He Is the Night, He Is Vengeance, He Is Batman: The Animated Series

Once you have gotten over just how amazing The Animated Series looks, it is the quality of voice acting which hits you. Kevin Conroy is at this stage as much Batman as Adam West, Michael Keaton, or Christian Bale. For many he is the (The) Batman. Mark Hamill is The Joker and likewise, he has marked this character just as individually as Jack Nicholson or Heath Ledger. Coupled very closely with the fluctuating psychosis of Hamill’s performance is Arleen Sorkin, who plays his lover and sidekick, Harley Quinn. Sorkin’s ability to deliver puns that even Rodney Dangerfield would have passed up while still appearing alternately dangerous and sympathetic, helps to keep the character from sliding too far into comic relief.

The incandescent Adrienne Barbeau rightly plays Catwoman, and it is a disgrace that she was never able to play her in a live action movie. Another horror legend, Jeffrey Combs, plays The Scarecrow in The New Batman Adventures (the successor to the Animated Series), bringing his Lovecraft badge with him. Adam West also guest stars and gives a fine performance in “Beware of the Grey Ghost” as a washed-up actor who once played a superhero on TV.

Although there were silly episodes on occasion, including the disappointing Joker debut, “Christmas With the Joker,” The Animated Series was consistent in quality throughout its run and despite what some say, actually managed to improve upon switching to a more cost-efficient animation style in 1997 for The New Batman Adventures. The tone of the show is certainly one of its great achievements and was in no small part indebted to Tim Burton’s big screen adaptations. Its impact since has been just as significant.

The Animated Series presented adults and children with a Batman cartoon which took itself seriously. In adapting some of the greatest stories in his history and writing new ones, it let lovers of Batman and comic books everywhere know that an adaptation could attract a mainstream audience and remain faithful to the source material. The two-part R’as Al Ghul episode, “The Demon’s Quest,” is a straight translation of the great debut of Batman’s nemesis, written by Denny O’Neil both in the 1970s and again for The Animated Series.

Although “The Laughing Fish,” originally written by that other great Batman innovator of the ‘70s, Steve Englehart, suffers from a stock ending and an inability to show a proper full-on grisly death, it remains a high-quality depiction of an iconic story. The most striking thing throughout The Animated Series, from the voice acting to the writing to the animation, is the respect for the history of the characters and the medium.

Yet, it is not only in beautifully realized versions of classic stories that Timm, Dini, et al. made their mark. The episode most frequently mentioned as one which transformed an existing character is of course, “Heart of Ice.”

Another classic written by Paul Dini, “Heart of Ice” took a peripheral character and gave him a reason to exist. The character: Mr. Freeze, a.k.a. Dr. Victor Fries. The reason: his loving wife, held in stasis while he looks for a cure to her terminal illness. This was in many ways akin to Burton’s inspired re-imagining of The Penguin in Batman Returns. Mr. Freeze was no longer a common goon, but a tragic character, a loving husband, and a brilliant scientist who was pushed too far by a cruel world. “Heart of Ice” won a deserved Emmy for Outstanding Writing in an Animated Series.

Paul Dini was also responsible for creating another of the most influential characters in the show. Harley Quinn has since become a mainstay in the comic books and is seen by some as important a pairing for The Joker as Robin is for Batman. At the start Harley Quinn was comic relief, but soon evolved into something else. The superheroic feminism of “Harley and Ivy” opened up a strange set of questions that could not be easily answered on a children’s TV show. Even when the writers occasionally felt they had to present a sanitized face of The Joker to the impressionable kids and concerned mothers, Harley was clearly in a masochistic relationship with a sadistic murderer.

“Harley and Ivy” is mostly just light fun—although there are some unusually risqué bits of dialogue—but it set the stage for perhaps the greatest original story and script that was produced in the show’s 109 episodes. “Mad Love,” written by Paul Dini, examines the unusual relationship between Harley Quinn and The Joker. Quinn, originally a respected psychiatrist working in Arkham Asylum, is seduced by the Clown Prince of Crime and becomes as deranged as he is.

This episode is a bleak and moving portrait of an abusive relationship and the desperate need for love which will/can never be reciprocated. When The Joker strikes Harley it is shocking, again, especially for a cartoon aired for children. The Joker’s exterior, the same one which seduced Harley, long ago seduced us. In this moment we are shown who he really is: a sick, hateful man. It is this incredible work from which some of the last decade’s most interesting insights into The Joker’s character have come. Brian Azzarello and Lee Barmejo’s Joker, in particular, speaks of this same strange, volatile relationship between the two. This panel, which shows Harley holding a weeping Joker is a reflection of “Mad Love.”

“Mad Love” was one of the last episodes in the show’s run and was a part of The New Batman Adventures, which featured a cleaner and more uniform visual style, a change required by the smaller budget. While it does not quite have the sumptuousness of the earlier seasons, its themes and stories—as evident from “Mad Love”—are even more accomplished. This is partly to do with the move from Fox to WB television. At WB, there were fewer restrictions on content and writers and animators could finally deal with more adult themes, including showing deaths on screen and more physical violence. The Joker would not have been allowed to have been as manic and vicious as he is during “Mad Love” in preceding seasons.

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