The New Batman Adventures - "Animal Act"

“We got enough yahoos running around this city without having to deal with Yogi and Boo Boo, too.”

A routine evening on patrol turns into a topsy-turvy night of misrule when Batman, Robin, and Nightwing catch a gorilla climbing a radio tower and stealing some gadgetry. Amazingly, Nightwing recognizes the gorilla from his days at Haley’s Circus. Dick Grayson refuses to believe that the gorilla’s trainer, Miranda Kane (Jane Wiedlin), could be behind the theft, but Batman’s hackles are raised when a set of bears robs a warehouse. Yet despite this episode being set in Gotham City, no one notices the strange clown lurking at the periphery.

Contrary to what my synopsis would have you believe – spoiler warning – it’s not The Joker at fault in this episode. (Kudos for that about-face, at least.) It is, in fact, The Mad Hatter, making his full TNBA debut after a cameo in “Over the Edge.” Hewing closer to Sir John Tenniel’s illustrations for the literary Mad Hatter, the redesign gives us a shorter Jervis Tetch, more gnome than man; wisely, Roddy McDowall remains on hand, his dulcet tones providing the requisite lilting madness for a plot that is appropriately off-kilter. 

“Animal Act” is not, however, a worthy use of the Mad Hatter, even more so than “The Worry Men,” in which even Batman was disappointed at the pure greed of the Hatter’s motives. Here the Hatter is once again after money, but his cockamamie scheme involves manipulating his human mind-control technology to allow him to conquer the animal brain. Why he’s taken this additional step is beyond me, and the episode is disappointingly uninterested in why Tetch has changed his modus operandi for such an underwhelming use of his talents. 

This episode also fails to make full use of the connection to Dick Grayson’s past. (For a better version of this idea, within the last decade, comics scribe Kyle Higgins made masterful use of Nightwing’s ties to his circus past.) For a show that hasn’t quite known what to make of Nightwing, a dive into his history can give the character a better grounding in his new identity. One could imagine this episode as a spiritual sequel to “Robin’s Reckoning,” which gave us a good look at Dick Grayson as a circus orphan with a surrogate family of sorts. Seeing any of that family might have tickled the nostalgia keys. Instead, we get a generic bevy of circus types, including the circus’s ostensible new management. (Ph.D. sidebar – Miranda Kane is obviously named for Batman co-creator Bob Kane, but Miranda is the daughter of magician Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, just as this Miranda is the daughter of the circus’s last animal trainers. Circus as magic?)

All told, “Animal Act” is relatively uninspiring yet almost entirely inoffensive. It’s not a catastrophe on the order of “Critters,” but it never soars as much as it ought to. We’ll have to wait until next week to learn more about how the first Robin became Nightwing, but I’d hoped that this episode (which, also like “Worry Men,” I barely remembered) would humanize the character a little bit. Instead, it further entrenches the notion that Nightwing is a humorless cynic, jaded by his time with Batman and unable to carry on a conversation without gritting his teeth lest he strangle his former mentor. “Just following a pattern of obsessive behavior instilled on me at an early age,” he deadpans, and I can’t help but wonder why the lively Loren Lester was allowed (or encouraged) to restrict himself to a monotone for much of his tenure as Nightwing. If anything, Nightwing should continue to be a light in the darkness, especially as he departs Batman’s orbit. You’d think there ought to be more levity in a show where the Dynamic Duo fights trained bears, but there isn’t a whole lot of it to be found in “Animal Act” – or indeed, regrettably, in much of The New Batman Adventures at large.

Original Air Date: September 26, 1998 

Writer: Hilary J. Bader

Director: Curt Geda

Villain: The Mad Hatter (Roddy McDowall)

Next episode: “Old Wounds,” in which we finally learn what broke up the band.

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