Batman Beyond
I love Batman, I love watching cartoons, so any Batman cartoon is easily going to make my list of things people need to watch. If you haven’t watched it yet, the animated series Batman Beyond is something you need to watch (not to be confused with Batman The Animated Series which is even more awesome). Set roughly 30 years in the future, Bruce Wayne is a retired cranky old man, and there is a new Batman in town.
Lets put this review in the realm of SUPER not current (debuted 14 years ago), but still something that you need to watch. I regularly get cranky and a little bit neck beardy about movies and tv shows that don’t follow the source materials, but Batman Beyond took a departure from the comics and set itself in a pretty significant jump in the future – one where the characters we know and are familiar with are still in the picture, but loooong after their crime fighting days are over.
The series starts with Batman laboriously fighting some street thugs and just getting beat. Literally. He was losing that fight, and he had to cross a line that he swore he would never do, which was to threaten to shoot them with a gun. Batman broke, and realized that the cape needed to be hung up for good. Fastforward another twenty years, and teen Terry McGinnis through a series of unfortunate events finds the Batcave, the same evening that his father is murdered. Insert bickering and a stolen Bat suit, Terry dons the mantle of Batman to avenge his father, and eventually comes to an understanding with Bruce Wayne, and becomes to protector of NeoGotham (because every future city needs to be named NEO-insertcitynamehere).
Neo-Gotham is a crazy world that seems to have grown into the future we all hoped the Jetson’s would bring us (flying cars, amazing interactive holograms, and where all the buildings are hundreds of stories tall), combined with the fear of DOOOOOM that the villains of the Batman universe could provide (cult following of the Joker, the chemical concoction of Bane made into a stick on patch, and worse).
What i’m least excited about in this series is instead of having the fun banter of Bruce Wayne pretending to be a playboy millionaire, we have to watch Terry McGinnis try to deal with being Batman, keeping a secret identity (which he FAILS, at some frequency), all while being a highschool student. It just doesn’t carry the same gravitas, you know? The new Batman has his own villains, but I just have a hard time feeling the same sort of soul crushing defeat that waves of poor souls mugging anyone with a purse because their city is dark and that is all they know to do, vs. a bunch of kids dressed up as joker posse circa Arkham City.
That said, the highschool drama vs. playboy philanthropist millionaire isn’t enough to dissuade me from this show. The bar I hold for comics turned tv or movies is still met here – you don’t really have to know anything about the series to enjoy this animated series. Those of us who are somewhat familiar will enjoy some of the cracks that Commissioner Barbara Gordon makes at both Terry and Bruce, as well as old villains and friends come to new life in this series: Joker, Ra’s al Ghul (where I giggled like a school girl when Talia corrects Terry for calling him “Raz”), Superman, and Mr. Freeze. There are also new versions of the Royal Flush Gang that include an obligatory Terry / villain love interest / conflict, as well as an interesting twist on the Cobra gang and where they end up in 30 years from now.
At the heart of this series, really is Bruce Wayne. My heart aches watching him putter around the Batcave looking VERY old on a cane, with no Alfred and only a pretty awesome dog to keep him company. While we’re all happy to see a Batman at any time in Gotham (Neo or otherwise), it has always made it a little sad when it wasn’t Bruce Wayne. I stand by my suggestion that you need to watch all 3 seasons of this series, as well as the series finale that was actually aired as part of a Justice League Unlimited episode that gives a 30 minute bombshell of background on characters you thought you knew from both series.
So on the merits of this series having great animation and voice acting (you can never go wrong with Kevin Conroy), includes BATMAN, is easy to understand without knowing the comic source material, with the only distraction of silly highschool drama, I happily give this series 4 out of 5 stars. (I personally shout this series from the mountain tops that everyone should watch it, but I’m trying to tamper my love of Batman for what others might think of the show!) Enjoy, and please comment below to let me know if you think of other comicbook animated series I might enjoy or may have missed!
