Robin in B:TAS

[The Laughing Fish]

It might not have been what the showrunners wanted, but I'm glad they had an older Dick Grayson in BTAS. If he had been a child, they'd have to drastically rewrite episodes like Robin's Reckoning and Fear of Victory, and they would've been worse off.

For example, in part one of Robin's Reckoning, there's a sense of poetry between the flashback of Bruce consoling a young Dick once he adopts him, and then cutting over to a grown up Robin yelling "You deceived me!" once he learns Batman is going after Tony Zucco by himself. You can say once Robin beats up and captures Zucco at the end of part two, it allowed him to move on, and perhaps it helped him regain some sanity with living two lives as Dick and the crimefighter, without the latter consuming him. Unlike Bruce, who never got the chance to find his parents' murderer, and he became rather cold and too obsessed with the mission that he alienated Dick. Which led to him relinquishing the Robin mask after their falling out in TNBA.

The Fear of Victory episode wouldn't have worked too well if Dick wasn't a college student and didn't suffer the effects of Scarecrow's poisoning. If you want to overthink it, you might say that episode could've been an allegory to choking in sports, and Dick eventually concentrated hard enough to beat his fears and use his acrobatic skills to catch the falling chemical vial, as it cuts between the Gotham football team scoring the winning touchdown.

[The Laughing Fish]

It was a happy accident that we ended up with a college-aged Robin due to concerns over child endangerment. There's more to explore when it comes to this age; as a child, Dick's whole life revolved around being Robin, but now he's got to worry about becoming his own man. This all comes full circle with Nightwing a few years later.

That was no accident, bro. Fox Kids was notoriously skittish about certain things. Child endangerment was one of them.

The showrunners say they wanted Dick to be a "bratty young Spider-Man". Something like Tim was in TNBA. But Fox didn't want anything to do with that so the showrunners reimagined Dick as a college student and wrote him out of most episodes. It's no accident that Batman never intentionally put young Dick Grayson in harm's way in the Robin's Reckoning episodes.

But when the show moved to WB, those censors were a lot more chill about certain things. So the TNBA crew were able to write Tim more or less the same way they originally wanted to write Dick Grayson. They were also able to do other stuff like use Firefly.

I'm revisiting this again because I found a drawing by Bruce Timm that hinted nine things that were prohibited on the show. If you look at the list upside down, child endangerment is #7.



In Robin's Reckoning Part 2, the young Dick Grayson put himself in harm's way going after Tony Zucco, but Batman was never shown in a questionable light. He was always responsible for looking after the boy's wellbeing, such as looking for him up in the sky in the Batwing and letting go of Zucco to save Dick when he was drowning in the river. At the end of the flashback, it's implied Batman helps Dick to become his sidekick once he reveals his true identity as well as his permanent guardian.

BTAS really had to tread the line carefully when it came to dark subject matter, didn't it? We see a lot of gunfire in the show, but we never saw anybody getting wounded, they obviously couldn't allow any sort of drugs or nudity on the show, and danger involving children would sometimes be resolved very conveniently. No matter how creepy the theme might be.

I was rewatching a couple of episodes recently - Be a Clown and See No Evil - and you can tell the showrunners had to carefully not to depict the kids caught in the crossfire so traumatically. For example, in Be a Clown, Jordan Hill befriended the Joker wearing a disguise as a birthday clown, and is taken hostage on a rollercoaster ride in the last five minutes of the episode. But even then, Batman's rescue left the kid no worse for wear and he begun to reconcile with his dad Hamilton. In See No Evil , the creepy Floyd Ventress tricks his daughter and tries to kidnap her, but she quickly runs back home as soon as Batman comes to the rescue. And when I say she runs back home, she just runs across the street to unite with her mother. Very simple.

[thecolorsblend]

Indeed. There were a lot of restrictions with BTAS. It's hard to even recognize most of them since the showrunners did such a good job covering most of them up.

But if you watch MOTP, you'll see Batman punch people in the face without an annoying all-white "flash frame". Also, he suffers real injuries and bleeds from multiple wounds while running from the police. And, of course, he and Andrea... brown chicken, brown cow. Absolutely none of that would've been permitted by Fox Kids.

Honestly, I think showing all these villains fire guns that never seem to hit their mark sends a far more dangerous message to children than anything else. But it doesn't really matter what we think, I suppose.

[The Laughing Fish]

MOTP had carte blanche, without a doubt. That, and Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker shows the Joker at his most dangerous and lethal yet. As much as I love BTAS, you can tell the Joker was watered down to keep it as kid friendly as possible. If the The Laughing Fish was an animated movie - all of the victims who were poisoned with Joker Venom would've laughed themselves to death like in the Steve Englehart comic, instead of Batman saving them with the antidote in the show.

It's funny how throughout the 90s we see live action Batman movies becoming more lighthearted under Warner's film department, but the DC animation was progressively getting darker under WB Animation. When Batman on film went on hiatus since B&R, DC animation was becoming more violent as years went by. Joker's torture of Tim Drake in BB:ROTJ, Aquaman forced to dismember his own hand to save himself and his infant son from a death trap in JL, Darkseid murdering Dan Turpin in STAS and Superman and Darkseid fighting each other to the death in JL. None way this stuff could ever happen during the Fox Kids era.

[The Laughing Fish]

I found this really good interview with Paul Dini on the Starburst Magazine website. While on the subject of Batman and Nightwing's uneasy relationship in TNBA, he was asked about Jason Todd.

As alluded to there, you brought in the Tim Drake version of Robin as Dick Grayson transitioned to Nightwing. Was there ever any talk at any point of including Jason Todd in the series?

Not really. Where we were at the time, I don't know if the crew liked Jason Todd all that much. I think we looked upon him as the Robin that didn't work out too well when they did that whole Death in the Family thing in 1988. When we did The Animated Series in '92, Jason kind of spoke to us as the Robin who didn't work out and who got himself killed, so let's not do him. So Tim came along, and there were elements of Jason. They hadn't done the redo on Jason yet or figured out the Red Hood. We looked at Jason, he's a circus performer also, and Dick Grayson done over again with a different name. So when Tim came along, we said, "Let's do Tim instead. He seems to be brighter, younger, a more engaging character." It just seemed to work out better for us.

Source: https://www.starburstmagazine.com/features/paul-dini-batman-animated-series

Considering the fans voted for Jason getting killed off in A Death in the Family, I believe it's safe to say he was never liked very much to begin with. 

Let's face it, even if the writers and producers wanted to use Jason, they wouldn't be able to do his story any justice because of censorship. Jason's demise is too brutal to adapt for a Saturday morning cartoon show.

Still, I suppose ADITF did serve some inspiration for Joker's torturing of the Tim Drake Robin in BB:ROTJ. Albeit not quite as deadly as Jason's torture. But as Commissioner Barbara Gordon says in the movie, the Joker appeared triumphant as the devastation he left behind broke up the Bat family, despite his death.

[The Laughing Fish]

I found a Starburst Magazine interview with Loren Lester, published four years ago.

https://www.starburstmagazine.com/features/loren-lester-batman-complete-animated-series

Here is what he says about his personal history with Batman and Robin during childhood:

I had a real passion for the Batman series of the '60s. I was a very little child. Now I look at it and I see that it's a spoof, it's funny. As a kid, I took it very seriously. It would play on Tuesday and Wednesday, and Tuesday they'd leave a cliff-hanger. Tuesday, I'd say, "Oh my god, Batman and Robin are going to die! They won't be back on Wednesday!" Of course, they would be. Everyone else who was older was just, "Of course they're going to be back!" But to me, it was very, very serious. I had every possibly piece of memorabilia I could find. I had everything you could possibly get; the utility belt, there's the Batman you threw up in the air and he'd land with a parachute. So I was a huge Batman fan. I wasn't necessarily a big fan of Robin. I didn't hate Robin or anything, but I was a Batman fan. So, when the opportunity came for me to audition for this, I was pretty excited about it. "Oh wow, I have the opportunity to be the voice of Robin!" I think only one other person at that point had been the voice of Robin, so it was an opportunity to kind of recreate that voice.

As somebody who used to watch the Adam West TV show as a toddler back in the day, I can relate to what Lester says here. It's easy to make fun of the show now with the goofiness and formulaic writing, but as kids who took the show seriously, it was very easy to think "this is the end", and not realise the next episode is coming.

How Robin was adapted in BTAS:

For those who were only familiar with Robin from the Adam West and Burt Ward TV show, they often saw Robin as a joke character. In that regard, Batman: The Animated Series had such an important role in making people realise just how much of a fascinating character Dick Grayson is.

What they did was very smart. They started the Robin character in college, so that he was already older, he wasn't this naïve kid. He was at a crossroads. He's still young and naïve in some ways, but ready to transition. Later on, when they transitioned him to Nightwing, it was perfect because he was already on his way to getting there when they started him as Robin. By the time they got to Nightwing, he was ready for that. Interestingly enough, when I do these conventions and panels, I learn things that I never ever knew that were going on. Bruce [Timm] and Eric [Radomski] said they had no plans when they started the show of having Nightwing, which was interesting because it seemed like they were headed in that direction. Maybe it was subliminal or something, that they knew they wanted to go in that direction. And it was great, because he became his own man, he became his own superhero, and he was important as opposed to just being a sidekick.

With BTAS, Dick Grayson didn't turn up straight away, instead being introduced later down the line. Do you know what the thought was behind that?

What happened was I did the pilot episode. The original concept was Robin was going to be there from the beginning, but then they decided they wanted it to be a darker show, they wanted it to be like that first Batman movie with Michael Keaton. They wanted him to be a loner, very dark, and they drew the cells on dark paper, and the music was very dark and foreboding. They wanted a dark show, and they didn't want it to be lightened up by the presence of Robin. After however many episodes it was, FOX Kids said, "Hey, where's Robin? You can't have Batman without Robin." They started to put me in a few episodes, then they did this two-part episode called Robin's Reckoning, which was a turning point. After they wrote that and after we recorded it, they saw that Robin was a really important part of the story. Things changed and Robin became a really important part of the show. That was an episode that won an Emmy, which was very nice. That was a great two-part story. I remember getting those scripts and thinking, "Wow, he's really going to become part of the show."

Audiences were instantly in love with BTAS, but, as someone who was involved in the series, when did you realise you were on to something truly special?

Remember, we record the voice first and then they animate to the voice. So, we didn't see anything for six months to a year after we recorded it. Only then when we came back in for ADR, where we have to replace some of the dialogue, did we say, "Oh wow, this is really different." It wasn't a cartoon, it was truly a cinematic experience. That's what Bruce Timm and Alan Burnett and all of these people, they were creating a cinematic experience like a movie not like a cartoon. It was at that point, after we'd recorded many, many episodes, that we started to see the show being completed. There was a richness and a subtlety. Cartoons aren't very subtle, but you think about Robin's Reckoning, one of my favourite moments is that you don't see the death of Dick Grayson's parents. You see a rope swing out of frame and then swing back broken. You know exactly what's happened, and the drama of it is just as powerful, it not more powerful, than if you'd seen them go splat.

Moments like that were just so cleverly constructed, covering some rather serious topics and dark moments but still managing to work within the restrictions of a kids cartoon show.

They were up against restrictions. No one ever died in that series, they couldn't show blood. It's just like in the golden age of Hollywood they couldn't show sex or real violence. They could show a guy getting shot and dying, but the violence that we're used to now, they couldn't show any of that. But they created fantastic atmospheres, and that's what this show did – it created a fantastic atmosphere even under the restrictions.

If there is one good thing I can take from the censorship, it forced the showrunners to become even more creative in how to convey such emotion within their own storytelling. If the show was aimed at adults, I don't think episodes such as Robin's Reckoning would've turned out as good as they are.

On Nightwing and TNBA:

When we see Dick become Nightwing in The New Batman Adventures, was that still like putting on a familiar old slipper, or did you approach it a little differently?

In a way, but also the scripts for my character were much richer. When I got those scripts, there was so much more for me to sink my teeth into as an actor. It was very exciting coming back and seeing those scripts. At the time, and I don't know if it's still the case, but there was a policy where when you reach a certain number of episodes for syndication, you stop making the show and make a new show. Which is too bad, as I think there was a big audience then, and there's a big audience now for it. The fans didn't want it to end, we were hugely popular, yet they still ended the show because they felt that they had enough for syndication. It's not like we jumped the shark – we didn't have enough time to jump the shark!

The quality was definitely still there in The New Batman Adventures...

My favourite one from The New Batman Adventures was Old Wounds. I got to play both characters; I got to play Robin because they did a flashback, and then in the present I got to play Nightwing. They told the whole backstory of how Robin fell out with Batman and his conflicted moralities. He wasn't going to put up with that anymore, so he punched Batman and he left to become his own man. That was a pretty thrilling episode from The New Adventures. We can see it again, they just need to pull the trigger.

I bet the policy to end TNBA after reaching a certain number of episodes had to do with plans in producing the Justice League and Batman Beyond cartoons.

[thecolorsblend]

Not to split hairs, but...

Audiences were instantly in love with BTAS

That's... not how I remember things going.

Wide audiences and critics expected BTAS to be like the Filmation cartoon. The series premiered in 1992 and I'm pretty sure it was months later, well into 1993, before anybody realized how unique and well-crafted BTAS was. It was a slow burn realization among critics and audiences that BTAS something special.

When Mask Of The Phantasm finally came out, the more mature tone surprised absolutely nobody. I think that's a big reason why MOTP is so highly regarded today, in fact. I think MOTP would've been a lot more controversial if people hadn't been watching the show for over a year by the time the movie came out.

[The Laughing Fish]

I never knew how that Akira bike slide made such an impact on artists that it was paid homage to in so many works. Robin's Reckoning Part I imitated it during the scene when Robin tracked down Tony Zucco.





Even the Batman '89 comics paid homage to it, when the Drake Winston Robin came to Batman's rescue, IIRC.