“You guys are both totally clueless. First of all, Batman’s real old – like, about 50. And second, Robin’s a girl.”While the arsonist Firefly (Mark Rolston) roams the streets of Gotham, four kids (Ryan O’Donohue, Anndi McAfee, Jeremy Foley, and Phillip Van Dyke) argue over what Batman is really like. Is he a giant pterodactyl or a rippling muscle god? Matt (O’Donohue) makes the case for a kinder, gentler Batman, while Carrie (McAfee) pictures the grimmest and grittiest Bat imaginable in this loving tribute to the works of Bill Finger, Dick Sprang, and Frank Miller.
Now that we’re getting down to the wire on the Batman animated project, “Legends of the Dark Knight” marks a number of “last” occasions – it’s the last anthology episode, and it’s the last episode filtered through the eyes of children. It’s definitely the best “kids” episode, handily thrashing “Be a Clown” and “I’ve Got Batman in My Basement.” It’s also a very strong anthology episode, but then we’ve already seen some real winners in that department (“Holiday Knights” and, of course, “Almost Got ’Im”). In other words, “Legends” makes a case for the series ending on a very strong note, and indeed this is the first of three episodes right in a row that I recall as among the strongest of The New Batman Adventures.
The central conceit of the episode – that there is no singular interpretation of Batman, that his value is in the eye of the beholder – is one that speaks very deeply to my beliefs about the value of fiction. Moreover, it’s particularly ingenious to pin the story to a group of children who turn their fandom into a kind of junior detective agency (another advantage over “Batman in My Basement”). It’s even better that this episode wears its creators’ own fandom on its sleeve, adapting two wildly divergent interpretations of Batman into a case study in the art of leaving them wanting more. I’d happily watch more in this vein, and have in fact done so; Batman: Gotham Knight did a segment like this, and an episode of The Brave and the Bold adapted Jiro Kuwata’s Bat-Manga, so it’s become something of a proud tradition for a character as multifaceted as Batman.
In the first segment, we get a cheerful Batman (Gary Owens) preventing a museum heist orchestrated by The Joker (Michael McKean). It’s a throwback to an era when Batman was unburdened of his early pulp roots, with a chest as broad as his smile. The visuals recall Dick Sprang’s 1950s Bat-art, but there’s a handshake with Robin (Brianne Siddall) straight out of Batman ’66, while McKean’s Joker recalls Olan Soule’s version of the Clown Prince from the late Sixties and Seventies. Put another way, it’s a pastiche within a pastiche, and this mash-up quality feels as anachronistic and yet as timeless as the giant props that fill the museum. There’s something very comforting about seeing Joker try to kill the Dynamic Duo by stomping on a giant piano; it’s a far cry from the Nolan and Snyder interpretations of Batman, but it feels right nonetheless, even as the kids reject it. The real star of this segment is McKean, whose Joker makes one wish he’d gotten to do more with the character; his version is rife with puns and cracking himself up, a playful jester with just a dash of sinister menace. “Mother always said I had talent,” he moons, a classic Joker line.
McKean would return to the world of the Bat as Dr. Bartholomew Wolper, Joker’s benighted shrink in the animated adaptation of The Dark Knight Returns. It’s an intriguing coincidence, then, that the next segment of the episode adapts DKR and its gritty 80s aesthetic, boiling its second issue down to a tight sequence storyboarded by the late, great Darwyn Cooke. The great casting continues; Michael Ironside is downright inspired as Batman, his voice gargling gravel over iconic paraphrases like “You don’t get it, son. This isn’t a trash heap. It’s an operating table. And I’m the surgeon.” (Miller’s original, note, was, “You don’t get it, boy. This isn’t a mudhole; it’s an operating table. And I’m the surgeon.”) Ironside would be replaced with Peter Weller for the 2012/2013 adaptation, which is a special kind of shame; though Weller was great, Ironside became a voice for a generation’s reading material. (Don’t cry for Mike, Argentina; he’d get his own day in the sun, though, as the definitive Darkseid over on Superman: The Animated Series and Justice League.)
The Dark Knight Returns segment is moody and expressionistic, capturing Frank Miller’s punchy dialogue and broad cynicism about the dark future. One wonders, with Cooke serving as storyboard artist, whether this segment had any influence or overlap with the similarly futuristic Batman Beyond, whose opening sequence was masterminded by Cooke. Taken on its own, though, this segment is relentlessly cool, with a special thrill for seeing Carrie Kelley – the first female Robin – make a quick jump into animation. The standout visual, though, is the shot of rain washing the mud from Batman’s face as he defeats the Mutant Leader in single combat. It’s enough to make you want a whole show of that world, and I’m sorely tempted to revisit the movies.Perhaps surprisingly, it is the third segment – the one starring Kevin Conroy – that ends up the weakest of the three, mostly because it can’t help but pale in comparison to two very striking takes on Batman. In this one, Batman chases Firefly and apprehends him for committing arson for hire. Divorced from the #MeToo context I read into him in “Torch Song,” Firefly is little more than a slick costume with a passing interest in lighting children on fire. Despite this part of the episode feeling somewhat compulsory, Conroy manages to hit another career note with a single syllable. When he shouts, “Go!” at the kid detectives as they flee through an opening in the inferno, Conroy packs an unbelievable amount of pathos into the word. Throughout this review series, I have stopped and noted all the wonderful, amazing things Conroy can do with his voice, and perhaps this is his apex moment, distilling an entire character into one syllable. You can hear his sorrow that children have been dragged into this mess, his fear that they will die in the fire, his anger at Firefly for endangering them, and his resilient hope that his nightly war on crime is making a difference.
“Legends of the Dark Knight” feels like it ought to be a Top 10 episode – and maybe, separated from all the great Dini episodes, it will be – but we must concede that this episode ends up somewhat less than the sum of its parts. It contains two first-rate segments and one a little weaker, and I find it hard to say whether the episode successfully communicates its message or whether I’m already predisposed to hear it. That message – that Batman is for everyone, with all versions being perfectly valid – is somewhat undermined, however, with a particularly mean-spirited joke at the expense of Joel Schumacher, who’s caricatured here as a preening pre-teen with a feather boa and a fetish for rubber-clad muscles. It’s the only sour note in the episode, but it’s pretty sour, reading like an embittered fan thumbing his nose at Schumacher’s Batman & Robin to assert his superiority over that particular interpretation. It’s perfectly legitimate not to like a movie like Batman & Robin, but this short punchline feels like the crankiest axe to grind in an otherwise jubilantly optimistic fable about fandom.
When we talk about Batman, it occurs to me that none of us is really talking about the same guy, and yet we’re all talking about the same elephant from a different vantage point. Some of us will describe Batman as a dark avenger, swooping through the night as a grim specter of obsessive vengeance. Others know him as a jovial square, willing slave to the conservative rules against jaywalking and violence. Still others think of him as a box office icon or a child’s plaything, a personal creed or just one of many in a box of toys. And the truth is, he’s all of those things. At the risk of sounding self-important in my own enlightenment, I think it’s really important for us to look at Batman from a four-dimensional perspective and realize that he’s all of his variations – pulpy, cheery, campy, gritty – a kind of cipher for the ages, telling us how we see ourselves and what sort of hero we need (or deserve). He contains multitudes, and no one interpretation has a monopoly on the character’s tone or history. There’s a part of me that wishes “Legends” were sequenced as the last episode of the series; it’s an effective series finale in the sense that it encompasses everything the show has been able to accomplish, uniting sixty years of history into as close to a unified statement as possible. And it’s a fine farewell to Batman in that it’s not an ending at all; it’s a renewal, a beginning, a reminder that he’s still out there, in all his forms, inspiring us by his example.
Writers: Robert Goodman and Bruce Timm
Director: Dan Riba
Villains: The Joker (Michael McKean), The Mutant Leader (Kevin Michael Richardson), and Firefly (Mark Rolston)
Next episode: “Girl’s Night Out,” in which the Femme Finest team up against the DCAU’s best villainesses.
🦇For the full list of The New Batman Adventures reviews, click here.🦇
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