Batman: The Animated Series

So one thing I've been doing is watching episodes of the old Batman cartoon from the 90s. By which I mean Batman: The Animated Series, and really just the first season—not any of the followups that were the same show but not the same show.

This series is, of course, well known among comic book people to be unusual in that it maintained a distinctly serious noir element. Batman was a genuinely dark character in this show, and I remember when I was a kid my mother actually had some doubts about letting me watch it because she thought parts of it seemed too adult-oriented.

Retrospectively, though, the series is lacking in its writing. It is all atmosphere and little substance. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule. The popularly cited emmy-winning Heart of Ice is the most obvious one, and for good reason. It's definitely the crowning achievement of the series. I won't go into why, as the aforelinked Wikipedia entry does a more than adequate job of that. The point is that, were the series of this caliber more consistently, I'd be more impressed.

Overall most of the characters are well crafted, but the writing itself—the dialogue and the plots—is very hit or miss. The Joker is still suffering here from corny one-liner syndrome. And I'm not just talking about puns, I mean that someone actually wrote the line, "Who says crime doesn't pay?" while he's robbing a jewelry store and thought it was a good idea. But then, what would you expect from an episode titled "The Last Laugh"?

Nevertheless I highly recommend finding this on mininova or pirate bay and taking a look at the first season. There are plenty of well crafted episodes to round out the embarassing ones.

I was going to compare this to Spectacular Spider-Man, a series which, in addition to accurately capturing the tone of the source material, is consistently well written, but if there's one thing I hate it's the fact that Batman is considered a superhero, and I don't want to perpetuate that mistake by comparing him to them. He is many things, but not that, and his character suffers when he's forced to share storylines with them. That's a post for another time, though.

Next time I may go over Mask of the Phantasm, a horribly underrated gem and my vote for second best Batman movie right after The Dark Knight.