Just when we thought the caped crusader’s TV time was done, we get…Batman: Caped Crusader. It’s a return to animation for Batman and the return of Bruce Timm. That should be a good sign except this is the guy who added in Batgirl and Batman hooking up because he has a weird obsession with them dating, and let’s not forget how people who weren’t me got excited for Russell T. Davies returning to Doctor Who and what we ended up with. He also brought J.J. Abrams, who started the decline of Disney Star Wars, and Matt Reeves, who had his own take on Batman I don’t really care for.
Still, a teaser for the Amazon Prime series was dropped that claimed it was the new intro for the new show. Intros are a dying art, so it’s nice to see the new Batman brought it along, which means I have a new entry in this series. Admittedly it looks pretty cool. Too bad it’s attached to this show.
And Batman still walks like he’s stiff as a board.
In the DCAU, Bruce Timm developed a retro gothic style for Gotham City, which he tweaked for the other four shows he worked on. This is a return to that but with an otherwise new art style, less influenced by Fleischer Studios Superman shorts than before. I do kind of like it, and the visual tone matches what few teaser clips have dropped thus far.
Timm and Co are going for a more adult audience, because goodness knows we haven’t seen that in every iteration since Beware The Batman that isn’t Batwheels in both live-action and direct-to-video animation. Although somebody needs to tell YouTube so they can stop treating it like a kids show just because it’s animated. My Adventures With Superman was intended to be the kids show, not this one! I can certainly see it…because nothing interesting happens in this intro! In a kids show you’d see some action besides Batman doing the gargoyle bit, hanging one dude over a railing, and slowly walking a few feet, with some gangsters shooting at who knows what. For all I know they’re at a carnival shooting gallery.
The theme sounds like background music rather than anything to get you excited for what’s coming, but it otherwises sounds good and sets the mood. It’s just once you get past the art style, there isn’t a whole lot here. Between that and all the alterations, it’s pretty much what The Rings Of Power has led us to expect from an Amazon Prime production. At least they’re consistent. Consistently failing, but consistent.
Said alterations include things like divorcing Harley Quinn, who’s Asian now because, from the Joker and missing Paul Dini’s whole point of creating her. There’s also a female Penguin, Oswalda Cobblepot. Is Oswalda even a really name? Spell check doesn’t seem to think so. If memory serves, Two-Face’s scarring is on the wrong side. Who knows what else they’ve messed up if they can’t even get the Penguin right! So if this was supposed to get me interested in this show, it kind of failed. Thus the whole point of the intro is lost to me here.
Well, there’s always Batwheels. Wait, it’s going to Netflix? Well…crap!
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