When The Penguin (Tom Kenny) and The Joker (Kevin Michael Richardson) break out of Arkham Asylum, their quest for loot leads The Penguin into a desolate Gotham crypt, where he accidentally reawakens the long-dead Count Dracula (Peter Stormare). But there’s only room for one bat-man in Gotham, as Bruce Wayne (Rino Romano) learns when he meets his latest supernatural foe.
It may surprise you to learn that I’ve never seen an episode of The Batman (2004-2008), the animated series to which The Batman vs. Dracula belongs. It was made just when I was phasing out of comics and ended just before I jumped back in, and I’ve never quite gotten used to the character designs, which look like inexpensive Saturday morning cartoons compared to Batman: The Animated Series (which, you’ll recall, is much more my jam). It ran for five years and sixty-five episodes, which is a significant investment of time for a project I’m not sure cuts the mustard for me.
After watching The Batman vs. Dracula, I’m still not sure if it’s “my” Gotham, per se, but I’m a little more intrigued after having dipped my toe. Still, The Batman vs. Dracula isn’t a new classic in the Gotham canon, a la Mask of the Phantasm or even Batman: Under the Red Hood. It’s perfectly serviceable but a little more shallow than some of my favorite Batman stories. It does exactly what it says on the tin – Batman does indeed fight Dracula – but it does so without the sophistication that might come of pitting two children of the night against each other. Indeed, the script feels very much like what might happen if you gave action figures of Batman and Dracula to a child: simple and straightforward, with a certain charm in its innocuous lack of depth.
Even before we meet Dracula, for example, when Bruce Wayne announces that he’s working on a device that will process solar energy, he may as well call it the deus ex machina, since we know it’s going to come up in the third act. Penguin, meanwhile, is relegated to the Renfield role without really doing much of anything else in the film; it’s perhaps just as well, since this Penguin seems to have the mentality of a twelve-year-old, with a scatological sense of humor to match. The Batman’s Joker is an interesting ragdoll of a man, with a husky voice and a colossal mop of green hair; while this isn’t the Joker I’d have written, it’s an intriguing and perfectly valid take on the villain, and Richardson captures that manic energy that makes the Clown Prince so compelling.
Then there’s our titular antagonist, and it’s hard to imagine better casting than Peter Stormare as Count Dracula. Stormare’s voice isn’t always recognizable – which is a shame, given how distinctive his line-readings can be (cf., The Big Lebowski, Seinfeld’s “The Frogger”) – but he’s clearly relishing the role, turning every line into a deep-throated snarl. The character is undercooked, only a surface-level interpretation of Stoker’s original, though perhaps anything would pale in comparison to Lugosi or Oldman. Stormare might have fared better in a longer theatrical release; as it is, direct-to-video animation doesn’t give this Dracula ample room to spread his wings.
I’ve said almost nothing about Rino Romano’s Batman, but then again I grew up with Kevin Conroy, and there are very few who can hold a candle to his Dark Knight. Romano (no relation, apparently, to Andrea Romano, who assembled the voice cast that included Conroy) is evidently playing a younger Batman, and the script seems to lean into his inexperience. He assumes, for one, that Joker’s death in the opening sequence is permanent, but then again, the city later assumes Batman has gone rogue based on the word of only one less-than-credible witness. Perhaps this is overall a younger Gotham than I realized? Then again, Romano’s Batman simply isn’t as vocally distinctive as some of his Bat-counterparts, though I may feel differently after watching more of the cartoon.
All told, The Batman vs. Dracula is not a great Batman movie, nor is it a great Dracula movie. I can’t imagine it being of much interest to anyone beyond the most ardent aficionados of either franchise. It’s serviceable and inoffensive, and it is transparently a product of its time, a particular era of Saturday morning cartoon that is hard to describe if you didn’t live through it. Its soundtrack, full of wailing electric guitars, makes it feel as much like an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer as anything else, and at least for this reviewer that’s not a tremendous compliment.
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