that was involved and sacrifices that everyone made to make this series into what it became it's just it's personally overwhelming to to know that this is uh still um as popular if not more 25 years later and it's it really again it's just a testament to the true passion people the the artists that worked on the show had for the content and for uh you know for the goal because it it took the team effort to pull this off and keep it consistent for the time that it took to to produce this show after he died i was uh i was asked to go to a memorial lunch for bob kane's passing it was this secret uh dining room that studios have paul levitz who's one of the smartest guys i i've ever met ever said uh this wonderful little memorial statement about how bob kane had created this character who had a core that was so strong and so deep that it he it was other writers could come in and add their vision to this character and change the world create the world do things with him and then let him go for the next personal comment that really is a remarkable thing and the way paul said it was it was beautiful and that's how i felt about us the batman group at warner brothers that suddenly this batman's character came to us having had all this added to them over the years by other creators and now it was our turn and we took our turn and then he goes away for the next the next person so it's quite i mean batman is an amazing character with legs that will go forever [Music] so [Music] [Music] do [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: DC

Views: 575,940

Rating: 4.954699 out of 5

Keywords: batman, batman the animated series, batman documentary, batman documentary 2018, history of batman, history of batman the animated series, btas, btas joker, dcu, dc comics, dc animation, dc movie, dc tv, joker, the joker, two face, batman comics, batman show, batman tas, batman: the animated series, batman series, batman animated series, mark hamill, kevin conroy

Id: PIfq88s4lzM

Length: 98min 31sec (5911 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 17 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/TheJoshider10]

This show was something special, and Batman Beyond was about as good a sequel as it could have possibly been. These two shows alongside everything else in the DCAU will always be iconic.

[u/samurai5625]

The only show where I shelled out 100 bucks without a thought for the complete series on blu ray.