‘Batman: Caped Crusader’: The Dark Knight Returns to His Pulp Fiction Roots

First name you see in the opening credits of the new Prime Video Batman: The Masked Vigilante The main character in the cartoon is not Hamish Linklater, who plays Bruce Wayne, or any other member of the voice cast. It is not executive director Matt Reeves, who earned a fair amount of credibility as Batman by directing Robert Pattinson in The Batman. Nor is it executive producer JJ Abrams, who, even in his post-production period,The Rise of Skywalker period remains one of the biggest names in nerd pop culture.

No, Hatted Crusader wastes no time in making its intentions clear by starting its credits with Bruce Timm, who isn’t as famous as his fellow producers, but whose name means a lot to fans of the best Batman movie adaptation of all: the ’90s mainstay Batman: The Animated Series. Timm co-created that series and oversaw the golden age of DC Comics-related cartoons that followed, including those tied to Superman, the Justice League, and even a new Batman 20 years later. All of them, but the first one in particular, hit the center of the Venn diagram that so many superhero stories try and fail to achieve: just safe enough for kids to watch, but ambitious enough in style and theme to be exciting for adults. Even today, ask the most diehard Batman fans what their favorite film featuring the character is, and chances are they’ll overlook anything Christopher Nolan, Tim Burton, or Zack Snyder has done in favor of co-director Timm. Batman: Mask of Phantasm.

Batman: The Animated Series was meant to feel both timeless and like a return to Batman’s roots as a pulp hero of the ’30s and ’40s. Batman: The Masked Vigilante The film leans even more deeply into the pulp era in which Bob Kane and Bill Finger created its title character. There are some deliberately anachronistic details, like vintage televisions and a colorblind cast of famous characters like Harley Quinn (who is Asian-American and played by Jamie Chung), Commissioner Gordon (who is black and played by Eric Morgan Stuart) and his daughter Barbara (played by Krystal Joy Brown), in a way that would go unnoticed in a less enlightened era. . But the art, conflicts, and dialogue are all straight out of the 1930s, filtered through Timm’s earlier work. While the episodes are in color, the opening credits sequence for each is in black and white. In one episode, Batman and a villain engage in a sword fight on a film set designed to evoke 1938.The Adventures of Robin Hood . Hatted Crusader

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TRK90KSkFM Harley and Gotham cop Renee Montoya (Michelle Bonilla) also appear to be openly gay, as they have both been revealed to be so in comic books written (some by

Hatted Crusader writers like Greg Rucka and Ed Brubaker) and takes place several decades later. By relying even more on the pulpier aspects of the B: BAG aesthetic,

Hatted Crusader is a joy to watch. Over the decades, comic book artists have played with Bob Kane’s original costume (shown here with a mask with extra-long ears sticking out at sharp angles and very short gloves) and tried to modernize it. But on some level, Batman seems more suited to the period in which he was introduced, leaping across the rooftops of Art Deco buildings and beating up gangsters in double-breasted suits.

The first episode of Batman goes back to the beginning in several ways. When the first episode begins, Batman is new to his job, more of a rumor than someone the general public knows and believes in. Gordon has never seen him before. And our hero has some learning to do on the job. He’s not an infallible, indestructible bat-god, but a rookie vigilante prone to overconfidence. He often rejects sensible suggestions from Alfred (Jason Watkins), and in one episode, he gets beaten up by a bearded lady and her circus friends. This raw take on the character fits the setting perfectly, and we get enough glimpses of him operating at full power that this still feels like a Batman show. RelatedThe writers also make some interesting changes to the members of Batman’s rogues gallery who appear over the course of the 10-episode season. Some, like the shapeshifting Clayface (Dan Donohue) or the glamorous Catwoman (Christina Ricci), are more or less as they appeared at one point in the comics. (Catwoman here is a down-on-her-luck socialite who moves in the same circles as Bruce Wayne and wears the purple dress that was her trademark in the ’40s and ’50s.) Others have been reinvented in appearance and/or

Catwoman, in Batman: The Masked Vigilante Prime The series is full of Easter eggs, with nearly every major character named after someone in the comics, whether it’s Montoya’s fellow detectives from Rucka and Brubaker’s excellent early 2000s novel Gotham Central book or press photographer Eel O’Brian (Tom Kenny) with the same nickname as Plastic Man. Sometimes, Hatted Crusader can get too cute with it, like one of Harley’s associates saying “Puddin!”, which was her term of endearment for Joker on

B: BAG, or an episode featuring a quartet of kids who are all modeled after different Robins over the years, in a series that, at the moment, doesn’t seem to have room for any sidekicks. (And if it did, Barbara Gordon is already there, working as a defense attorney but frequently stepping in to protect her father from gangsters and crooked cops.) The main story arc of the first season involves Bruce’s old friend, district attorney Harvey Dent, running for mayor, and in this case the show benefits from the fact that the audience knows from the start that this man is the future Two-Face. Dent is played by Diedrich Bader, who previously voiced Batman in two other cartoons: the charming, retro Batman: The Last of Us Part II Batman: The Brave and the Bold(where Kenny also played Plastic Man), and the irreverent and incredibly profane Max Harley Quinn . That he can seamlessly fit into three very different series is a testament to Bader’s vocal gifts. But it’s also a testament to Batman’s flexibility as a character, since he can appear in stories with such different tones and to such different audiences. And even here, all the trappings of pulp and hardboiled fiction would make it easy for

falling into self-serious parody. But despite Batman insisting to Catwoman that he’s not funny, the show itself is. Tendency All that being said, Hatted Crusader is a bit more exciting conceptually than in its narrative, which is solid but uninteresting. This is where the emphasis on Bruce Timm’s involvement is a double-edged sword, as it openly invites comparisons to a classic, of which these episodes would seem to be fairly minor entries. I had a good time watching them, but they mostly made me want to watch them again

Batman: The Animated Series and its companion shows on a competing streaming service. But perhaps this is a plot to trick Amazon customers into subscribing to Max through their Prime accounts? All 10 episodes of