- Batman (laughs). (bell dings)
(upbeat music)
Of the countless entries in the Batman franchise,
few feel as total as Batman: The Animated Series.
Through the relaunches, reboots,
and endless Elseworlds takes on the character,
it's somehow always easiest to point
to Batman: The Animated Series as the purest distillation
of what makes Batman, well, Batman.
But calling it a distillation is almost a disservice
to the show because Batman: The Animated Series
didn't just simply repurpose the best of Batman's assets.
It frequently invented original elements
and powerful new takes on characters
that have since become synonymous
with the greater Batman mythos.
And of the many ways that it's done this,
none are more significant than the villains.
Here are five ways that Batman: The Animated Series
changed Batman's villains forever.
(bell dings) Number five, Mr. Freeze.
If you thinK of Mr. Freeze and you don't think tragedy,
well, you're either fundamentally lacking
some kind of empathy, or you're stuck back in the 1950's
when Mr. Freeze was still known as Mr. Zero.
First introduced in 1959's Batman #121,
Mr. Zero was yet another causality of vats of goo
that turn you into a boring evil mutant villain guy.
Wayne Enterprises should really invest in like,
I don't know, lids.
Lids for vats.
Mr. Zero had a gun that fired ice,
and he did all the boring bad guy stuff.
The most interesting about the guy
was that he was named Mr. Zero instead of Mr. 32
implying that he was an adopter of Celsius
instead of Fahrenheit, man of science, that's cool.
I guess, not really, okay, movin' on.
Batman '66 featured the character with multiple actors.
They even bothered to give him a real name,
Dr. Art Schivel, confirming that the guy's
just a big ol' nerd.
The eventual rebranding of Mr. Zero as Mr. Freeze
didn't make the character interesting.
It wasn't until Batman: The Animated Series
that Mr. Freeze became
cool, you see what I did there, I did a bad joke.
- (laughs) Wild. - On September 7th, 1992,
Bruce Timm and Paul Dini completely overhauled
the character's origin with the now infamous episode,
Heart of Ice, this version of Mr. Freeze
as a GothCorp cryogenic scientist named Dr. Fries
who is desperately tending to his ailing wife, Nora.
Fries has placed her in a cryogenic freeze
to buy himself time to cure her terminal illness,
but greedy GothCorp CEO, Ferris Boyle,
deems this a misappropriation of funds
and shuts the project down, which would effectively
kill Nora, Fries pulls a gun on Boyle,
but he can't bear to pull the trigger.
He's not a violent man, but in the scuffle,
Boyle smashes Fries into the cryogenics equipment
in a way that permanently alters his body.
Fries now can only survive in extremely low temperatures.
He builds his Mr. Freeze suit, and now the classic tale
of his bittersweet mission of love and revenge begins.
Batman learns Mr. Freeze's origin
and feels a great empathy towards the guy.
I mean, we all do, but Batman can't get through
to the guy's heart of ice.
Like the title of the episode, eh?
Bats is able to thwart Mr. Freeze's mission
of murderous revenge with a pot of hot chicken soup,
and Fries is cordoned off to a frozen cell
in Arkham Asylum to grieve for his lost wife Nora
in cold solitude.
The episode became an instant classic
from the very first season, even.
And Mr. Freeze went onto being Mr. Zero to a Mister,
well, you know, much more popular A-list Batman villain.
The comics adopted the same origin,
and soon after we got Arnold Schwarzenegger's performance
in Batman and Robin.
While I love the incredibly dubious quality,
keep in mind how significant it is
that a Fox kids cartoon influenced a major motion picture.
Critical bomb or not, this movie was a major factor
in solidifying the non-cartoon watching public's awareness
of Mr. Freeze and his origin.
Since then, a direct-to-video movie,
Batman: SubZero played as a direct sequel to Heart of Ice,
featuring Mr. Freeze's life in the arctic
with his adopted family and pet polar bears.
But before you get it in your head
that Mr. Freeze has become fully super sympathic softy,
he's been expanded out in the comics as well,
becoming much more dangerous and much more violent.
The first issue of Gotham Central has him freezing
and shattering cops, murdering them in--
(record scratches) Cold blood!
(bright music) (Mr. Freeze sighs)
Mr. Freeze has gone from being a goofy joke
to a sympathic anti-hero, a complex, dark, tragic character.
And it's all thanks to a single episode of TV.
(bell dings) Number four, Clayface.
Batman: The Animated Series didn't just create
and popularize new elements of characters,
it also took raw materials that already existed
and sculpted them into something usable,
something iconic, something brown and mushy
and hard to look at, I'm talkin' about Clayface obviously.
What did you think I was talkin' about?
If you follow Clayface in the comics,
you'll know that this is a messy character.
In fact, there have been a whole wet wad of folks
who have called themselves Clayface.
There's Basil Karlo, Sondra Fuller, Preston Payne,
Todd Russell, and that's not even half of 'em.
There have been enough Clayface's in the comics,
nine in total, that they eventually just looked around
and decided that they could form their own goop-themed gang
called the Mud Pack, that's real.
That's a real thing in the comics just out there.
But in the animated series, Timm and Dini
were able to get their hands dirty
in mashing that mush down to the necessary elements.
The Clayface of the animated series, Matt Hagen,
is actually named after the second comic book character
to take on the Clayface name, but he shares his background
of being a handsome actor with the original comics Clayface.
Our animated Matt Hagen gets a new origin though
where his pretty face is hideously disfigured
in a car accident sending him desperately
to pursue an experimental drug that allows him
to regain his good looks, but an overdose
turns him into the moist maniac we've all come to be
grossed out by, thematically, this works great.
An actor who makes his livelihood from his face
taking on roles, becoming an ironic embodiment
of this very pursuit, horrible and forced
to take form and shape of other people.
It's cool, and as we've covered before,
this version of Matt Hagen's legacy
is fired in the furnace in the New Batman Adventures episode
Growing Pains where Robin befriends and develops feelings
for a young amnesia girl, Annie,
who later is revealed to be nothing more
than a big chunk of Clayface that strayed
a little bit too far from the body.
She's subsequently re-absorbed, disappearing horrifically
into nothingness, kind of like how the animated series
absorbed several different comic characters
into a single entity so that they'd be easier
for us to keep track of, huh!
Neat.
Once again, the recent Batman comics have looked back
to the animated series for inspiration,
making Karlo's current origin story
that of an handsome actor who's disfigured
in a car accident and abuses an industrial makeup
known as Renew to reshape his face.
Does that sound familiar?
I mean, it should because it's literally
just the same story that we talked about.
Weren't you paying attention, what's wrong with you?
I do these whole videos, and you just like tune out
and do something else, you should've been paying attention.
Come on. (bell dings)
Number three and number two, Harley Quinn and The Joker.
As I'm sure I don't need to tell you,
the Queen of Hot Topic herself, Harley Quinn,
did not exist before Batman: The Animated Series.
The character was created specifically for Timm and Dini's
friend Arleen Sorkin to voice
and little did any of them know that one day,
their children's cartoon character creation
would lead to this.
I mean.
(winces) It led to a lot of good things though.
I mean, just (sighs).
(whistles) First introduced briefly as a henchman
in the seventh episode of the series, Joker's Favor,
Harley didn't come into her own until January of '93
in the episode, The Laughing Fish.
This episode adapted some of Joker's most iconic stories,
but more importantly, it was the initial step
to establishing the iconic character interplay
we would see between The Joker and Harley for years to come.
And while Harley's best known episode
may actually be Mad Love from the New Batman Adventures,
she had already busted her way into the comic books
by way of The Batman Adventures in 1993.
And when 1999 rolled around, the same year as Mad Love,
Harley Quinn was already popular enough
to be receiving her own featured titles.
Soon after, she was a series staple,
appearing in everything down to the Batman games.
And although she only somewhat recently made it
into the live-action world with Margot Robbie's performance
in Suicide Squad, there was even a time in the '90's
where she was planned to appear
in the unmade Batman and Robin sequel Batman Triumphant,
possibly to be played by Courtney Love,
which is just really weird.
It's just a weird, cool fact.
And of course, Harley Quinn wouldn't exist
without Mark Hamill's incomparable performance as The Joker.
Between the 14 episodes of Batman: The Animated Series,
five episodes of the New Batman Adventures,
three episodes of Superman: The Animated Series,
one episode of Static Shock, two episodes
of the live-action Birds of Prey, six episodes
of Justice League, two episodes of Robot Chicken,
six episodes of Justice League: Action,
four animated films, 12 video games,
and a fucking roller coaster in Madrid,
Mark Hamill has a total of 55 credits as the character,
that's more than twice of the runner-up, Caesar Romero,
from Batman '66.
Dude, he's the best Joker, okay?
It's just, I don't know how much there is to say, really.
What else can I say about The Joker and Harley Quinn
that you don't already know?
They're just iconic, they're great.
They're great, and it's good, let's move on.
(bell dings) Number one.
Adam West, okay, stick with me here.
I know what you're thinking.
Adam West, he's not a villain.
He was amazing, also he played Batman.
He's not a Batman villain.
Well, no, Adam West was not a Batman villain,
never in the traditional sense, but in the late '80's
and the post-Frank Miller hard boiled rebranding
of Batman as the grim protector of Gotham
in the era of Tim Burton's dark take on the character,
it was just not cool to like Adam West's intentionally
campy take on the character.
For a spot of time, Batman '66 was something
of an embarrassment to a fan base
who was only willing to treat the character seriously.
But in episode 32 of Batman: The Animated Series,
Beware the Gray Ghost, Bruce Timm and Paul Dini
brought to the table an amazing take on Adam West,
featuring none other than-- (rim shot rings)
Well, Adam West, I guess that's not very surprising,
but in this episode, Adam West portrays
a washed up actor named Simon Trent
who's glory days of playing TV vigilante, The Gray Ghost,
are behind him, is this starting to sound like a parallel?
Yeah?
In the episode, Batman ends up teaming up with Simon Trent
who dons his popular TV costume.
The two are out to stop a villain known
as the Mad Bomber, who looks suspiciously
like Bruce Timm himself.
Well, it turns out that the Gray Ghost
was a tremendous inspiration Bruce Wayne to become Batman,
and that Batman has modeled his persona
on his childhood hero, and at the end of all things,
after the Mad Bomber's stopped with Simon Trent's help,
the Gray Ghost is recognized as being an actual hero.
A resurgence in popularity is prompted,
and his show is released in crystal clear high definition,
standard definition VHS home video.
His career is saved, if it isn't already abundantly obvious,
this is a direct meta-textual take on Adam West's career.
Bruce Timm, inspired by Adam West's Batman as a child,
but not so presumptuous as to cast himself
as an analog to Batman becomes the Mad Bomber,
who's responsible in a way for bring Adam West
and Batman together to showcase Adam West's value.
In a community where Batman '66 was being derided
in publication such as Wizard Magazine,
Batman: The Animated Series came to the rescue.
The episode began to turn public perception
and give Adam West the credit he's due
for keeping the popularity of the character alive
and for being a valuable, wonderful, bizarre part
of Batman's history. (upbeat music)
Also, it's cool when he like Bat dances, you know?
That's just good, I don't give a shit.
I love it.