For years fans of Batman: The Animated Series have clamored for a return to the DC Animated Universe, for more episodes of B:TAS or Batman Beyond or Justice League Unlimited. At conventions, the casts have appeared on panels, attempting to spur interest. Surely Warner Bros. would be encouraged by home video sales, merchandise, and the numbers viewing the series on streaming services. In fact, it was due to streaming that Warners renewed Young Justice after years from the previous season. And Disney, after acquiring the rights to X-Men, recognized the value of that property enough to continue its story decades later, but from its original time frame, 1997. So why didn’t Warners do the same with Batman?
It turns out, the studio wanted to. But Bruce Timm didn’t. He wanted to revamp the franchise. In the August 2, 2024 online edition of The Wrap,[1] Drew Taylor found out what happened.
It was around the spring of 2020. According to Timm, “They said, ‘Hey, how would you feel about going back and making some more ‘B:TAS’ episodes?’ And I’m like, ‘Nah, we’d been there, we’d done that.’ I wasn’t interested in just revisiting that world,”
Though he and James Tucker did consider a new Justice League series. But both wanted to do Gotham City stories that they weren’t able to do in the original Batman: TAS. Instead, they rebooted the concept with directors J. J. Abrams and Matt Reeves involved as executive producers. This would be Batman: Caped Crusader, Initially, it would be streamed for HBO Max (later renamed “Max”), but Warners and Discovery merged, and they instead licensed the property to Amazon Prime. The show’s first ten episodes premiered August 1, 2024.
A week prior, on Saturday, July 27, Comic-Con International: San Diego screened the first episode in Room 6BCF at 2:45 p.m. This was prefaced by a video from Bruce Timm explaining the new show complements the original B:TAS.
Still, it’s a reboot.
Timm told The Wrap that his Zoom pitch to Abrams and Reeves was, “I wanted to blend the atmospherics of Universal horror movies and the drama of Warner Bros. gangster movies and the action of Republic serials and mix it all together with a lot of film noir on top.”
On “X”, Chieze Noma commented, “Um, perhaps I’m missing something here, but the OG Batman:TAS already did that. And it was done better.”
What’s really different is gender-swapping, race-swapping, character redefinition, cast changes, a score not done by Shirley Walker or her proteges, The Dynamic Music Partners, the addition of profanity and a higher degree of violence. Not for family viewing. Pandering. Change for the sake of change.
Alas, Bruce Timm’s revelation came too late to include in Batman: The Animated Interviews, which details the making and legacy of the original Batman: The Animated Series and its DCAU spinoffs. But it is noted here, for possible inclusion in updated volumes.
Aside from Bruce Timm, the only crew from the B:TAS days are background/color designer David Karoll and supervising dialogue director Mark Keatts. (James Tucker joined the DCAU in The New Batman Adventures.) Why not hire the rest of the available crew? No answer has been publicly forthcoming.
But the DCAU could continue with more episodes of Batman Beyond, or Justice League Unlimited, or even a spinoff with Nightwing or a future Justice League Unlimited. And the available talents could be hired for those projects. And they would be produced by DCAU alumni while Timm is involved in his own show.
One can hope.
[1] “Why ‘Batman: The Animated Series’ Creator Bruce Timm Finally Returned to Gotham City With ‘Caped Crusader’; The animator tells TheWrap about developing the show for Max before getting saved by Prime Video.”
