Return to Gotham: How Batman: The Animated Series Built an “Expanded Universe”
DC Comics’ most successful adaptations literally began and ended with Batman.
Photo Courtesy of Warner Bros. Animation
Editor’s Note: This year, the iconic Batman: The Animated Series turns 30 years old. “Return to Gotham” is a monthly column looking back at the cartoon that remains a touchstone of the superhero genre and one of the most iconic portrayals of The Dark Knight.
Superman: “That man won’t quit as long as he can still draw a breath. None of my teammates will. Me? I’ve got a different problem.”
It is sometimes hard to believe how this monthly column—preplanned since December of last year, and focusing on a show that is 30 years old—can somehow be relevant to our current entertainment discourse. Sometimes it’s because Batman’s corporate owners are still allowing great things to be made starring long-running characters from the show. This month, though, Batman’s (new) owners are making headlines for being absolute ding-dongs.
Thirty YEARS ago!
Speaking in a Batman: The Animated Series retrospective feature, Bruce Timm, one of the creative leads on the show, said that one day he was approached by somebody at Warner Bros. animation division with an opportunity: Did he have any ideas for a DC comics character to adapt to a cartoon? Warner Bros. owned the rights to do so. Timm said he blurted out “Batman!” without skipping a beat, met with approval from whichever suit had brought it up, and then immediately went to his office, shoved a bunch of Tiny Toon Adventures work off his desk and began creating B:TAS. The show got the greenlight not long after.
It was a good time to be slinging Batman merch, what with Tim Burton and Alan Moore and Frank Miller giving Batman’s cinematic and comic incarnations a shot in the arm. Still, it seems hard to believe even Warner Bros. could have guessed that the show’s spinoffs would be airing 13 years later, and every entertainment pub on the internet would be singing the show’s praises three decades on. Discovery is the corporate entity that now has the inestimable honor and responsibility of owning the rights to the gold mine that is DC comics adaptations. And yet it seems that they, too, are ignorant to the fact that DC already made a “universe” 30 years ago and that some of its architects are actually still around writing movies for Warner Bros. (which Discovery is canceling!!!).
This is, I swear, a column about Batman: The Animated Series, but this installment is running mere days after the announcement of the slaughter of the Batgirl movie. It would be tough to ignore it as we talk about how B:TAS’ successful run kicked off one of the longest continuous stories in the history of comic adaptations (Marvel’s “cinematic universe” is now arguably as long or longer, depending on how you reckon it).
Batman was a constant during that run, a run that Warner Bros./Discovery/whoever have been flailing around for since 2013’s Man of Steel without even knowing that’s what they want. Kevin Conroy’s caped crusader ushered that saga in and was there in its final moments (was there, truly, in the last scene that occurs in the continuity). For any Discovery execs who might be listening, there are some things we might learn from the DC Animated Universe, as it was called.
B:TAS’ run was nearing its end in 1996 when the same creators were given license to tackle another of DC’s superheroes. I wrote about how the show’s first spin-off, Superman: The Animated Series, could be a master class in bringing a classic superhero up to date for an eager generation of new viewers. The show’s debut winked knowingly at fans of B:TAS, of course: During the three-part pilot, Martha Kent suggests that her adopted son take a more open approach to his super-heroics,v lest he be received like “that nut in Gotham City.”
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