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The Batman

Started by Adrian Bamforth, 26 October, 2005, 08:49:40 PM

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Adrian Bamforth

Just caught this animated version on kids TV yesterday, it was great stuff, beautifully designed and moody, especially the colours. Don't know how new it is but seemed different and better than the last version I saw which was a bit more simplistic design, a little more Art Deco style to this version's Art Nouveau. Seemed like an early episode too since I don't think Wayne knew who The Penguin was.

Cracking stuff anyway, I think it's on all this week.

ADE

Bico

Not bad, but it has to forever live in the shadow of Paul Dini/Bruce Timm's version.  Nice theme by the Edge, too, which they dropped later in favour of a guitary woo-woo montage in the style of the Adam West version (no, really), and then based the show on the best of the bat-movies - Batman and Robin.
And has it been so long since I was a teenager that they've started referring to their generation as 'teeny-boppers' again, or is this new version written by people born in the 1960s?  And what are the chances that ALL Batman's villians (Joker and Penguin included) are top-notch martial artists?  And making Poison Ivy a teenage girl is a bit rum, too.

Dunk!

Nice stylisation, but my main problem with it is as Bear has mentioned the abundance of trained ninjas amongst Batman's foes.

The Joker is more athletic than Nightcrawler, the Penguin's rotund figure is no hindrance to back flips and even Mr Freeze would rather kick off with a lightning flurry of fists and feet, then say use his patented freeze gun.

Very bizarre to watch, but then I suppose it's what teenyboppers want nowadays.


"Trust we"

Byron Virgo

Oh chirst, this show was fucking awful! It's like when they take any good ideas that they had for a series and decide to make them shite for no other reason than they have some evil Machiavellian desire to turn gold into crap.

The character design was really weird, with Batman having this bizarre pointy chin that made him look like Siku's wet dream. The characterisation and voice artists are routinely awful (were they trying to do a Burgess Meredith impression with the Penguin, because that was appallingly bad?). As mentioned before, the Penguin has somehow gained the mastery of kung fu ("something I picked up in the East"), but it's never explained quite how he has the mystical power to completely ignore the laws of physcs and hang in the air like he was in Crouching Tiger Hidden Penguin or something.

Factor in shit dialogue ("This Penguin has claws"), no actual story, casual British stereotypes and an awful theme tune, this was a big piece of stinky rubbish from beginning to end.

Artificial Idiot

Is it me, or does the Riddler look like Maralyn Manson?

the3rdman

Haven't seen any of this but watched the batman vs dracula animated feature length yesterday. That from the same series ?

Eric Plumrose

I like the logo. And the fact they're calling him 'The' Batman. Sounds absolute shite, though.
Not sure if pervert or cheesecake expert.

Buddy

Wot Byron said...

Only seen a few of these.

Quite like the designes but it's just all wrong.

Mr Freeze is no longer the scientist serching for the cure for his misses.

No, he's a common thief who just heppened to srumble into a cyrogenics lab and get metamorphasised into a cold dwelling super fiend who then somehow imprisons a cyro scientist and forces him to invent a supercoldsuit to allow him to carry out his unlawful deeds.

And too much computer giggery pokery.

What was wrong with the Bruce Timm stuff, that was class.

Bico

"What was wrong with the Bruce Timm stuff"

More toys needed to be sold - the old stuff was at the point where tons of it was being sold off to warehouses and such and ending up in pound/dollar shops, meaning not much profit was to be gained from the franchise unless a new toy range was created.  And the bar was raised too high for animation by the Dini/Timm stuff - a newer, less cerebral (and argueably more insulting to kids' intelligence) show was needed to lower the bar again.  The alternative was to create a *better* animated series - and care, effort and attention are not the bywords for American animators as a rule.

'The Batman' would still only have been a 'not bad' show if it was made ten years ago, and if the Dini/Timm series had never been made, but it's 2005 and the Dini/Timm *was* made, so 'The Batman' cannot be judged on its own merits, but rather judged against a benchmark in serialised animation - against which it falls very short.
As I say, it's not bad, but its predecessor was fantastic, and was followed by Justice League, Superman, Batman Beyond - proving the first series wasn't a fluke, but the result of good production.

Buddy

As I say, it's not bad, but its predecessor was fantastic, and was followed by Justice League, Superman, Batman Beyond - proving the first series wasn't a fluke, but the result of good production.

Agreed.

LARF

It's shit.

Completely unauthentic and toy merchandisingly designed.

Pap.

The Monarch

It is crap but i do like the new version of clayface how he got that way is one of the only genuine bits of emotion this cartoon has

nxylas

Saw a bit of one once. It seemed very much aimed at kids, unlike the Timm/Dini version.
AIEEEEEE! It's the...THING from the HELL PLANET!

Adrian Bamforth

Ah well, i guess I'm speaking from an uneducated point of view especially since I don't read Batman. I remember seeing some of the Timm/Dini version and remember it being quite moody and sober though I wasn't really sure about the retro Art Deco style (had a look at a web site for the series and evern the font is art deco). They have to design everything simple for the benefit of the animators though it seemed a bit oversimplified to me, the new one is similarly simple though it seems more angular rather than curvy. I think I saw a Batman Of The Future as well and thought it a bit oversimplified (though entertaining). However, everything I read tells me it was acclaimed.

I watched some old Thundercats a while ago and the thing that struck me was there was no concession at all to keeping the characters simple to draw for the animators: Every frame was basically graphic novel quality, I don't know where they found enough good artists to get it all done.

ADE


DavidXBrunt

Don't forget you can get 28 episodes of the Dini version for ?30 from H.M.V.

One of the reasons given for the decision to relaunch Batman in cartoon form and distance it from the Dini version is that the new head bods of the animation devision think it's easier to work without the shadow of other peoples greatness. The same thing applies to the effective sacking of last of the Dini/Timm staffers.

Oh, and Mr Freeze? The idea of him searching for a cure for his misses, that whole element of his character was thought up by the Din/Burnett/Tim team for Batman Animated before being adopted by the comics so it's perhaps harder for them to include it as a concept as it's taken from their predecessors.