Batman: Mask of the Phantasm (1993)

“I need it to be different now. I know I made a promise, but I didn’t see this coming. I didn’t count on being happy.”
 
When I reviewed Batman: Mask of the Phantasm back in 2012, I said that it was “impossible” to compare it to The Dark Knight, finding Phantasm to be “quintessential.” Four years later, in my first expansion of my Personal Canon, Mask of the Phantasm made the cut – and yet I had said it was “imperfect... the resolution doesn’t quite hold up after repeat viewings.”
 
Reader, I was wrong. This review could have been so many things – an edition of “Take Two Tuesdays,” a continuation of my 2017-2019 reviews of Batman: The Animated Series, or part of my heretofore undeclared attempt to review every movie on the Personal Canon. Even before rereading my original review, I wanted to revisit Mask of the Phantasm because it deserved so much more than just 250 words in that “Monday at the Movies” format – especially on the occasion of its 30th anniversary this year. Whatever I was thinking in 2012, Phantasm has never truly let me down.
 
The Batman (Kevin Conroy) is a wanted man, wrongly accused of the murders of some of Gotham’s most notorious mobsters. Batman is hot on the trail of the real killer, The Phantasm (Stacy Keach), when an old flame returns to town – Andrea Beaumont (Dana Delany), whose past relationship with Bruce Wayne is explored in heartbreaking flashbacks, even as the plot marches inexorably toward a final confrontation with The Joker (Mark Hamill).
 
I always forget that Phantasm is as brief as it is. In the neighborhood of 75 minutes, it’s hard to find a film that hits all the bases like this one does: suspense, romance, comedy, heartbreak. Between dynamite action sequences and deeply human character work, Mask of the Phantasm includes no fewer than three origin stories across two timelines, telling an indelible and original story about Batman. It’s a tale that has cast its own shadow over Batman in the past thirty years, with fans constantly asking, “When will the Phantasm show up?” (The Phantasm appeared in Batman Beyond comics circa 2015 and in 2020’s Batman/Catwoman; over on film, we got a name-only tease in Batman v Superman, while the Phantasm is frequently name-checked in wishlists for the inevitable sequel to The Batman.)
 
Yet the reason I’ve never quite sounded the call for more Phantasm stories is because this one is perfect. The comics did a semi-sequel to the film in Batman & Robin Adventures, in an issue that could only be called “Shadow of the Phantasm.” While it’s a fun romp, it’s not indispensable, and it essentially leaves the characters in the same place where the film did: separated, exiled, and presumed dead. I’m being cagey about spoilers, even though the film is thirty years old and the action figure infamously unmasked the Phantasm just in time to disappoint kids on Christmas. My spoiler-phobia is largely due to my quasi-religious devotion to stories and the art of storytelling, but it’s also because the mystery isn’t entirely the point; if you know how tragedies work, you’ll plot this one out in short order.
 
Because the key to Phantasm isn’t that it’s a mystery; it’s a film noir about brooding avengers and the dark shadowy antiheroes who love them. It’s a tragedy about what happens when people let their pasts define them, but it’s also about the inescapability of the past, of chickens coming home to roost when it’s least convenient. Indeed, the past looms as large as the heavy tombstone on which the WAYNE family name is inscribed, and the real pain of the film is Bruce Wayne’s inability to escape that destiny he pledged for himself. “The way I see it,” Andrea snipes in one incisive moment, “the only one in this room controlled by his parents is you.”
 
Phantasm is somewhat unique for a Batman origin story in that we never see the murder of the Waynes, that random act of devastating violence that set Bruce Wayne on a course of dark vengeance. Instead, the film takes their loss as a given and sets the real origin story as a choice – Bruce Wayne chooses his vow over his own selfhood, and when he dons the cape and cowl for the first time, it’s not a moment of triumph. Alfred intones, “My God!” and recoils. The music swells, but even that refrain is sobered and pained. From that moment on, Bruce Wayne is the performance, a careless playboy charade who has to hide himself away from others lest they see through his façade.
 

The Phantasm, too, is a performance, reciting the ominous refrain, “Your angel of death awaits,” like some grim prophecy that explains everything. Outfitted with a theatrical costume and an insistence on dramatic violence, the Phantasm is wrestling with demons that have nothing to do with framing Batman for murder. Meanwhile, the mobsters – most notably Sal Valestra, voiced by Abe Vigoda – are stuck in their roles, playing out cheap imitations of The Godfather while their past catches up to them. The casting of Vigoda is inspired, mired in the genre’s past while playing on the arrested timelessness of Vigoda’s permanent old age.
 
Paradoxically, only The Joker is perfectly liberated. If you didn’t know he was in the movie, his first appearance reads like something out of a nightmare; the film takes a hard pivot and bends around his manic gravity. At first, the mobsters try to recruit Joker to protect them from Batman, but the incorrigible Joker can’t help but take over the plot for his own purposes, bumping off as many gangsters as The Phantasm does. He even seems to grasp the cruel irony of the film’s finale, laughing with gleeful abandon as he, Batman, and The Phantasm stare down certain death. Indeed, throughout Joker plays the Shakespearean fool, commenting on the coincidences of the plot, calling out red herrings about Phantasm’s identity, and cracking wise with a sense of humor best suited to the gallows of Gotham.
 
I haven’t said anything about the voice cast because the scripting is so impressive, but suffice it to say that Kevin Conroy remains the definitive Batman, giving us no fewer than three takes on the character (costumed vigilante, fresh-faced bachelor, and jaded philanthropist). He can plumb the depths of grief or crack a wry one-liner, and he’s the voice I’ll always hear in my head for any comic book. Ditto for Mark Hamill, whose Joker is so good that you forget he was ever a farmboy from Tatooine. Hamill has a knack for uncomfortable punchlines like “That’s what I want to see, a nice big smile.” Then there’s Dana Delany, who has to be the emotional heart of the story while keeping her own feelings clenched beneath a cool exterior. She can keep pace with both Bruce Wayne and Batman, and using nothing but her voice, she convinces us that she’s Bruce’s true star-crossed lover.
 
Ultimately, the reason people want more Phantasm isn’t because there’s more to say. It’s because this film is so good, so perfect, that 75 minutes feels criminally brief. We want to hear Conroy and Hamill riffing on each other until the end of time. We want to chase happiness just like Bruce Wayne does, and we want to revel in the bittersweet fatefulness that finds Bruce pursuing a darker calling. Or maybe we just want to live in that glorious art deco Gotham, painted on black with red skies, with a breathtaking Shirley Walker score to make sense of it all. (I know I do.) It’s an agonizingly human story, heightened by the presence of elaborate costumes and a certain Clown Prince, and as in the best films no one wants to see it end.
 
I don’t know what I meant in 2012 by “doesn’t quite hold up,” because Phantasm is a movie that has held up – and it has held me up when I’ve felt down about storytelling, disappointed by my favorite genre, or just grim about life itself. It’s almost like a calculated distillation of a superhero narrative, sweeping from start to finish, from origin story to never-ending battle. It’s not a movie that necessarily makes one feel good about humanity, but it does make one feel good about being alive. What life is worth living if you don’t have Conroy and Hamill narrating it?
 

Batman: Mask of the Phantasm is rated PG for “animated violence.” Directed by Eric Radomski and Bruce Timm. Written by Alan Burnett, Paul Dini, Martin Pasko, and Michael Reaves. Based on the DC Comics. Starring Kevin Conroy, Dana Delaney, Hart Bochner, Stacy Keach, Abe Vigoda, Efrem Zimbalist Jr., and Mark Hamill.

The Top 10 Batman Animated Episodes (As Written by Paul Dini)

If there’s one thing on which we can agree after two years and more than one hundred episodes (beyond the indomitable, indispensable powers of Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill), it’s that Paul Dini was the show’s finest writer. As I said back in July, Dini is “arguably the show’s greatest writer, a man who fully understands Batman and his world, who can craft tales therein unlike nearly anyone else.” As master of his craft, Dini deserves his own Top 10, and with a new crop of episodes under our belt, it’s time to see how this shakes out.

Just like the preceding reprises, this list reproduces the July 2018 text where relevant, adding TNBA episodes where appropriate; removed from the immediacy of watching these episodes, commentary addenda will appear in blue. With that said, on with the show!

The Worst 10 Batman Animated Episodes

A reminder of the words of Anton Ego: “We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read.” As good as Batman: The Animated Series and its follow-up The New Batman Adventures could be, they had a commensurate propensity to disappoint. I had initially struggled to come up with ten bad episodes, settling for eight bad ones with a forgettable flop and a two-thirds bad episode. Now, however, I’m proud to say I’ve gotten ten worst-of-the-worst.

Just like last week’s “Top 10” redux, this list reproduces the July 2018 text where relevant, adding TNBA episodes where appropriate; removed from the immediacy of watching these episodes, commentary addenda will appear in blue. With that said, on with the show!

Remember, nobody’s perfect.

Superman: The Animated Series - "The Demon Reborn"

“Old age, Superman – it truly is a shipwreck. One that I have survived more times than I can remember.”

An art exhibit in Metropolis attracts an army of ninja attackers, who steal a peculiar staff fabled to have mystical healing powers. Batman arrives to help Superman apprehend the ninja, who are working for his old flame Talia (Olivia Hussey). Talia wants the staff to help her ailing father Ra’s al Ghul (David Warner), but Ra’s needs Superman for the final stages of his plan, which will make Batman’s foe more dangerous than ever.

“The Demon Reborn” is a peculiar episode because of its bifurcated identity. Where “Knight Time” did a very good job bringing Superman into Gotham, the attempt to bring Batman into Metropolis is somewhat more overpowering. The character Superman feels very out of place in an episode that wants so desperately to be another Batman episode, revisiting one of his greatest foes in a plot that doesn’t have much use for Superman other than as a demi-MacGuffin for the al Ghul clan to chase. Lois Lane, too, gets the short end of the stick, though she has a charming scene with Batman that builds on their unconventional relationship from “World’s Finest.” It’s a fun moment in which both characters reckon with their strange past and muse on their impossible future – a conversation that’s only possible in this incarnation of the DC Universe, where Lois fell in love with Bruce Wayne but fled from the Batman. (“She likes Bruce Wayne and she likes Superman. It’s the other two guys she’s not crazy about.” / “Too bad we can't mix and match.”)

As a capper to more than two years of reviews, then, “The Demon Reborn” makes the case one last time for Batman as a genre-proof dynamo, able to airdrop into any type of story without any seams. Superman seems out of sorts in a mystical story like this one, and he’s ill-matched for the threat Ra’s poses because all Superman can do is politely accommodate Ra’s and his villainous monologue until it’s time to break free. Superman is vulnerable to magic, yes, but that always seemed to me to be a way to justify putting two divergent cosmologies together. Morality plays, colossal threats, iconic battles of good vs. evil, interrogations of the notion of America – these better suit Superman than an immortal man with a magic stick. (And conversely, Ra’s al Ghul deserves better, I think, than trying to steal Superman’s strength for no particular reason.) In the moments when Batman is doing his detective work, the episode is firing on all cylinders; oddly enough, it’s the Superman parts that drag – though perhaps I’d feel differently if I had just watched the 50 preceding episodes of Superman: The Animated Series.

It’s hard to imagine that Batman: The Animated Series marked the first time that Ra’s al Ghul had been adapted from the comics, but he had a character-defining portrayal there, with David Warner as the irreplaceable voice in my head. We can think of “The Demon Reborn” as the capper to the fine Ra’s episodes – “The Demon’s Quest,” “Avatar,” and “Showdown.” Indeed, in the latter we saw (through a Jonah Hex flashback darkly) Ra’s al Ghul beginning to reflect on his long life and his many regrets, and we see that painful legacy here, with the ecoterrorist’s body failing him as the Lazarus Pits have begun to lose their luster. We also see, for the first time, Ra’s demonstrating some degree of compassion for his daughter; all too often, Talia was treated like a devoted disciple and not a true member of his family. She’s been abandoned, beaten, manipulated, and literally thrown at Batman, but at least here she gets a modicum of respect from her father, who abandons his assault on Superman to save her. (The icky, bizarre conclusion to their strange relationship would come in an episode of Batman Beyond, penned by no less than Paul Dini himself.)

“The Demon Reborn” is in a weird liminal space where it’s not quite a Superman episode, but not quite a Batman one, either. It’s a terrible note on which to end a review series because of the way it resolutely resists finality; when Superman suggests that he and Batman work together more often, Kevin Conroy is given the unsettlingly glib line, “Yeah, right.” Of course, they would work together on a regular basis in the Justice League animated series beginning in 2001, but moreover it’s odd to hear a surfer bro’s response from the mouth of a grim avenger. Conroy sells it, of course, but I wonder if he’d have done better with a terse “We’ll see.” It’s not quite my Batman, not quite my Superman, and not even quite my Ra’s al Ghul – but even so, it’s not quite terrible. It’s silly and fun, and perhaps that’s all we need to ask from a show like this one.

Original Air Date: September 18, 1999

Writer: Rich Fogel

Director: Dan Riba

Villains: Ra’s al Ghul (David Warner) and Talia al Ghul (Olivia Hussey)

Next episode: Once more, we come to the end of a series. Next time we’re together, we’ll begin revisiting the best and worst of the Batman animated project.

🦇For the full list of Batman: The Animated Series reviews, click here.🦇

Superman: The Animated Series - "Knight Time"

“All this sneaking around isn’t exactly my style.”

Superman (Tim Daly) busts up a classic Roxy Rocket heist in Metropolis when he discovers that Batman has gone missing. With crime up in Gotham, Superman offers his help to a reluctant Robin, impersonating Batman in the interim until the Dark Knight can be found. Suspecting mind control, Robin and a disguised Superman scour the city for the Mad Hatter but find Bane, who’s elated to have another chance to break the Batman.

Just in case I never get around to full reviews of Superman: The Animated Series, I should say up front that this is probably my favorite of the show’s 54 episodes – discounting, of course, the three-parter “World’s Finest,” strung together as The Batman/Superman Movie. No slight to Superman, who had plenty of good episodes of his own (“Livewire,” “Mxyzpixilated,” and “Apokolips... Now!” come to mind), but it should come as no surprise that this Bat-fan was tickled pink to see Metropolis and Gotham meet once again. And while some Batman/Superman crossovers get bogged down in the philosophical differences between the two superheroes, occasionally erring on the side of the impossibility of cooperation, “Knight Time” is unapologetic in reveling in the exuberant fun of mixing the two worlds together.

Batman’s absence is the narrative catalyst, forcing Superman to investigate, but the episode is particularly inspired in the moments when Superman disguises himself as Batman, mastering Kevin Conroy’s voice through “precise muscle control” but completely missing the boat on posture, demeanor, and his own invincibility. It’s a comedy of errors, but the joke wisely never targets either hero, acknowledging instead the inherent absurdity of the situation and the irreplaceability of Batman. The episode even sneaks in a clever meta-gag about the darker tone of The New Batman Adventures when Robin notes that a video from Bruce Wayne has to be a forgery because “he’s smiling.” It’s an interesting sideways glance at Gotham, where one man’s disappearance sends an entire city into chaos; the police are stymied by a dangerous uptick in violent crime, while every villain known to man collaborates on a dystopian plot to conquer the city.

Despite its pitch-perfect portrayal of its titanic protagonist, the strength of the Batman animated shows was always its deep bench of villains, and “Knight Time” really packs them in. Even aside from the trio of villains plotting to dominate Gotham – Bane, Mad Hatter, and the criminally underused Riddler – we get appearances from Roxy Rocket and the Penguin, both of whom get compelling face-time with Superman. Roxy is, as ever, flirtatious, but it’s Penguin who gets what might be the best scene of the episode, facing down a Batman who’s suddenly able to kick a table across a room (even if Bat-Superman needs a little nudging from Robin to amp up the aggression). 

“Knight Time” remembers, of course, that it’s a Superman show, and it doesn’t overstay its welcome in Gotham simply because it’d be fun to do so. The reveal of the episode – that Bruce Wayne’s disappearance has been engineered by Brainiac, who needs his considerable resources to build a rocket – fits right in with how Superman: The Animated Series reimagined Brainiac. And it’s always a delight to hear Corey Burton, who was positively iconic in the role of a dispassionate computer willing to sacrifice an entire world to preserve its knowledge. Like its bat-eared predecessor, StAS had a tendency to knock it out of the park on voice casting (shout-out to casting director Andrea Romano); like Mark Hamill as The Joker, Clancy Brown is to this day getting work as Lex Luthor, while Gilbert Gottfried and Dana Delaney really captured something quintessential about Mr. Mxyzptlk and Lois Lane, respectively. But Corey Burton’s clipped precision as Brainiac is dollars-to-donuts in that legendary status, and he’s a rival befitting Tim Daly’s note-perfect boy scout Superman.

“Knight Time” is an interesting coda to these animated Batman reviews because it’s an episode that celebrates the best of Batman’s 109 episodes – its madcap characters, its funhouse mirror of a setting, and its flexible accommodation of nearly any conceivable plot. It’s both a return (of sorts) to Gotham and a fun frolic through a new setting for Superman. And it’s a fine example of the best kinds of episodes the DC Animated Universe could churn out, the kind of candy you eat every so often without getting bored of it. It feels mildly sacrilegious to say, but “Knight Time” is probably the episode of StAS I’ve watched the most; it’s in a league with the best of Batman.

Original Air Date: October 10, 1998

Writer: Robert Goodman

Director: Curt Geda

Villains: Brainiac (Corey Burton), Bane (Henry Silva), Roxy Rocket (Charity James), The Penguin (Paul Williams), The Mad Hatter (Roddy McDowall), and The Riddler (John Glover)

Next episode: “The Demon Reborn,” in which Superman meets one of Batman’s exes.

🦇For the full list of Batman: The Animated Series reviews, click here.🦇

Batman: The Animated Series - "The Lost Episode"

“Yowza, yowza, ladies and germs! Let’s have a big Land O’ Laffs welcome for your pal and his – Batman! Hee hee! I’m delighted to see you made it this far, but then I knew those other losers couldn’t put you out of action... at least, not like I can. Ah hahahaha!”

After apprehending Poison Ivy during a bank robbery, Batman discovers that his foes have all banded together to run the Dark Knight through a gauntlet. The Riddler has captured Commissioner Gordon, while The Joker and Harley Quinn are holding Robin hostage at (where else?) an abandoned amusement park. As Batman races to free his friends, he learns that he’s heading for a confrontation with the architect of this insidious plot.

The Adventures of Batman & Robin debuted on Sega CD in July 1995. While the game existed in several different versions released across various platforms (a Super Nintendo version loosely adapted episodes like “What Is Reality?”), the Sega version has gone down in the annals of fandom as a “lost episode.” It resurfaced on the Internet a few years back but got a signal boost when Mark Hamill tweeted about its existence in December 2018. As a “lost episode,” this collection of video game cutscenes is remarkable for uniting the voice cast from Batman: The Animated Series in a story written by the show’s top scribes, Paul Dini and Bruce Timm. That’s an impressive assembly of talent for a forgotten video game on an obsolete gaming system.

“The Lost Episode” is not, however, a lost treasure or even a missing link. It’s by definition a little choppy, since the playable levels – all driving, by the way, with Batman never exiting the Batmobile for any gameplay – have all been extracted and frankensteined together in this seventeen-minute compilation. But despite making for unconventional viewing, there’s actually a good deal to like in here, leading some (Hamill included) to lament that it wasn’t included in some form on any of the DVD sets. The cutscenes play like a “greatest hits” compilation, with each villain getting a new variation on a classic gimmick. They’re familiar premises but new riffs, almost like hearing Eric Clapton’s acoustic version of “Layla” for the first time. Poison Ivy debuts a new plant monster, while Riddler devises a scheme to prove his own mental and technological superiority; Joker orchestrates a carnival gone mad, and Clayface morphs and smashes like no other. Best of all, it’s all our favorite voices, including Arleen Sorkin as a giddy Harley Quinn.

There are two surprises in “The Lost Episode,” both of which make it an interesting change of pace from the standard BTAS fare. The first of these is the violence, which is not particularly graphic but is certainly shocking in comparison to the tamer material that reminds us that BTAS was, first and foremost, a show aimed at kids. Verboten by the television censors were guns, drugs, breaking glass, alcohol, smoking, nudity, child endangerment, religion, and strangulation – all of which Bruce Timm infamously sketched into one Batman image. (Also off-limits were vampires and most depictions of blood.) Unfettered by the censors, though, “The Lost Episode” includes a shockingly protracted sequence in which Batman takes a fire axe to Poison Ivy’s plant-based beastie. Batman’s face is splashed with green goo before the scene warps into a riff on “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” all splinters and shadows as Batman dismembers the creature. After 100+ episodes of network standards, “The Lost Episode” feels a little edgier – not necessarily for the worse, but definitely enough to give even a seasoned viewer a moment’s pause.

The second big surprise is the master villain – the final boss, if you will. And it’s spoiler warning time, because I can’t talk about the twist without talking about the double twist. At first, it seems that the true mastermind of the plot is Rupert Thorne (John Vernon), and I observed aloud, “Well, that’s disappointing.” Though Vernon is delightfully smarmy as crime boss Thorne, he’s hardly the archrival Batman – or a videogame – deserves. But “The Lost Episode” does an unexpected about-face when it’s revealed that, actually, Clayface is masquerading as Thorne to unite Batman’s rogues against him. It’s a bit of an intellectual stretch for Clayface to become a criminal mastermind, but it’s a fun change of pace and would seem to lend itself to a nifty boss fight – if the game weren’t comprised exclusively of driving and flying levels. (Clayface meets a classic “haven’t seen the last of him” fiery end when his plane is shot down over the Gotham River.)

All told, “The Lost Episode” is a strange bird, an odd viewing experience that does not quite yield the concealed greatness its mysterious name implies, but it’s just shy of required for any fan of Batman: The Animated Series. If nothing else, it’s seventeen “new” minutes of Kevin Conroy, Mark Hamill, and the rest of the gang. After twenty-four hit-or-miss episodes of The New Batman Adventures, “The Lost Episode” is that rare treat which reteams Bruce Timm and Paul Dini for as authentic an experience as you can get. If nothing else, it’s a fine auguring of future, better Bat-games likeBatman: Vengeance and the Arkham series, both of which would continue to reteam Conroy and Hamill in the roles they defined (with the latter scripted by Dini).

Original Release Date: July 1995

Writers: Paul Dini and Bruce Timm

Director: Bruce Timm

Villains: Poison Ivy (Diane Pershing), The Riddler (John Glover), Harley Quinn (Arleen Sorkin), The Joker (Mark Hamill), and Clayface (Ron Perlman)

Next episode: There are no more episodes! Stay tuned, though, for two more bonus reviews before we revisit the Top and Bottom 10 episodes. Up next, “Knight Time,” in which Bruce Wayne treats himself to an impromptu vacation.

🦇For the full list of Batman: The Animated Series reviews, click here.🦇

The New Batman Adventures - "Judgment Day"

“May heaven have mercy on your souls, Two-Face – both of them.”

Gotham’s new vigilante, The Judge (Malachi Throne), takes a harder line on crime when he violently attacks The Penguin. Egged on by corrupt city councilman J. Carroll Corcoran (Steven Weber), The Judge works his way down a list of Gotham’s most wanted. While Two-Face (Richard Moll) scrambles to avoid facing the vigilante’s death sentence, Batman discovers that something far worse than a murderer lurks beneath The Judge’s robes. (Note: I’ll have to spoil the reveal below to discuss this episode fully.)

It’s a strange position to review “Judgment Day” as a series finale. It was the last episode produced but not the last one to air – that honor belongs to the masterful “Mad Love.” I’ve never been clear on how quickly the creators had to change course, though in Vulture’s oral history Bruce Timm suggests a fairly quick turnaround between The New Batman Adventures and Batman Beyond. (In that same history, Paul Dini notes, “we could have gone another two or three years on just Batman stories alone, because we also liked where we were taking the relationships.” If only!) So it seems partially fair to treat “Judgment Day” like a series finale, but we also have to acknowledge that it was more of a full stop than a proper conclusion.

As a finale, “Judgment Day” ties a bow on one of the animated programs’ longest running arcs – the fragile sanity of Harvey Dent, who debuted in the show’s fifth episode before the series’s first two-part episode depicted his fall from grace in an accident that scarred him physically and shattered him mentally. It’s both perplexing and fitting, then, that this episode introduces a third personality – that of The Judge – to accompany Harvey Dent and Two-Face (the erstwhile “Big Bad Harv”). Giving Two-Face a third personality is perhaps a bridge too far for a villain so obsessed with doubles and duality, but it compounds the tragedy of Harvey Dent and doubles-down, so to speak, on this Batman’s first and perhaps only great failure. Batman’s concluding monologue, reminiscent of a similar closing speech from Psycho, is perhaps a little too pat in explaining the narrative twist, and another pass might have helped draw out the long connection Batman and Two-Face, Bruce Wayne and Harvey Dent, have shared.

When Councilman Corcoran volunteers to help The Judge, he does so by observing, “I figure if Gordon can have his hero, why can’t I have mine?” This comparison is a fascinating one, and it’s something that, in another world, might have made for an excellent two-parter or even a season-long subplot. Positing The Judge – and, by extension, Two-Face – as Batman’s dark opposite number raises fascinating questions about which lines are important for Gotham’s vigilantes to draw, and the fact that only Corcoran notices is a bit disappointing. Along the same vein, The New Batman Adventures has prided itself on deepening the Bat-bench with Nightwing, a new Robin, and an expanded role for Batgirl, yet none of the Bat-family appears, save for a brief Alfred cameo. Batman himself doesn’t appear for nearly seven minutes while The Judge makes the rounds with Gotham’s villains. It’s a treat, to be sure, to see many of these foes again, even if Killer Croc isn’t voiced by Aron Kincaid, or if The Riddler is relegated to a news clip in his only non-hallucination appearance on TNBA. But one can’t help but feel this episode might have been fuller had someone other than Batman had a word about The Judge – especially Tim Drake, on whom Two-Face had a rather significant impact back in “Sins of the Father.”

On one point of order, “Judgment Day” is a striking series finale because of the way it invokes one of the animated project’s finest hours. Between his swooping robes, booming voice, and operatic score, it cannot be an accident that The Judge is extremely evocative of The Phantasm, the eponymous antagonist of Batman’s first and best animated film – to say nothing of the fact that Alan Burnett wrote both this episode and Phantasm’s story. Harley Quinn certainly looms largest among the pantheon of original animated creations, but there has always been something primal about The Phantasm, who never quite made the jump to the comics the way Harley did. (The Phantasm would resurface in an episode of Justice League Unlimited and a few Batman Beyond comics; when I met the writer of those comics, he speculated that the rights might have been handled differently at the time since Phantasm was released theatrically.) Nevertheless, The Phantasm has become a kind of hypostatic metaphor for the entire Batman animated project – an example of its fine visual flair, its ingenious creative writing, and its gut-level “cool” factor. 

Moreover, The Phantasm represents the key conceit that Batman: The Animated Series and The New Batman Adventures always kept in mind: no matter how relentlessly cool his villains might be, Batman is the star of his own show, and every well-crafted story has to feed into exploring his specific psyche, his need for justice, and the personal connection he shares with his enemies –many of whom he may have had an accidental hand in creating. It’s also always been about the belief that one man can make a difference, that the city is a better place for this one figure standing between it and total lawlessness. We see it with The Phantasm, with Simon Trent and the redemption of his soul, even with Harley Quinn and her loony halfhearted reforms. And we see it with Harvey Dent, on whom Batman has never given up. This episode works very well as a thematic sequel to “Second Chance,” in which Harvey Dent found himself abducted by a Two-Face unwilling to accept that his better half might genuinely express contrition for his crimes. Back then, I wrote words that sum up my overall sense of the Batman animated project, words on which it may be wise to end:

We came for the earnest exploration of the Batman and his world, who he was and how his enemies came to be; we stayed for stories like this one, that remind us that these stories matter because they are about superhuman figures who remain, at the end of the day, failingly human.

Original Air Date: October 31, 1998

Writers: Rich Fogel and Alan Burnett

Director: Curt Geda

Villains: The Judge (Malachi Throne), Two-Face (Richard Moll), The Penguin (Paul Williams), Killer Croc (Brooks Gardner), and The Riddler (John Glover)

Next episode: “The Lost Episode,” in which everything old is new again.

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

The New Batman Adventures - "Beware the Creeper"

“Jilted madman stalks crazy clown girl – film at 11!”

While reporting on Gotham’s villains, Jack Ryder (Jeff Bennett) finds himself on the wrong side of The Joker (Mark Hamill) and his famous temper. Joker douses Ryder with the chemicals that made him the clown prince of crime seven years ago, but Ryder emerges as The Creeper, a bright yellow ludic goblin whose fractured sanity leads him on a mad chaotic spree across Gotham – and into a deep infatuation with Harley Quinn (Arleen Sorkin). 

When Steve Ditko passed away in June 2018, he was rightly remembered as the co-creator of Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, and Squirrel Girl. His creations for DC Comics were somewhat less widely remembered, though chief among them was The Question – inarguably the spiritual father of Watchmen’s Rorschach. Forgotten by all but the diehard DC heads was The Creeper, the madcap alter ego of Gotham television reporter Jack Ryder. The Creeper isn’t exactly an obscure character, but he’s a pretty deep cut; I’d wager that most comics fans (this one included) can’t quote his origin story, even if they know the central Jekyll-and-Hyde conceit of the character.

Bruce Timm is on record saying that his crew made several attempts to work The Creeper into the animated series but never found a story that made good use of the character. In the show’s eleventh hour, it isn’t clear whether Timm and company finally found the right notes or if they just threw their hands up and deployed The Creeper before it was too late. I’d like to think it was the former, especially because the show gave Jack Ryder the Harvey Dent treatment and used him throughout The New Batman Adventures before finally giving him the Christmas colors of The Creeper. Writers Rich Fogel and Steve Gerber (the latter having made his mark on weird comics by creating Howard the Duck) are so enamored of the character that Batman is largely a guest star on his own show, which is oddly appropriate for a show that has risen and fallen on the strength of its villains and supporting cast. (And when the show’s star, Kevin Conroy, is as steady and consistent as ever, it can afford to lean on its villains.) This shift in focus also lends credence to my theory that The New Batman Adventures was headed toward a “brave and bold” team-up model. 

“Beware the Creeper” marks the final appearance of The Joker, so it’s fitting that the show turns on its head for its greatest ne’er-do-well, a theatrical scene-stealer of the first order. In this topsy-turvy episode, Joker becomes the hero, with The Creeper dogging his every move and trying to steal his girl; at the episode’s climax, Joker begs for Batman’s help, retreating in sheer terror at the lunacy of The Creeper. It’s a laugh riot, especially as the episode operates under a kind of Looney Tunes approach to physics, with an absurdist domino chain leading to Jack Ryder’s initial transformation. Acid, fireworks, cigars, and chemical explosions all conspire to reshape Ryder’s reality before he’s presumed dead in a send-up of the most readily accepted version of The Joker’s own origin. (The episode also includes a nod to Joker’s role in the flashbacks from Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, a nice little wink for the penultimate episode.) In short, this episode is a hoot, and it knows it. 

As the last Joker episode, it’s also the last episode for Harley Quinn, too. While “Mad Love” is an impossible act to follow, this episode takes the interesting approach of reminding us why we love a loon like Harley, even when she’s acting against her own best interests. Despite seeing firsthand how incidental she is for her beloved Mistah J – in a meringue-coated spoof of Marilyn Monroe, which provides a delightful excuse for Arleen Sorkin to sing for us one last time – we still feel some degree of safety with him as opposed to the daft courtship of The Creeper. Creeper’s amorous intentions are never without a whopper of comedic intent, but there is something a little scary about his irrational and relentless pursuit. Put another way, maybe we’d all get back together with our worst exes if the rebound looked like The Creeper. No matter what, though, we’re always rooting for Harley – and I think we always will.

I had said back when The New Batman Adventures began, with “Holiday Knights,” that the Joker redesign was more than a little reminiscent of contemporary cartoon Freakazoid!, and with “Beware the Creeper” we come full circle. Freakazoid, the Deadpool of his day, took great postmodern delight in deconstructing what a kid’s cartoon could look like, with a powerful metafictional bent and a visual style that was more Chuck Jones than Jack Kirby. While I never watched much Freakazoid as a kid, I’ve always been aware that this incarnation of The Creeper owes a little bit to that offbeat sensibility. Case in point, the inspired use of Billy West as Joker’s three goons Mo, Lar, and Cur – doubtless a gag built around West’s spot-on Larry Fine impression (at a time when Larry was the “forgotten Stooge,” seldom imitated). It’s a joke that works because it makes perfect sense that Joker would hire goons for their resemblance to bygone comedians, the same way Two-Face would hire sets of twins. But it’s also a joke that only works because the audience recognizes the telling, a joke told as much for the benefit of its tellers, who layer in the reference with reverence. It’s one last reminder that the creators of the show have always given their viewers credit for being smart enough to follow along, even in an episode as deliberately mindless – and ultimately, richly entertaining – as this one.

Original Air Date: November 7, 1998

Writers: Rich Fogel and Steve Gerber

Director: Dan Riba

Villains: The Joker (Mark Hamill) and Harley Quinn (Arleen Sorkin)

Next episode: “Judgment Day,” in which it all wraps up when The Judge delivers his final verdict.

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

The New Batman Adventures - "Chemistry"

“Relationships aren’t supposed to be easy. Even I know that, and I’m a vegetable.”

At Veronica Vreeland’s fourth wedding, Bruce Wayne meets Susan Maguire (Linda Hamilton), who sweeps our billionaire off his feet. The relationship moves fast – fast enough for Bruce to propose marriage and resign the mantle of the Bat – but Robin and Batgirl are suspicious, especially when Veronica’s new husband Michael starts displaying murderous intent.

As the clock winds down on The New Batman Adventures, “Chemistry” is an unexpectedly appropriate antepenultimate note. For a show that has been nominally about family (albeit a family that squabbles, bickers, and at times flirts inappropriately), “Chemistry” is an episode that asks what it would take for the patriarch to leave the family. It’s been a long-standing precept of the Batman universe that Batman is a foster father to the Robins, Nightwings, and Batgirls who have found their way into his fold, with stalwart Alfred as his own surrogate father; in short, Batman creates for himself a family to replace the one he lost in Crime Alley.

For Susan Maguire to come along and destabilize all of that suggests that she must be a very special lady. This episode very smartly invokes some of the most powerful moments of Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, in which a young Bruce Wayne was already considering abandoning his nascent vow of justice in favor of a life with Andrea Beaumont; in “Chemistry,” it’s the cave scene in particular, framed and scored like that Phantasm moment, that helps to land the notion that this might be Batman’s swan song. However, one never really gets the impression that this is permanent, even if this were the final episode of the Batman animated project. Like Robin and Batgirl, we recognize that this is all moving a little too quickly, and Kevin Conroy smartly keeps his Bruce voice a little too dispassionate for a man on the verge of wedded bliss. I might have liked a little more convincing that Susan was the woman of Bruce’s dreams, but perhaps writer Stan Berkowitz is more interested in the detective work of Batman’s juniors and the horror derived from the truth about Susan.

The episode begins to destabilize (in a good way) when we learn the truth about Veronica Vreeland’s fourth husband. Veronica has been a fun addition to Gotham’s supporting cast, a useful reminder of what everyone else thinks Bruce Wayne is – a vapid, shallow, and self-absorbed heir to a fortune of ungodly size. She has the early weavings of a moral fiber, having learned half a lesson from abusing Penguin in “Birds of a Feather,” but she’s hardly an altruist. Still, our investment in her, even if only as a consequence of continuity, means that “Chemistry” wrings a successful amount of horror from her husband’s monstrous transformation into – and spoilers, all – a venomous plant creature born in Poison Ivy’s lab. Michael’s shambolic lurch toward Veronica, cowering in a closet, reminds one of the better moments in “Heart of Steel,” though I wonder if I’m the only one who wishes we might have gotten one more good H.A.R.D.A.C. episode out of TNBA.

As the final Poison Ivy episode, “Chemistry” keeps its main antagonist off-screen for a while, building suspense but sadly relegating a major Bat-foe to the periphery. There’s a lot that could have been done with this character – a happier ending with the besotted Harley Quinn, perhaps, or a seed of the long-running redemption plot the comics have entertained for her. Creating plant spouses to take over global industry is perfectly of a piece with Ivy’s ecoterrorist sentiments, but her emphasis on controlling their fortunes seems a little petty for a villain who always tried to do a little good for her planet. (Say, why hasn’t Ivy ever teamed with Ra’s al Ghul to save Mother Earth?)

“Chemistry” is a kind of cold inversion of “House & Garden”; where Ivy found herself incapable of forming a family, even a synthetic one, she’s here ready to dispense with the artifice and take full advantage of her powers of photosynthetic simulation. Years later, the tie-in comics would claim/reveal that every appearance of Ivy since “Holiday Knights” was actually a plant-based doppelganger that Pamela Isley used to escape Gotham and join Alec “Swamp Thing” Holland in his botanical research; as I recall, she even washed up from the watery climax of this episode. It’s an interesting footnote for a character who’s more often than not received a fair shake from this show. 

Original Air Date: October 24, 1998

Writer: Stan Berkowitz

Director: Butch Lukic

Villains: Poison Ivy (Diane Pershing) and Susan Maguire (Linda Hamilton)

Next episode: “Beware the Creeper,” in which a clown prince is plagiarized, and three stooges take a day off.

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

The New Batman Adventures - "Mad Love"

“Face it, Harl, this stinks. You’re a certified nutso wanted in twelve states, and you’re hopelessly in love with a psychopathic clown! At what point did my life go Looney Tunes?”

Smarting from his latest thwarted attempt to kill Commissioner Gordon, The Joker (Mark Hamill) rebuffs Harley’s advances, pushing the clown princess (Arleen Sorkin) to remember how it all began. In flashbacks, we see how she met The Joker as his psychiatrist in Arkham Asylum, before she fell in love and broke him out as his new henchgirl. As Harley remembers her past, she plans her future with her puddin’, plotting a way to rework Mr. J’s old schemes to kill Batman once and for all.

“Mad Love” is, as memory serves, the last great episode of the animated Batman project, which is really fitting in a number of ways. It’s the last episode by Paul Dini and Bruce Timm, adapting one of their seminal comic book works, and it remains the definitive statement on Harley Quinn. (We’ll see her once more, in two weeks, for a zany sideplot.) It’s a brisk twenty minutes, giving us a pair of fully-realized villains whose ambitions are clear, and it features Batman cleverly dodging his way out of danger with his trademark sense of black humor. (“She came a lot closer than you ever did... Puddin’.”) Put another way, it’s at once a high note and a mic drop for Paul Dini and Bruce Timm.

Reviewing this episode is a little like reviewing Citizen Kane – even if you haven’t seen it, you know its reputation is titanic, and the central concept is so culturally ingrained that it’s seeped into the culture by four-color osmosis. Everyone knows the story, and you’ll be unsurprised to see it crack the Top Five of my “Best Paul Dini Episodes” when all is said and done. It’s such a tight and engaging exercise in precision, with a wonderful showcase for Arleen Sorkin, who plays Harley as a multifaceted bundle of mess. She’s romantic, lovestruck, tragic, determined, afraid, clever, infatuated, obsessed, angry, and often a mix of most of them at once. What Kevin Conroy can do with the word “Go” pales in comparison to what Sorkin can do with a well-timed “Puddin’.”

Giving a villain like Harley such a complex psychological and emotional profile is a bit brave, but it’s long been the hallmark of this show that the villains are almost more the star of an episode than Batman is. Joker, too, gets his convolutions, obsessed as he is with marshalling all the strength of his comedic genius against Batman’s vast toyetic arsenal. He’s aware of the theatricality of it all, and it’s been this self-aware mania that has marked Hamill’s Joker tenure as indisputably definitive. He’s genuinely funny – on more than one level, as when he gags, “May the floss be with you!” – and yet frighteningly manipulative. This danger is something that Suicide Squad started to get right, this interpretation of The Joker as emotionally abusive and psychologically controlling, with Harley’s true tragedy being her inability to learn from her own mistakes.

Of course, in the comics, she’s long since learned her lesson, but in “Mad Love” she’s incorrigible, swooning over her Mistah J despite his endless violence. Yet at her core, she’s real; we recognize her cheery optimism and believe in her abiding capacity for love. We can’t help but admire her spirited determination to get back up and try again, even if that is the very definition of madness. In this way, she’s become a kind of accidental feminist icon, representing the capacity for strength and growth in the face of astonishing cruelty. No matter what happens to Harley, regardless of how warped her perceptions can be, she’s determined to continue to try to make the world in her own madcap image, whether that involves a shellacking of whiteface or a good thwack of her oversized mallet. 

We’ve seen throughout that this series often lives or dies on the strength of a particular voiceover artist – Kevin Conroy, Mark Hamill, Michael Ansara, even Paul Williams as The Penguin. Here, though, Sorkin makes the case (if she hadn’t already) that she belongs on the Mount Rushmore of Bat-voices – indeed, such that I can’t imagine who a comparable fourth would be opposite Conroy and Hamill. (Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., maybe? Andrea Romano? Sound off in the comments.) “Mad Love” is then a kind of farewell gift; though Harley Quinn will appear once more, this episode is the treasure by which we’ll always remember her.

Original Air Date: January 16, 1999

Writers: Paul Dini and Bruce Timm

Director: Butch Lukic

Villains: Harley Quinn (Arleen Sorkin) and The Joker (Mark Hamill)

Next episode: “Chemistry,” in which our Dark Knight finally settles down.

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

The New Batman Adventures - "Girl's Night Out"

“An empty mall, an unguarded cash machine – who says life ain’t fair?”

A prisoner transfer from Metropolis goes sideways when Livewire (Lori Petty) escapes confinement and runs loose into Gotham City. Batgirl (Tara Strong) and Supergirl (Nicholle Tom) team up to recapture the electric supervillain, but in her escape Livewire teams up with Poison Ivy (Diane Pershing) and Harley Quinn (Arleen Sorkin) for a criminal shopping spree. 

In the final scene of this episode, it’s not a spoiler to say that Supergirl and Batgirl cap off their night of crimefighting and bonding in slippers and bathrobes, with their own pints of ice cream. If there’s a better analogy for how this episode is the animated equivalent of comfort food, I can’t come up with it. “Girl’s Night Out” (odd apostrophe placement, I know) is a real treat of an episode, fan service in its purest form. Last week’s episode might be a Top 10, and so too do I need to give this one some consideration. (Next week’s is a lock.)

It’s a little surprising for me to discover that Supergirl only appeared in three episodes of Superman: The Animated Series; even more startling is that Livewire only appeared in two. These two women loom so large in my memory of the show’s 54 episodes, possibly as a consequence of this episode, which throws together the best of two animated shows (which, recall, aired for a time as a one-hour block, The New Batman/Superman Adventures, on the Kids WB network). While there is something lightly discriminatory about pitting two women against three women, given the deep bench of villains Batgirl and Supergirl could have fought, I submit that we look at “Girl’s Night Out” as uniting the DC Animated Universe’s two greatest original creations – Livewire and Harley Quinn, both manic pixies with squeaky voices, too good to be bad but too bad to be good. It’s the perfect team-up of two perfect characters, just different enough to get on each other’s nerves.

This episode also revisits the Harley & Ivy dynamic that works so well. We saw a kind of trial run for this episode in “Holiday Knights,” when the pair abducted Bruce Wayne for a holiday shopping spree and murderous nightcap, so it’s a delight to see that the friendship persists, with Ivy as the gently indulgent den mother and Harley as the impulsive ball of energy. “She tries so hard,” Ivy laments as Harley whacks away at a locked door. Sorkin is in rare form as Harley, grunting her way through endless hammer strikes, gleefully acknowledging her own madness, and knocking herself out (whoopsie-daisy!) when she forgets that Supergirl is invulnerable. We have two more Harley episodes to go after this one, and she’s well on her way to going out on a high note.

One thing that ought not go without saying is that “Girl’s Night Out” is to be commended for an episode in which Batgirl and Supergirl’s friendship is assumed as a matter of course; they have no rivalry, no deep-seated resentment, and no hang-ups about working together. Indeed, they’re only jealous of the quotidian differences between them (namely, technology, farm life, and chores). It took Batman and Superman an entire movie to learn how to get along; it’s refreshing to see these two learning from their mentors’ mistake. While Batman is gruff and agitated at needing Superman’s help to take down Livewire, Supergirl is all too happy to step in for her famous cousin and make a night of it. 

In fact, this refreshing optimism is something from which The New Batman Adventures overall could have benefited. I had to keep checking this wasn’t a Paul Dini episode – it’s not, nor was Livewire’s debut – because the infectious brand of enthusiasm is Dini’s trademark approach to a universe as full of delights as this animated one. As dour and uncomfortably romantic as TNBA could be, it was episodes like this one that left us feeling good about the direction of the DCAU. Better, “Girl’s Night Out” is one of a number of episodes, like “Trial,” that feel like an open toybox adventure, dumping all the action figures onto the rug and having a blast. Sadly, this boy never had a Harley Quinn or a Livewire figure (or a Supergirl, come to think of it), but this would have been a dream of a team-up.

Original Air Date: October 17, 1998

Writer: Hilary J. Bader

Director: Curt Geda

Villains: Livewire (Lori Petty), Harley Quinn (Arleen Sorkin), Poison Ivy (Diane Pershing), and The Penguin (Paul Williams)

Next episode: “Mad Love,” in which life goes looney tunes.

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

The New Batman Adventures - "Legends of the Dark Knight"

“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.

Original Air Date: October 10, 1998

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.🦇

The New Batman Adventures - "The Demon Within"

“Gone, gone, the form of man / Rise the demon, Etrigan!”

A branding iron at auction in Gotham City draws fiercely competitive bids from occult expert Jason Blood (Billy Zane) and the impish witch boy Klarion (Stephen Wolfe Smith). It’s Bruce Wayne who places the winning bid as a “professional courtesy” to Blood, who Tim Drake is flabbergasted to learn is an ageless wizard who shares a body with Merlin’s personal paladin, Etrigan the Demon. Etrigan escapes when Klarion’s familiar, the were-cat Teekl, steals the iron, and Batman and Robin have a real hellraiser on their hands.

I have a hard time remaining objective about this episode because it was one of my earliest forays into the mad world of Jack Kirby, whose boundless imagination never took a holiday. Even after revolutionizing the “Marvel method” with Stan Lee, after formulating the Fourth World Saga practically single-handedly (and conjuring its god of evil, Darkseid), Kirby continued to churn out new and amazingly original creations like Etrigan and Klarion; the legend tells that workhorse Kirby fashioned Etrigan within the span of a lunch hour, and I believe it. There’s something immediate and dreamlike about Etrigan’s origin, summoned by Merlin to guard Camelot while bonded to a knight, wandering immortal as a god.

Put another way, I’m a real sucker for a Kirby creation, and so I’m not especially perturbed that Batman and Robin essentially become guest stars in their own show when Etrigan and Klarion come to Gotham. (See also Superman: The Animated Series, whose best episodes were the ones involving Darkseid and Kirby’s New Gods.) I’ll also argue that these dark magic characters fit quite nicely into the red-skied ethos of the redesigned Gotham. The implication that Batman already knows Etrigan makes perfect sense, extending his sense of the occult from the training we glimpsed in “Zatanna,” and this episode finally finds a good use for Robin, pitting him as the perpetually amazed sidekick entering a daft world already in progress. Indeed, this episode makes perhaps the greatest use of Robin’s diminutive stature, juxtaposing him with both the slender Klarion and the mammoth bulk of Etrigan.

In the case of The Demon, casting director Andrea Romano hit a home run when she cast Billy Zane as both Jason Blood and Etrigan. As ever, Zane brings a perfectly calibrated performance, flirting with the realm of camp when his Demon speaks in rhyme but also knowing exactly how much gravel to use to differentiate the two voices. We believe his exasperation with Klarion, and we can hear the wink in his voice as he alludes to his past in a conversation with Robin. And in the moments when he speaks the incantation to unleash Etrigan, we can almost see the forceful showiness of a Jack Kirby close-up, replete with bolded lettering and that distinctive “Kirby krackle.” It’s the kind of performance that is just fun to hear, not too far removed from Kevin Conroy’s own distinctive dulcets. This is usually the part of the review where I say it’s a shame we didn’t get more Etrigan, but I’m not sure how much more could have been done with the character while still maintaining this as a Batman show.

In fact, I almost wonder – as we approach the end of The New Batman Adventures, were the writers making a soft pitch for the show to become reinvented as a “Brave and the Bold” team-up series? After this episode, we’ve only got six to go, and two of them can be considered less at Batman episodes proper and more as team-up standalones; over on Superman, meanwhile, the showrunners gave backdoor pilots to Green Lantern, Aquaman, and The Flash (among others). Those of us in the know recall that we did get a team-up show – named, incidentally, Batman: The Brave and the Bold – and with next week’s wink-and-a-nod to a kinder, gentler Batman, perhaps this sort of episode was a necessary course-correction away from the friendless, emotionless, unfeeling Batman of whom we’ve seen all too much on TNBA – even if his friends are literal demons.

Original Air Date: May 9, 1998

Writer: Stan Berkowitz

Director: Atsuko Tanaka

Villain: Klarion (Stephen Wolfe Smith)

Next episode: “Legends of the Dark Knight,” in which there’s no wrong way to read a Batman.

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

The New Batman Adventures - "Old Wounds"

“He was so upset he couldn’t even talk about it. It wasn’t the first time I’ve seen him like that. What is it between you two?”

Robin finally asks Nightwing (Loren Lester) why he parted ways with Batman. Though the former Boy Wonder is reluctant to share, he tells his successor about the night Batman went too far, leading to a few confessions with Barbara Gordon (Tara Strong) and a confrontation with The Joker (Mark Hamill) where tensions boiled over.

Although the Batman animated project has largely eschewed long narrative arcs and dense continuity callbacks, “Old Wounds” is maybe the closest the show ever came to addressing its own internal mythology in an episode that promises a major revelation to answer the long-running question of why Nightwing gave up the mantle of Robin. I have very strong memories of this storyline – not as its animated instantiation but as the five-issue tie-in comic book miniseries, The Batman Adventures: The Lost Years, which preceded the episode. I remember that series fondly for its deliberate introspection, getting inside Dick Grayson’s head and tracing his path to a new identity.

Perhaps “Old Wounds” would have benefited from the breathing room that a two-parter would have given it, because the episode moves so briskly through its events that everything seems rushed and a little thin. This is an important story, maybe the second most significant one The New Batman Adventures would ever tell (in four weeks, “Mad Love” makes the case for being the most significant). The way it’s handled, though, seems perfunctory – Batman was a jerk, and Robin had enough – and it doesn’t quite gel with the healthy and positive relationship these characters had in The Animated Series. I’m reticent to pull a “book did it better” with this review, but The Lost Years took two issues to divorce Robin from Batman, establishing the conflict between Bruce’s increasing prickliness and Dick’s bristling under his mentor’s wing. “Old Wounds” distills that pattern down to an incident or two, giving us the acute feeling that we’re being rushed past important backstory. When Barbara says that “It wasn’t the first time I’ve seen him like that,” the problem is that itwas the first time the audience saw Dick like that.

Another drum I hate to beat – but once more feel the unfortunate need to strike – is that the episode gets into very strange territory when it accidentally implies that Barbara Gordon transferred her attraction to Dick Grayson onto Bruce Wayne after the former left Gotham. You can’t say I’m reading into this because of what we’ve seen from the show thus far, and you equally can’t ignore the fact that this episode includes promising sequences of Dick and Babs on a dinner date, followed by a later scene in which he visits her apartment while she’s wearing her other nightwear. I say promising because it’s an age-appropriate gesture to the long history these two share in the comics, building on light continuity with the Sub-Zero movie that preceded the redesign. But the relationship is scrapped as quickly as it’s acknowledged, ending after Batgirl reveals her identity to Dick Grayson, in a scene that uncomfortably reads like Dick thinks Babs is cheating on him with Bruce.

The revelation that Batman has always already known that Barbara Gordon is Batgirl is a clever one (though The Lost Years included sequences of Batman’s process of deduction, noting how Barbara’s tennis moves matched Batgirl’s fighting style), and his compassionate admission takes some of the sting out of the fact that he’s generally an emotionless bastard for most of this episode (and the redesign writ large). Indeed, that whole sequence in the Batcave is note-perfect, from Barbara’s crimefighting gusto to Alfred’s confession that “Yes, I admit it, I am Batman.” It’s a glimpse at a perfectly functional Bat-family, but the rest of the episode, though, does not live up to the promise of that setpiece. Nor, unfortunately, can a single episode sustain the weight of anticipation that’s been building since The New Batman Adventures began.

Original Air Date: October 3, 1998

Writer: Rich Fogel

Director: Curt Geda

Villain: The Joker (Mark Hamill)

Next episode: “The Demon Within,” in which a witch boy and a demon demolish a bakery. 

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