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Post by Some assclown on Jul 9, 2003 14:37:52 GMT -5
This thread is for all that love Batman the animated series to talk about why it's the single greatest American cartoon ever. Coming soon my venomous rant on season three and until then watch Big O because if you like Batman TAS you'll love it.
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Post by Some assclown on Jul 9, 2003 19:24:26 GMT -5
Batman TAS is my favorite American animated show and one of my favorite animated shows of all time. I watched it while it first ran on FOX everyday it was on and the show really got me into Batman even though I was reading my brother’s Batman comics at the same time. Now long after it left the FOX airwaves, a third season on WB was announced. Now Kids WB had Superman, which is a good show and adding new Batman episodes to the line up was a great idea to bolster ratings and draw in the large Batman TAS fun base. But the third season was hardly anything like the Batman I loved. First the character designs had major problems. They used the same design outline that they where using for Superman. This meant characters were stripped of details including muscle definition so Batman among other characters had big flabby arms. Then they made muscular male characters look like Scott Steiner by giving them stick legs. The females as a whole got off worst. All most all the females had the same body which was horribly disproportional. They had really long legs, a super skinny waist, and a huge head. Plus they all wore black lip stick for some odd reason. The redesigns sucked and some of them moved far away from the original superior designs. Riddler lost his cool question mark suit and his hair. Killer Croc somehow gained green scales and lost his creepy monstrous look. Bane became an S&M freak. Penguin became a normal human. The only good redesign was Scarecrow but they screwed his character up (get to that later). Voices were replaced and Killer Croc sounded like a generic thug instead of a creepy killer. Robin II was brought in to replace the first one and be the annoying Saturday/Sunday morning cartoon character you want to kill of the show. First the fact that he looks like he’s eight and suppose to be 13 (I think) and has a giant head annoys me. But add the fact that he learned to be Robin with no problems in a short period of time just adds to the hate. Batgirl became Bats sidekick which posses these problems. She wasn’t a competent hero in the first two seasons. She had a long way to go before she got anywhere near as good as the first Robin but in season three she’s able to go toe-to-toe with large groups of goons and super villains. There’s also the fact that she knows who Batman is and no matter that he told her as revealed in flashback, there was still no reason for it. She should have stayed like she was in the previous seasons. Catwoman took a total u-turn. She turned from animal loving sort of good guy with a thing for Batman to a greedy cold bitch that set Nightwing up to be killed. Scarecrow was a wimp that hid behind his fear gas to a mysterious creepy guy. Mr. Freeze was a tragic figure that only committed crimes out of vengence/love to a totally cold hearted generic bad guy that stole his spider head gimmick from a villain from the Mask cartoon (go Fish Guy and Putty Thing!). For some reason the night sky became red which kills the mood. Batman stalks villains from the shadows and darkness which is kinda hard to do under the well lit red night. The plots suffered greatly. Even though there are a couple of good episodes (Mad Love, Over the Edge) the over all quality went down. The mystery/detective stories of the first two seasons went out in favor of bad action stories and lame humor ones (Joker gets rich). They gave me Firefly but instead of a man that loves nothing more then to burn things to the ground he was a jealous boyfriend that knew how to use pyro. Batman TAS went out with a whimper instead of the bang that Superman TAS had which is a real shame.
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Post by Azrael98 on Jul 10, 2003 0:17:18 GMT -5
Good Rant! ALthough technically it's not considered season 3 of Batman TAS, but it was a totally different show. I also hated when they started to use the Superman animators. But there's a couple of little things that I really hated about the show, that you didn't mention. First of all, the Joker has no lips or pupils . For some reason that just drove me nuts he looked so terrible. The other thing that really got on my nerves was the fact that both Bruce Wayne and Batman now talked with the same voice. Before whenever Kevin Conroy did Bruce Wayne's voice he would raise it up a few octaves so it wasn't obvious that he was Batman. It seems like such a little thing but it added a bit of realism to the character. There are only two really good things that ever came out of "The New Batman Adventures." One was the new look of the Scarecrow, I thought he looked a lot cooler and they never really got his character right in the original series. The other really great thing to come out of the show was the episode "Legends of the Dark Knight."
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Post by HeartBurnKid on Jul 10, 2003 0:30:51 GMT -5
"Mad Love" was the only New Batman Adventures/Batman: Gotham Knights episode worth watching. The series died when it left Fox. We went from dark, moody, character-driven stories to utter drivel. The new character designs served only to dehumanize the villians, to turn them from fascinating characters with interesting stories and motivations to two-dimensional characters who only exist to be beat up by Batman. All the new villains they introduced were lame, lame, LAME! And not to mention, they got rid of one of my favorite villains, Rupert Thorne. Mind, they didn't kill him off or anything, they just stopped using him, with no explanation whatsoever.
Oh, and minor geek quibble: Tim Drake was Robin III. The writers completely skipped over Robin II (Jason Todd), but that's understandable, considering that in the comics, Todd got murdered by The Joker, and they would have problems trying to do that on TV (then again, they did kill off Detective Turpin on Superman, so maybe it wouldn't have been that big of a problem). Kind of a shame, because Robin II's story might have actually been interesting in a way that nothing that went on in the Kids WB series was.
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Post by Some assclown on Jul 10, 2003 15:57:59 GMT -5
The bastards took Joker's orange away and turned Bullock into a two-legged Jabba the hut. The worst new character by far was Roxy Rocket which seems like something Paul Dini thought up just to piss me off. Another thing I forgot is what they did to Clayface. Now Feats of Clay are my two favorite episodes ever and they feature the beat animation in the entire series thanks to the awesome Sunrise Stewdios. Now he was a great deep character that combined Basil Karlo (the actor) and Matt Haggan (the clay monster) together to from one great tragic villain which like Mr. Freeze wasn't that bad of a guy really and wanted to get revenge on the man that tired to kill him and regain his lost humanity. Now he shows back up in Gotham Knights (or what ever you want to call it) and has powers he should never have (making an indepently thinking clay girl) and a common robber. Also all the regular mob guys and other criminals quit showing up probably because kids want super villains and not real criminals.
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Post by Some assclown on Jul 10, 2003 16:01:00 GMT -5
Oh, and minor geek quibble: Tim Drake was Robin III. The writers completely skipped over Robin II (Jason Todd), but that's understandable, considering that in the comics, Todd got murdered by The Joker, and they would have problems trying to do that on TV (then again, they did kill off Detective Turpin on Superman, so maybe it wouldn't have been that big of a problem). Kind of a shame, because Robin II's story might have actually been interesting in a way that nothing that went on in the Kids WB series was. Turpin's death lead to the single greatest quote of the entire run of Superman: Darkseid: If I knew the death of one man would affect you so, I would have killed more. |
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Post by Some assclown on Jul 10, 2003 18:19:06 GMT -5
Another thing I forgot to rant about. The police were major players in the first two seasons but get scaled down to cameo players for most of the New Adventures. There used to be episodes that centered around Harvey, Rene, and Gordon but that ended. Hell, the police never really helped Batman out or the other way around. Batman's interactions with Bullock were ace but I don't remember him ever really being in a scene with Bats in New Adventures. But like the real criminals I guess the kids didn't want to see the cops ether. Because New Adventures is nothing more then a stripped down kid friendly version of Batman TAS.
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