Batman The Animated Series

The one with the voodoo dolls lampshades it, with Batman himself telling Tetch he's become a petty criminal. IIRC, Tetch handwaves it by bringing the need of money for his projects up.

... You overthink these things.

Really? I thought I was just pointing out the obvious.

Perchance to Dream was a good episode though.

Feet of Clay Part 2 had gorgeous animation.

I liked that one episode where there's this lost amnesiac girl Robin II falls in love with only for her to find out she is Clayface. Lot of emotion in that one. Kinda cheesy though. But still good.

edited 7th Mar '11 10:36:59 PM by Schitzo

^ Yeah, Growing Pains was one of the episodes of The New Batman Adventures that I really liked, and I can count those on one hand.

edited 8th Mar '11 1:27:30 AM by KnownUnknown

Yeah, well, it still seems like too much nitpicking, especially when considering 96% cartoons out there have much less emotional depth when it comes to villains. Especially the DC cartoons that came afterward. You can count the villains from The Batman with any depth at all with the fingers of a hand (basically, the first Clayface, the Riddler at some point, Catwoman, kinda, and... that was pretty much all). Batman The Brave And The Bold has great cheesy and over the top villains, and a few larger than life serious ones too (like Equinox), but again, depth and development never has been their strong point.

And even after they turned to 'generic' crime, I never felt the TAS villains felt interchangeable with each other. You'd never mistake a Mad Hatter plot and pathos with a Two-Face or Clayface one, no matter what.

Who else loves the cape and cowl affair?

I probably do need to pick up the box sets again.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not calling B:TAS bad, not by a long shot. Just pointing out that there is a lot it could've done better.

I realize that this show was made in the early 90's and that there have been a lot of advances in animation technology since then. Still, does anyone else think the action scenes in this series were pretty poorly done? They just seem so slow and clumsy most of the time.

I believe that is a textbook case of Seinfeld is unfunny.

Depends on the studio animating, for me. They're not near the level of later Superhero cartoons, but that's because technology has advanced.

Also, in terms of sympathetic villains, the only Superhero cartoons I can think of are The Spectacular Spider Man and Justice League Unlimited.

edited 8th Mar '11 8:17:49 PM by Scardoll

^^^^ "The Cape And Cowl Conspiracy" was this episode where a Riddler knockoff put Batman through a series of deathtraps in order to steal his cape and cowl for a mob boss, who turned out to be Batman.

It's a really cool episode, and the villain, for all that he was an expy of Riddler, was pretty cool as well: basically Cluemaster or Riddler as a sadistic international mercenary mastermind. His voice helped.

I like it, anyways.

In my opinion the best episode (that I saw, anyways) was Almost Got Im

^ "I THREW A ROCK AT HIM!"

It was a big rock

I don't think bats respects crock's inteligence.

edited 8th Mar '11 9:14:22 PM by dontcallmewave

The fight scenes were more about atmosphere, car chases, stealth and fistfights. They didn't become quite the acrobatic rock-em sock-em epic battles until Batman Beyond and Justice League, when they got some good fight scene directors like Butch Lukic and Joaquim Dos Santos, though Dan Riba certainly kept things alive until they came along.

To be honest, I never thought this was the kind of show you watched for "epic battles."

The problem I really had is, in action scenes that seem to demand quick movement, things usually feel oddly sluggish. There are plenty of times where some thug has hit Batman and I can't help but think, "Oh, come on, I could have avoided that punch."

And I'm not so sure if it can be chalked up to the technology of the day, because my understanding is that, if you have to animate a character moving, it's more easily done if they're moving quickly. At the very least, I know that slow motion is supposed to be hard to do animation.

Sure, there's lots of other stuff going on in the show besides fight scenes, but they are still present in just about every episode, usually taking up a fair bit of screentime, so it's pretty aggravating when a lot of them feel like the lightsaber duel from the first Star Wars movie.

The fights in BTAS weren't as well staged and flashy as those seen later in TNBA and JL, but they were more realistic, and more fitting the context of those early stories. Batman wasn't the unbeatable juggernaut yet; common thugs once got the drop on him, for instance.

The fights may have been a little sluggish and low quality compared to what we are used to today, but it would probably be hard to find something else of that quality that was made at that time

The fights may have been a little sluggish and low quality compared to what we are used to today

What with the rise of anime and all.

Still we're talking about Batman. It's primarily a detective show first, it can be forgiven for not having the best fight scenes in the universe.

If we're judging it on its merits as a detective show, though, I've gotta say I never found any of the mysteries in the show particularly intriguing. For example, a guy is poisoned while at dinner with his fiancee, who just rolled into his life a week ago; you'd think doing a background check on the fiancee would be standard procedure, but thinking to do so is supposed to be an inspired deduction on Batman's part.

I don't want to sound too negative, though; the rest of that episode was pretty darn good. Whoever it is they got to voice Poison Ivy, let me know if there's a recording of her reading the phone book, would ya?

^^ and ^: More that it's primarily noir in setting and atmosphere: noir is not known for big, flashy fight scenes - more roughhousing than anything, and is a bit more cerebral, you might say.

edited 9th Mar '11 6:09:58 PM by KnownUnknown

Setting highly complex mysteries in a half hour format mainly aimed at young audiences while still leaving room for action scenes is pretty much an impossible mission. With that considered, the show still did a damn fair job at it.

See, I'm not criticizing the fight scenes for not being flashy; plain ol' rough-and-tumble fights can be very entertaining. My problem is simply that the characters seem to be moving too slowly when they fight, which dials down the adrenaline and, in more severe cases, hurts Willing Suspension of Disbelief.

And I'm having a hard time understanding how this could be due to technological restrictions. My understanding was that, the faster an animated character moves, the easier it is to get away with off-model designs and other technical imperfections without anyone noticing. I'd have thought the animators would prefer that the characters move more swiftly?

True enough, but when people praise B:TAS they often talk about it being highly enjoyable for both child and adult audiences. Saying "it was good for what it was" is kind of a step down from that.

edited 9th Mar '11 6:22:23 PM by RavenWilder