I recently watched the first season of the new Batman cartoon that was unceremoniously dumped on Amazon Prime. I've been anticipating (maybe dreading) this show for a long time; I'm a huge fan of Batman: The Animated Series, and the wider world of Timm/Dini/McDuffie DCAU stuff (one day I'll write a bigger post about how much I love Superman TAS in particular) and the idea of Timm returning to a fresh Batman project rather than iterating on the DCAU version, or adapting something has excited me for a while. With caveats.1
Caped Crusader was kicking around as a rumor, then a project in development hell, for a looong time. The deck felt pretty stacked against it, if I'm being real: it was pitched as a "grittier" "darker" Batman story which means basically nothing these days, it was bounced off of HBO/Max/WB/whatever into Amazon's care, and early promo images and leaks gave an impression of a show that was maybe too indebted to the beloved look of B:TAS, filtered through modern digital adult animation budget constraints. There's also the fact that... Look, I love the guy, I think most of his instincts regarding the character are genius, but Bruce Timm has attached his name to some real slop in the decades since the peak of the DCAU, including one of the worst movies I've ever seen.2
So how is Caped Crusader? It's fine. It's pretty good! Spoilers after the read more break:
I'd like to get the most unavoidable observation out of the way. Caped Crusader does not look anywhere close to as good as B:TAS. It doesn't look as good as Justice League Unlimited, either, and that was a show that looked noticeably less lavish than what had come before. It has the unmistakable look of lower budget adult animation. The characters are stiff, meticulously on-model at all times, and shot from a 3/4s view as often as possible. They often look odd against the backgrounds, which are lovingly rendered in the same style as the original B:TAS, which makes me feel less bad about making such a direct comparison. It's a different show made at a different time with a different budget under different circumstances, but every background has the texture of toothy black construction paper. It wants you to think about B:TAS while watching it, and the comparison it invites is unkind.
Thankfully, while the animation itself leaves a lot to be desired, the design work is fantastic. The aforementioned backgrounds are gorgeous, and while they rarely animate in interesting ways, the character designs are lovely. Timm's firing on all cylinders here; it's interesting seeing his take on Batman characters again, without Glenn Murakami's additions.3 I like basically every new design, save for a few minor quibbles with like... I dunno, the Two-Face is a little boring maybe. The more radical changes, like Harley Quinn and Penguin, I loved, but we'll get to that in a bit.
Caped Crusader attempts to split the difference between being a serial drama and delivering episodic villain-of-the-week Batman stories. It is far more successful at the latter than the former. Similar to B:TAS, Caped Crusader presents Gotham as a vaguely historical place. Unlike B:TAS, though, it's lacking fantastical elements. There aren't airships or ray guns or anything like that; there is a sense of unreality still, but that has more to do with the unfortunate lack of focus on Gotham as a setting here. We get the vague sense that this is set in something like the early 1940s, in that there are gangsters and radios and black and white televisions, and sometimes gender discrimination and racial prejudices but also sometimes not4, so it's definitely not the 1940s. I might be mistaken, but I'm fairly sure nobody makes so much as a peep about other countries or the war, or even, I dunno, Metropolis. This Gotham just sort of Is. There's very little sense of where it is in the world and time, or even what the city itself is like.
Batman is just getting started in this story. Caped Crusader cribs pretty heavily from Year One, but it makes some very odd choices about how to present Bruce Wayne's feelings about being Batman. He's mean to Alfred, up until the last episode where he decides to warm up to his butler5 because he remembers that he is very supportive, after all. That's an arc in the most literal sense, I suppose, but their relationship isn't explored enough for this to matter much. And familial drama aside, Batman is kind of stupid whenever it's time for the serial story to matter. It takes Batman several episodes to realize that removing one gang leader agitates other gang leaders into action. He stares at his map and muses about this as if he's solved some great puzzle. This would fly in a children's show, but--again, this is a criticism the show invites!--Caped Crusader's stated intent is to not be a children's show. It's a serious Batman, for adults.
Thankfully, the surrounding cast and Batman's more episodic adventures are really fun. Aside from the first episode--which features a really fun take on The Penguin that's unfortunately stuck in a really boring story--the rogue's gallery really shines! We get a wonderfully creepy Clayface, a delightfully vapid Catwoman,6 and a reinvention of Harley Quinn that I was dreading but actually turns out to be a fascinating inversion of her character. On Batman's side we also get reinvigorated takes on Barbara Gordon, Renee Montoya, Harvey Bullock, and Arnold Flass, which are mostly successful and always at least interesting.7
Harley Quinn is the most interesting of the bunch, I think, because this is of course Timm returning to perhaps his and Dini's biggest single impact on DC. They make movies starring Margot Robbie about Harley Quinn, which is a very funny outcome considering she was originally a one-off gag character designed for one episode. She's also been endlessly reinvented--sometimes well, sometimes poorly, but always in a departure from her original, simple premise: a woman who was a little dumb and a little mean and a little too obsessed with The Joker. Ideas about her character have driven writers all over the place for 20-odd years now. Is she good or bad representation? Should she be a funny and silly henchman, or a violent maniac? Should she have magic powers and achieve godhood? I've grown exhausted of all of the different Harley Quinn takes out there, regardless of their quality honestly. And, look, I love Timm's work, but the last time he put his name on a Harley Quinn project was for the movie I linked earlier. I fully support being a freak about your characters, but that movie sucks real bad and the most it had to say about Quinn was "Nightwing fucked her so good she started peeing" and "her farts smell so bad they have to pull the Batmobile over". I would rather go 3 rounds with Batman in a fistfight than watch that shit again.
So when promo started appearing for this show and we learned that Harley Quinn was going to be in it, and actually in this one her clown persona is serious and scary, I basically gave up any hope of it being worthwhile. Thankfully, I was wrong! I think this version of Quinn is fantastic, although I think it's one of those things where I appreciate how different it is as a one-off and hope that it doesn't become the norm going forward. You see, I think this version of Harley works very well in this specific context: one of the original creators returning to a pop culture lightning rod and working that experience into the story. This version of Harley is a practicing therapist rather than the classic Arkham-employed psychiatrist, and in her first handful of appearances she speaks in BetterHelp pablum. When she treats Bruce Wayne and several other rich patients, another persona appears--that of a Robin Hood of sorts, digging into the secrets of the wealthy. Then, we see her hanging out with Barbara Gordon and Detective Montoya, where she trades this act for another, becoming a mischievous, absent-minded friend.8 When we finally see her in the jester get-up, everything clicks into place: she isn't just stealing from her rich patients, but punishing and humiliating them.
There's a great scene of her walking through her lair inspecting her victims, all of whom she has stuffed into supervillain costumes, all of which correlate to recognizable fetishes: a feet guy, an adult baby lifestyle guy, a guy dressed as a king, etc. It's a bit base, but I think the idea behind it is clever, especially considering that Bruce Wayne/Batman is her next target. The episode is not subtle about drawing a line between fetish roleplay9, Harley Quinn, and Batman. It feels like an acknowledgement, and a shrug. Yes, Harley Quinn is a thinly veiled fetish object. So is Batman. It's layered enough that it manages to feel like a fun counterpoint rather than juvenile defensiveness, and it's also one of the few elements that feels like a properly "adult" part of the story.
This is the kind of thing that can make a legacy revival show worth watching. It's not a slam dunk, but I had a good time and there was enough on display for me to understand why this show was a worthwhile project. There are real ideas about Batman here. There's a great moment between Wayne and Harvey Dent/Two-Face where Dent laments that he's destined for prison because he's killed two people. Bruce, in what sounds like all earnestness, brushes him off. Maybe for some people, he tells Dent. But you're a former DA! The moment passes without being commented on, and sticks out to me as a great bit of character development for an early-career Batman who hasn't quite shaken the idea that people with power are worth something more than those without it. It's a great little moment that reminds me of one of my favorite quotes about the original B:TAS from Timm about The Forgotten, a so-so episode where Bruce Wayne investigates homelessness in Gotham:
Sean Derek was big on doing shows with social messages. And my big problem with message shows, is that you can't solve the world's problems in a half hour cartoon. If you raise the issue of homelessness, what can you do? It makes the [episode] look very exploitive, because you're just using the problem as an exotic background. You can't discuss the problem on any meaningful level in a 22-minute action cartoon. So I put in the dream sequence with Bruce in the barracks where these multitudes of people are looking to Bruce for a handout, and he doesn't have enough money for them all, and they're surrounding him and suffocating him. It's not enough for him to put a band-aid on the problem at the end, by offering the two guys a job. It just doesn't work.
If this show gets more seasons, I hope we see more moments like this exploring who Batman is and what he believes. Just like the Harley Quinn inversion, there's a lot of room to explore the discussion around the character--and Timm's own contributions to the character--in the decades since.
1There are some very bad episodes of the DCAU.
2Do not watch this movie. Other people were involved, of course, but Bruce Timm's name was heavily invoked for the marketing of this and it is ostensibly part of the timeline, which is maddening to think about.
3For the record I think Murakami was a welcome addition to the DCAU art team. So many people complain about the art style evolution in the New Batman Adventures seasons, but I think some of the most visually stunning episodes are from that era.
4Out of all of the elements of the 1940s setting that feel weak, this is the most damning one. Caped Crusader has a really diverse cast, and there are allusions to racial tensions and gender discrimination, but they are quarantined in a handful of very short, rather vague scenes. Most damning of all, Batman and/or Bruce are never confronted with these issues, and is spared having to weigh in on them. It makes the choice of setting feel like nothing more than window dressing. It's a real shame, and it's embarrassing to compare it to the DCAU where great writers like Dwayne McDuffie were able to confidently discuss social topics in shows for children.
5Here's a thought: if Bruce is the last remaining member of the Wayne family, is Alfred actually a valet, not a butler?
6I had to cut things off somewhere but I do adore this version of Catwoman/Selina Kyle. It's so funny to make a character like this more vapid and less of a thief with a heart of gold, and the performance is delightful.
7Bullock and Flass make for an excellent loser buddy-cop duo. They're both corrupt, but Bullock is corrupt and lazy and Flass is corrupt and ambitious. Their bickering is great fun.
8Worth noting here: Harley Quinn is explicitly gay and so is Renee Montoya. They share a big kiss right on screen, which is great--I was worried they'd have to keep it subtler--and even some interesting drama between Barbara, Quinn, and Montoya. Quinn calls Barbara on a payphone to confirm she's still alive, and more often than not these characters are presented as a trio. Harley Quinn running evil mind games on what might be her lesbian triad is such a fun idea it's enough to make me want a season 2.
9Not for nothing but there is a very unsubtle gag where Harley Quinn suggests "trying roleplay" to Barbara Gordon and Renee Montoya
