Deep Freeze

[The Laughing Fish]

I watched the second Mr Freeze-centric episode of BTAS a few weeks ago for the first time in years, and I've been reading about the parallels between the main villain Grant Walker and Walt Disney.

In Deep Freeze, Grant Walker is a theme park entrepreneur who wanted to be cryogenically frozen and become as strong as Mr Freeze, so he could live for practically eternity and fulfill his vision of ridding the world from chaos and disorder. In the end, his body is frozen and trapped underwater, sinking deep below the destroyed remains of his theme park. In real life, there was a crazy myth that Walt Disney had been cryogenically frozen and buried underneath the Pirates of the Carribean ride at Disneyland.

https://www.biography.com/news/walt-disney-frozen-after-death-myth

Despite being debunked by family members, there had been rumours about Disney showing interest in the idea of cryogenics and was afraid of dying, like Walker was in Deep Freeze. Even Walker's theme park sanctuary Oceania seems to be inspired by Disney's Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT) - a concept by Disney to develop his vision of an ideal society, but it never came to fruition.

In hindsight, this is a pretty crazy episode and I believe the only reason it was created is because the showrunners wanted to do a twisted parody of Walt Disney. In terms of continuity, Bruce Timm appears to have either forgotten or ignored this episode, because he went on record insisting Nora Fries had been originally killed off in Heart of Ice. Not only does she appear alive but comatose in Deep Freeze, Timm himself was credited for co-creating the story with Paul Dini!

I think it's a decent episode, but it doesn't top Heart of Ice. In the grand scheme of things, it ties in well with SubZero, in spite of what Timm would've preferred otherwise.