The New Batman Adventures - "Love is a Croc"

“What do you suppose they do on a date?”

Her reform efforts hindered by an unforgiving public, Mary Louise Dahl (Laraine Newman) watches the televised trial of Killer Croc (Brooks Gardner) and feels a pang of empathy for a man persecuted for his appearance. Donning her Baby-Doll regalia, she stages a breakout and retreats to the sewers with her new paramour. As they become Gotham’s Bonnie & Clyde, their crimes draw out Batman and Batgirl, while Croc’s uglier impulses start to overcome Baby-Doll’s more amorous ones.

As much as I didn’t enjoy “Baby-Doll” (clouding, recall, my memory of the quite decent third act), I’m not sure I’ve ever rewatched this episode. On the surface, it seems like this would put Baby-Doll at two for two in terms of dud episodes, but I found myself really digging “Love is a Croc” much more than I thought it was. It’s still somewhat off-putting and doesn’t quite sell me on Baby-Doll as a character, but writer Steve Gerber (who created Howard the Duck, among others) does well to take the focus away from Baby-Doll’s condition and emphasize instead that she’s a psychopath who just happens to be short. Her obsession with her appearance does, however, give her the unlikely yet narratively successful obsession with Croc, assuming he feels as she does – and missing, tragically, the fact that his “poor me” routine was a ploy for sympathy from the court. 

Here’s an episode that works really well in isolation, but it crumbles a bit if we think about it in the larger context of the show. You’ve got Baby-Doll, who acquits herself rather well in this episode, but it’s tough to buy that she’s reformed to the point where she can manage a motel – particularly in Gotham, where rehabilitation seems to be a dirty word within the walls of Arkham. (Sidebar: how did Paul Dini never write an episode where Harley Quinn tries to adopt Baby-Doll, much to Poison Ivy’s incredulity?) Furthermore, Killer Croc’s brutish disinterest in his monstrous appearance is at direct odds with his role in “Sideshow,” where his embrace of monstrosity was tempered by his own sense of tragedy at the same. Here, Croc loses that depth and becomes uninterestingly thuggish, a dispiriting decline for a character who had one of the more surprising emotional arcs on the show.

In terms of the redesign, it’s a wash for this episode. Baby-Doll’s redesign is more angular and helpfully strips her of the Looney Tunes cuteness that saddled her character in her debut; Laraine Newman replaces Alison LaPlaca, but her voice is so close that I didn’t notice until the credits rolled. For Killer Croc, though, the redesign scraps his gray scales for a dark green and more reptilian appearance, but the shading on his green skin is so dark that he fades into the background in many scenes. Worse yet, Aron Kincaid has been replaced by Brooks Gardner, who doesn’t do anything interesting with Croc’s snarls or grunts. I’m sure that my attachment to Kincaid stems from his unmistakable delivery of the line, “I threw a rock at him!” (which I should hope is not unreasonable for anyone following this series), but for a Croc-centric episode, Gardner isn’t really bringing much to the table to replace the character-laden Kincaid. Gardner’s Croc does, however, seem to prefigure the “Pimp Croc” of the comic Broken City (which, in turn, inspired the Academy Award-winning Suicide Squad).

Robin and Nightwing are nowhere to be seen in this episode, giving time instead to the Batman/Batgirl team-up that has been a consistent selling point for The New Batman Adventures. In an episode as littered with sexual tension as this one, there’s an uncomfortable note in knowing that Bruce Timm has been guiding Batman and Batgirl together in a romantic way (which will always, until the end of time, be a gross misreading of the relationship, in every sense of the word “gross”). Granted, the Timmverse romance only gets as explicit as transparent flirtation in Mystery of the Batwoman – setting aside, as we all should, the first forty minutes of The Killing Joke  – and thankfully here Batgirl plays the role of maturing teenager, joking about a villainous date night and maternally recommending a good spanking for Baby-Doll. It’s that spirit that has made Batgirl such an endearing member of the cast, and Tara Strong is doing definitive work in the role.

“Love is a Croc” is simultaneously the better Baby-Doll episode and the worst Killer Croc episode. It’s an odd story with a curious emotional center, defying resolution and sidelining its ostensible heroes in favor of an oddball romance between two misfit felons. But what else might we have expected from a writer who created a cigar-chomping pantsless duck? It’s rare for anyone to show up Paul Dini, but I almost think Gerber has gotten closer than anyone by halfway redeeming Baby-Doll.

Original Air Date: July 11, 1998

Writer: Steve Gerber

Director: Butch Lukic

Villains: Baby-Doll (Laraine Newman) and Killer Croc (Brooks Gardner)

Next episode: “Torch Song,” in which the star that burns brightest burns fastest.

🦇For the full list of The New Batman Adventures reviews, click here.🦇

Monday at the Movies - September 24, 2018

Welcome to another installment of “Monday at the Movies.” This week, a film which gives lie to the old expression about how the sausage is made.

All the Money in the World (2017)– A year or so from its release, it is a shame that the most interesting – and distracting – thing about All the Money in the World remains the ballyhoo surrounding the replacement of Kevin Spacey with Christopher Plummer in the role of billionaire J. Paul Getty. It’s unfortunate because the film is otherwise quite fine, neither a triumphant masterpiece nor a mordant trainwreck, but in every scene with Plummer there’s a macabre curiosity about what Spacey, beneath mountains of Gumby makeup, had done with the part, whether we’ll ever see any of the footage that necessitated the speedy and expensive reshoots. Plummer is doing masterful work, as he always does, and I have no doubt that he gave a more engaging performance than Spacey, who was exceedingly distracting in the prosthetics-laden trailers. Michelle Williams, as the mother of the abducted Getty grandson, is equally compelling, heartbreaking in the frustration we share with her at the immovable object of Plummer’s Getty. Mark Wahlberg, however, is disruptively miscast as the CIA operative turned Getty advisor Fletcher Chace; Wahlberg plays Chace like a scrappy everyman, albeit without the sobered gravitas needed to believe that this man is dangerous and capable of anything. (One almost expects him to tell an OPEC sheik, apropos of Andy Samberg, “Say hi to your mother for me.”) But the suspense of the film, a true story, falls somewhat tepid with knowledge of how the facts turned out, and the continual reminder of the film’s tumultuous gestation gets in the way of two very solid performances. Then again, I would much rather director Ridley Scott make films like this instead of persist in reinscribing the Alien mythos to the point of murky exposition (after Prometheus, I’ve still not hauled myself in front of Alien: Covenant, and I consider the prospect leavened with dread.)

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you next week!

The New Batman Adventures - "Growing Pains"

“It’s not you. I have to keep moving. There’s a man after me.”

After Robin saves a young girl (Francesca Marie Smith) from a street gang, he learns that her identity is something of a mystery. She doesn’t know her name – Robin dubs her “Annie” until they can learn more – and all she remembers is that she’s being pursued by a frightening man. Meanwhile, Batman’s investigation into a violent robbery intersects with Robin’s case when the heroes realize that this new robber is the man shadowing Annie.

Paul Dini gets a story credit on this episode, but I don’t feel he must have done very much on this one beyond pitching the basic outline to Robert Goodman, who pulls solo duty as script writer. It seems there are a few really interesting ideas in this episode, but I don’t sense that they’re given full attention in a plot that meanders and fumfers around until Batman figures out what’s going on.

There’s a nugget of a really good idea in this episode – that Robin sees Annie as something of a kindred spirit because they have similar backgrounds. “My dad wasn’t much of a prize either,” he tells her in a surprisingly sober emotional moment. It’s the kind of key character detail that was lost in “Sins of the Father” when it could have formed the backbone of a “Robin’s Reckoning”-style episode. We certainly start to get a better handle on Tim Drake as an emotional Boy Wonder, perhaps governed more by his passions than Dick Grayson ever was. If he came off as bratty in his debut and more or less neutral in the episodes since, “Growing Pains” gives us a strong sense of Tim’s personality, his dedication to his moral center, and his willingness to butt heads with Batman (something we glimpsed, to great success, in “Never Fear”).

But the largely chaste budding romance between Robin and Annie is a bit, pardon the pun, muddied by the fact that she’s revealed to be – spoilers ahead – an amnesiac piece of Clayface, sent off into the world after the events of “Mudslide” to scope out whether the coast was clear. All along, this series has blurred the line when it comes to its villains being pure evil; most if not all of them have very sympathetic reasons for doing what they do, and most villains have recognizable goals coming from deep cores in their psyches. Clayface already had the subtlety from “Feat of Clay,” in which we saw his addiction to the Renuyu cream drive him into madness. I don’t think he’s any more sympathetic when we see him as a preadolescent girl of the streets, much less when Robin appears to fall in love with Annie. The whole thing becomes a little uncomfortable, and Robin’s reaction to Annie becomes somewhat comical when we know she’s made of mud.

To top it off, “Growing Pains” continues the uncomfortable evolution of Batman into a cranky and abortive father figure. He’s curt and abrasive with Tim, perhaps giving us a hint as to why Dick left (again, spoilers – that’s exactly why he left), and worse yet he’s largely uninterested in Annie until he learns that she’s part of Clayface. Poor Kevin Conroy is saddled with the line “I know who Daddy is,” which he delivers with his nonpareil gravitas, but the absurdity of the dialogue deflates the tension of a second-act commercial break. Alfred catches some plot shrapnel too, first reminding Batman that Tim is a child before reacting with horror to learn that Batman is doing the responsible thing by tracking his protégé’s movements. Either Bruce and Alfred have become the world’s worst father figures – which, in a real sense, Bruce usually is – or they’ve been bludgeoned by a plot so peculiar that they can’t help but be warped.

Indeed, in an episode littered with faltering fathers, there’s a joke, surprisingly unsuccessful in its execution, in which Commissioner Gordon calmly observes that he’s “Glad my Barbara’s past her wild years.” It’s a decent enough gag (even though I’ve always maintained that Gordon winks at his daughter’s cape-and-cowl discords), but Batman pulls the most surprised face you’ll ever see him make, the visual equivalent of a record scratch straight out of a trailer for a mid-1990s teen comedy. It’s one of many moments in the episode where I genuinely don’t know what tone Goodman and Dini were trying to set.

The episode’s coda, in which Batman grimly intones, “Sometimes there are no happy endings,” is a fitting end for a strange episode, capped off by Robin’s oddly stubborn insistence that Clayface murdered Annie. Maybe once puberty settles in, Robin will look at “Growing Pains” differently; he doesn’t seem to be thinking clearly, and Batman doesn’t seem to understand at all what his young ward is going through. Seeing as how Batman himself had a strange adolescence, deprived of a normal childhood with normal childhood interactions, you’d think he might have a little more compassion. It’s ultimately a misfire for the otherwise usually impeccable Paul Dini, but at least it’s an uncompromising swing for the fences. It also seems to be one of the more divisive episodes of the series – fans either love this one (Dustin Nguyen, a top Bat-artist, frequently tosses Annie into his crowd scenes) or they’re unsettled by it. Count me among the latter – the fantasy of Batman is that he’s the best surrogate father a young boy could want, not an emotionally stunted absentee patriarch. 

Original Air Date: February 28, 1998

Writers: Paul Dini and Robert Goodman

Director: Atsuko Tanaka

Villain: Clayface (Ron Perlman)

Next episode: “Love is a Croc,” in which Baby-Doll has her first big girl crush.

🦇For the full list of The New Batman Adventures reviews, click here.🦇

The New Batman Adventures - "Joker's Millions"

“If I don’t pay up, I’ll go to jail for tax evasion! I’m crazy enough to take on Batman, but the IRS? No, thank you!”

The Joker (Mark Hamill) is flat broke. Struggling to make ends meet by taking on impossible jobs, Joker loses his Harley Quinn when a heist goes wrong. But a letter arrives for him, revealing that Joker has inherited $250 million from an old mob rival, the late King Barlowe (Allan Rich). With his financial woes behind him, Joker launches into a life of extravagance – until the tax collectors show up.

I can only beat the drum for Paul Dini so often before I feel myself becoming stale, and I think the declaration that I’ve said it all has itself become a wearied refrain. “Joker’s Millions” is yet another amazing episode from Dini, who turns in yet another first-rate Joker story, which barely involves Batman but nevertheless gives an immersive portrait of the sort of city that needs him. (It’s worth noting that Batman doesn’t even speak for nearly sixteen minutes of a twenty-one minute episode.) The finest writer is once more paired with his finest star, as Mark Hamill gives an uproariously funny performance with every line (“Haha! Let the good times roll!”). His ostensible muse, Arleen Sorkin, is in rare form as Harley, fuming at her boss and lover for abandoning her before hatching a harebrained scheme to escape Arkham and give him what-for.

What follows over the course of the episode is a series of well-crafted jokes that never miss their mark. From the myriad visual gags indicating Joker’s abject poverty (a wilting acid flower, a getaway car that stalls when the tank runs dry) to a montage of all the ways Joker (mis)spends his newfound inheritance, Dini has found the funny bone with surgical precision. Even the minute detail that Joker has found lodging in a flophouse under the alias “Mr. Kerr” is hysterical, since the landlady either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care that her tenant is an easily recognizable fugitive. 

“Joker’s Millions” is one of those episodes that doesn’t misfire (even Joker’s redesign is barely noticeable, considering what a treat the rest of the episode is), so rather than run down every delight one at a time, let’s turn our attention to another redesign. The Penguin makes his debut as owner of the Iceberg Lounge, an invention of the comics in 1995, and it’s really the best version of The Penguin, who’s always maintained a pretension of sophistication and legitimacy. Gone is the DeVito-inspired birdman, replaced with what Bruce Timm has described as a “nineteenth-century gentleman” by way of the Jack Burnley comics (Burnley made Penguin stouter than his initial appearances). Setting Joker’s ersatz reform amid Penguin’s larcenous nightclub is a giddy continuation of Dini’s topsy-turvy eye on Gotham – two criminals pretending to be otherwise, in plain view of those who know better.

Like a surprising number of great episodes, Batman and his crew don’t really feature in the episode, popping in to do a bit of action but otherwise leaving the focus on Joker and his own self-made fall from (temporary) grace. Dini’s best episodes remind us that crime doesn’t pay (and in this episode, boy doesn’t it) and that villainy always defeats itself with the most punishing irony, but it’s equally viable to see in these episodes the infectious fun that tempts so many to the dark side. Joker’s clearly having a ball, even as his fortunes – literal and figurative – roil beneath him. And Dini is too, which is a sure way to bring the audience along for one of his best episodes.

Original Air Date: February 21, 1998

Writer: Paul Dini

Director: Dan Riba

Villains: The Joker (Mark Hamill), Harley Quinn (Arleen Sorkin), and The Penguin (Paul Williams)

Next episode: “Growing Pains,” in which Robin gets a little muddy.

🦇For the full list of The New Batman Adventures reviews, click here.🦇

The New Batman Adventures - "Never Fear"

“Fear is the glue that holds society together. It’s what makes people suppress their worst impulses. Fear is power.”

All across Gotham, people have stopped listening to the better angels of their nature, throwing caution to the wind and behaving with reckless abandon. After saving a man swinging between rooftops, Batman follows a trail that leads from a brazen employee directly into the lair of The Scarecrow (Jeffrey Combs). The master of fear has developed a singularly unique way to bend his research into phobia, but when Batman is blasted with the gas, Robin wonders if he’s still in control.

The net effect of the redesign for The New Batman Adventures is largely neutral, with the bulk of the updates being mere streamlining. If the worst of these is the Joker redesign, we’re in pretty good shape; it’s by and large difficult to mess up the look of an iconic character like those in the Batman universe. In the case of The Scarcrow, however, it’s a marked improvement, both from the original baghead Scarecrow of “Nothing to Fear” and his toothier refresh in “Fear of Victory” and beyond. The long black duster, the wide-brimmed farmer’s hat, and the skeletal leathery frame finally make Scarecrow a figure of proper terror. Icing in the cake is the broken noose around his neck – which, I believe, is an invention of this show that’s since carried over into most visual interpretations of Scarecrow. Points also to Jeffrey Combs, who drops Henry Polic II’s slightly theatrical bravado for a lethally restrained monotone that’s positively chilling. (Combs, a schlock horror veteran, would later go on to redefine The Question as a raspy conspiracist with a crush on The Huntress over on Justice League Unlimited.)

In terms of visuals, Scarecrow is a winner here, but as far as narrative goes, Scarecrow had already begun to approach greatness with “Dreams in Darkness,” which figured out how to play up his scientific genius and his contempt for the city. “Never Fear,” however, is leaps and bounds Scarecrow’s best episode to date (though perhaps not his best overall, if we’ll count “Over the Edge” in a few weeks). Between the spooky redesign of the character, the moody red skies, and somber men’s chorus on the score, Scarecrow moves the show closer into a zone of horror, which is the right move for this character. The best villain stories are the ones that use the villain in a non-interchangeable way, finding a plot that’s uniquely suited to that particular foe. Here, Scarecrow reverse-engineers his own gimmick, depriving Gotham’s citizenry of fear in order to coax them into reckless and ultimately fatally dangerous behavior. 

It’s writer Stan Berkowitz’s animated Batman debut (he’d done some strong episodes of Superman: The Animated Series), and he’s firing on all cylinders. Not only does he find a great Scarecrow plot, but he makes excellent use of the Batman/Robin dynamic, something TNBA has largely struggled to do. First, though it isn’t explicitly stated in this episode, we see the return of Bruce’s “Matches Malone” disguise as he infiltrates Scarecrow’s operation. That’s the kind of deep dive into the mythology I really appreciate, since Matches isn’t used nearly often enough. Moreover, though, Berkowitz puts Jason Todd Tim Drake to great use when he realizes he may have to challenge his mentor after Batman might have fallen under the spell of Scarecrow’s anti-fear gas.

The episode concludes with the stunning visual of Scarecrow piloting a subway train barreling toward the heart of the city, all the while looking for all his withered self like a literal grim reaper, an avatar of the city’s doom. While the dénouement of the episode isn’t quite as thrilling as one might hope, its narrative payoff and the introduction of a scarier Scarecrow might even go so far as to make “Never Fear” the second-best episode of The New Batman Adventures thus far. (Hey, “Holiday Knights” is a tough opener to beat.) It’s a solid reminder that, as rocky as the first few episodes of TNBA have been, the same was true of Batman: The Animated Series. The really good stuff lies ahead of us.

Original Air Date: November 1, 1997

Writer: Stan Berkowitz

Director: Kenji Hachizaki

Villain: The Scarecrow (Jeffrey Combs)

Next episode: “Joker’s Millions,” in which The Joker faces his greatest fear.

🦇For the full list of The New Batman Adventures reviews, click here.🦇