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2024 brought us back to Gotham City as drawn by Bruce Timm with “Batman: Caped Crusader.” Timm was co-creator of the much-beloved “Batman: The Animated Series” back in the 1990s. “Caped Crusader” has the same art style and banks on nostalgia for “The Animated Series,” but it’s not a sequel, a prequel, or otherwise connected to that show at all.
“Batman: The Animated Series” modeled its Gotham City on the 1930s, from the cars, clothes, and architecture, but it was officially set in the present day despite the timeless feel. “Batman: Caped Crusader” goes one step further and is literally, not just spiritually, set in the 1940s. The overlapping characters also have different designs; Batman’s costume looks more like the “Golden Age of Comics” suit (longer ears, smaller and purple gloves, etc.) and less like “Bronze Age” one (blue highlights, yellow oval Bat-symbol, etc.) as he did in “Batman: The Animated Series.” This Caped Crusader has a new voice too (Hamish Linklater taking over from the late Kevin Conroy).
It may not be surprising to hear that the earliest germ of the idea that became “Batman: Caped Crusader” was to simply revive “Batman: The Animated Series.” Speaking to the Wrap in August, Timm recounted Warner Bros. approaching him: “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.”
Then Timm ruminated on the idea with producer James Tucker and they came to a pitch that did interest him. The original production bible for “Batman: The Animated Series” naturally had a lot of unused concepts. One of them was Batman as a grim loner anti-hero, “more like the Shadow or the Avenger,” in Timm’s words. When the series went into production, “it became something different.”
While no-one will confuse Conroy’s Batman for Adam West’s, “The Animated Series” did originally air on Fox Kids. For every Gothic film noir-inspired episode of “Batman,” there were goofy ones too: “I’ve Got Batman in My Basement,” “Moon of the Wolf,” “The Terrible Trio,” etc.
“Batman: Caped Crusader” would be exempt from that.
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