[GRUNTING]
[GASPS]
[EXHALES]
This moment.
This moment right here, this is what sets the DC Animated
Universe apart from almost every adaptation of the beloved DC
Comics characters, or really any other superhero adaptation.
If you're unfamiliar, this is a scene from the pilot episode
of Batman Beyond.
This sequel television show takes place
in Gotham 50 years of the events of Batman--
The Animated Series.
It shows an old, haggard Bruce Wayne
using a technologically advanced batsuit in order
to stop criminals.
And yet his body just isn't up to the challenge.
Despite having a heart attack, he's
attempting to do the right thing.
But in doing so, he's forced to cross the one line
that he swore he never would.
He picks up a gun.
This moment is brilliant character writing.
Batman ends the same way he began--
with a, well, you already know.
See, guns are antithetical to Bruce Wayne.
His monastic devotion to protecting the innocent
from the evils of the night have evolved
to the point where he has a strict moral code,
a visual iconography, and only two real lines he won't cross--
no killing, no guns.
And all of that is broken in this moment.
And we the audience know it instantly.
This is something none of the live-action versions of Batman
have ever truly gotten correct.
But also none of those adaptations that Bruce Timm,
Eric Radomski, Stan Berkowitz, and Paul Dini at the helm.
But we'll get back to that.
If you're unaware, the DC Animated Universe
is a series of shows and films interconnected
in a shared continuity.
Sounds like a familiar concept now, but in the '90s,
it was unique.
The DCAU started on September 5, 1992,
with the premiere of Batman--
The Animated Series.
Believe it or not, it lasted all the way up until May 13, 2006,
with the cancellation of Justice League--
Unlimited.
If you're not familiar with the inner workings
of that timeline, it's pretty simple.
The Animated Series, Superman--
The Animated Series, The New Adventures
of Batman and Robin, Batman Beyond, Zeta Project,
Static Shock, Justice League, and Justice League--
Unlimited.
All there.
It also included the feature films, Mask of the Phantasm,
Batman and Mr. Freeze--
Sub-Zero, Mystery of the Batwoman, Superman--
Brainiac Attacks, and Batman Beyond--
Return of the Joker.
If that's a lot to remember, don't worry, you don't need to.
This interconnected tapestry of films and shows
produced one of the most intricate and well-crafted
superhero universes ever put to screen.
And it did it a solid decade before the idea
of producing interconnected cinematic universe
was a fashionable thought.
Because all this reminds you of something, doesn't it?
Yeah.
The DCAU kind of feels like the MCU or the Arrowverse,
but also distinctly doesn't feel like the DCEU.
Simply put, the DCAU should have been
the blueprint for both the MCU, but more importantly, the DCEU.
What makes it even more frustrating
is that Warner Bros.
easily could have hired the minds
behind the Animated Universe to shepherd DC Cinematic
Universe into existence to help mold, well, what they've
already molded in the past.
They just chose not to.
So let's delve a little deeper.
Let's examine what is so great about the DCAU, what common
attributes that it shares with the MCU and the DCEU,
and also where it can all go wrong.
Let's see what DC's Cinematic Universe maybe
should have done differently.
OK.
So if you're familiar with the history of comics,
you know that both the Marvel and DC Universe
were constructed bit by bit organically.
Action Comics No.
1 and Detective Comics No.
27 didn't originally take place in the same worlds.
And we're going to get a little granular here, so bear with me.
After National Publications saw what was working,
they leaned more into the idea of caped characters
and eventually put all of their caped characters
together on a team.
Same thing with Marvel.
Stan and Jack had been creating comics for Timely, a.k.a.
Marvel, for a long time prior to 1962's Fantastic Four No.
1.
But after they started working on that project,
the success beget more success.
And the Marvel universe ballooned out from there.
So lets smash-cut 30-ish years or so later, and the DCAU
literally functioned the same.
There was no plan to make a universe out
of Batman, the animated show.
It was just so successful, that new and interesting
opportunities to tell stories kept popping up,
and the creators took advantage of them.
The MCU was built much the same way.
The idea of an interconnected tapestry of franchises
began for Marvel after former Toy Biz
exec, and low-key mastermind behind most
of the Marvel subsequent film and television adaptations,
procured the rights to Iron Man.
Marvel decided to launch a film studio,
adapting their own intellectual property into feature films,
off the backs the success of Fox's X-Men series and Sony's
Spider-Man franchises-- you know, the Sam Raimi ones.
And they followed through.
The first two outings for the fledgling Cinematic Universe
would be in the summer of '08.
Iron Man with RDJ and The Hulk with Edward Norton.
Both these films were solid origin films.
They were intended to set the characters up
for continuing adventures.
And in one case, they succeeded.
After the resounding success of Iron Man
and the weird pseudo-not-failure of Hulk,
Marvel Studios announced on May 5, 2008,
a plan to produce a Captain America
movie, a Thor movie, Iron Man 2, all of which
would interconnect and lead up to an Avengers film, which
if you look at it, is very similar to the structure
of the DCAU, which, again, a decade earlier.
Start with individual pieces, organically grow them,
and let them become something bigger like,
well, Justice League--
Unlimited.
Across the street at Warner Bros.
However, DC Comics-- things were a bit rocky.
After the undisputed success of the MCU,
WB decided that they needed their own Cinematic Universe
off the ground.
However, even though like they were behind the eight ball,
they didn't follow the model that both the DCAU had
pioneered and didn't want to appear
as they were mimicking the MCU.
So instead, they took the opposite approach.
Big team movies, then spin-offs out of it.
The launchpad film was going to be called, Justice League--
Mortal.
That's right, the first DC Universe film
was going to be called, Justice League--
Mortal.
It would've depicted the titular big seven coming together
to stop fast-food tycoon and mind control enthusiast Maxwell
Lord from taking over the Earth.
Then an interconnected web of solo superhero outings
would have spun out of that film.
So the inverse of the way this should work.
The project was going to be directed by Mad Max's George
Miller.
However, despite getting pretty far along in pre-production
and having a whole film cast, and being
ready to shoot in Australia, the project
was shelved at the last minute due to the financial crisis.
DC then pivoted to attempt to follow the Marvel model.
Well, things don't always go as planned.
The idea was a solo Superman film.
The film would share the title with a long and gestation
sequel to Bryan Singer's Superman Returns,
but would be helmed by Zack Snyder.
The film ended up coming out.
It was a modest success at the box office,
but it was by no means a runaway smash-hit on the level
of any of the MCU films.
As such, WB executives did what executives do best and panicked
and decided they needed to pull out the big guns immediately.
They didn't have time to wait for establishing
all the solo characters in their own films and, you know,
building character.
They needed to get to the highly recognizable
intellectual property front and center.
This would lead to rushed and poorly conceived
versions of Batman v. Superman--
Dawn of Justice, which is a loose adaptation of both
The Dark Knight Returns and Death
of Superman, a heavily re-edited Suicide
Squad, and, well, you know, now Justice League.
We all know what happened there.
It would eventually go on to produce Aquaman, Shazam!,
Wonder Woman and Birds of Prey.
So now that we have an overview of the MCU contrasted
against the constantly readjusting DCEU, let's
break down why Warner didn't follow the template of what
they had already accomplished literally
over the past 15 years prior.
Remember this, the Batman holding the gun moment?
That moment tells you everything you need to know about Batman.
And it shows you him at the end of his arc, which
is a key distinction, because Batman Beyond is
about passing on the mantle to the next generation.
Everything Bruce Timm, Eric Radomski, and the other DCAU
stalwarts did took these key details
as the starting points for these characters,
something the MCU has in spades.
And to be clear, every MCU movie isn't great.
The MCU in general isn't necessarily amazing.
But structurally speaking, it's hard to argue
that the MCU didn't get something right.
Do I love every MCU film?
Not even close.
But what I do know is that they understood what it
meant to create their universe.
Sometimes their jokey banter makes
these characters feel kind of samie,
but underneath all of that, they get
what makes the various characters tick
on a bone-deep level, again for the most part.
Now look at the way Eric Radomski constructed
the look and feel of Batman--
The Animated Series.
All the backgrounds of the show were drawn on black paper,
so that it felt like the shadows were the primary attribute
Gotham had.
That aesthetic choice flows directly
from the character of Bruce Wayne.
The fact that the governing style
was Dark Deco, meaning Gothic art deco,
also comes from Batman's history.
He's a character that's been around forever
and, yet, he's timeless.
Just like the aesthetic of the show.
There's computers and phones, and, yet, zeppelins
and old-timey radios.
The world of the show is built around Batman.
The show comes from his character.
Same thing from the Superman show.
It's bold and bright, and it's reminiscent of the Fleischer
brother cartoons, but still contemporary and modern.
It's timeless and iconic.
Tim Daly, the voice of Superman in the show,
is so perfectly cast, that an entire generation of people
hear him in their head when they read Superman comics.
They didn't try to make Superman grim or morally gray.
They didn't try to update him for the '90s.
They made him a perfect distillation of everything
that had worked before.
So let's juxtapose that with Man of Steel.
And it doesn't really learn those lessons, does it?
Let's look at another reasonable distillation of this--
MCU Cap versus DCEU Superman.
They are two sides of the same coin.
Warners was concerned that Superman would appear hokey
or out of step with the times.
So they let Snyder run with a darker, more
conflicted Superman in Man of Steel.
In many ways, they have lost confidence
in their ability of their man out of time
to connect with modern audiences,
because his morality was something
from a bygone era in their opinion, which
is exactly what Marvel chose to do with Steve Rogers
and people loved.
That's what they keyed in with Steve Rogers.
That's what made Captain America work.
Understanding the tonality of your character
and building that tonality from inside the character,
not crashing that tonality onto them.
Ultimately, the fact that Dwayne McDuffie, Bruce Timm,
Stan Berkowitz, and Paul Dini were literally
employees of Warner while all this was going on
is exceedingly frustrating.
Because this tonality is something
they understood down to their core.
And this tonality is exactly what
has driven separation between DC movies and Marvel movies,
and arguably exactly what has made the Marvel movies more
successful than the DC movies.
Tonal consistency into understanding.
The right people for the job were right there even,
if they had just been the executive producers guiding
things along the way.
They certainly understood these characters better than,
well, maybe Zack Snyder.
And that's not a shot at Zack Snyder.
He's an incredible visual filmmaker.
But being a good filmmaker does not
give you the expertise that these men who
build these worlds, these iconic worlds, had.
So why weren't they involved?
Well, a few reasons-- politics, money, and vision
being the primary ones.
However, the more important aspect of this
is that they weren't ever even in the conversation.
Because animation isn't thought of as culturally important
in the same way live-action film is or television.
Animation is for children, live-action is for adults.
The heads of the WB wanted high-profile directors
and writers, despite some of them
not being massive fans of the source material.
The Justice League-- Unlimited season two finale epilogue
is one of the best Batman stories ever told.
If you need any convincing that the DCAU team would
have knocked this out of the park,
this should be the front and center example.
But, alas, it wasn't meant to be.
And honestly, it doesn't matter, because the DCAU still
exists and is fantastic.
Well, guys, that's it for today's episode of Nostalgic.
As always, if you enjoyed this video, press the like button.
And on your screen right now should be
two more episodes on Nostalgic.
So you can stay right here and check those out,
and hopefully I'll see you guys in the next video.