Original subtitles

Downloaded from YTS.MX

Okay, this is from the directory that...

This is from The Complete Directory of Prime Time TV Shows,

Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX

and this is their little capsule summary of Batman: The Animated Series.

"Gotham City's Caped Crusader returned in prime-time television

"in this animated series that was much more somber in tone

"than either the 1960s live-action Batman

"or the animated versions that had run in the '70s and '80s.

"This animated series was produced by Tim Burton."

(LAUGHS)

I don't think that's true.

MICHAEL USLAN: Batman: The Animated Series

really changed the way

people were making animated drama.

BRUCE TIMM: This was not the usual fare for kids' entertainment.

TOM RUEGGER: We weren't just reinventing Batman.

Batman's villain gallery was all being re-invented.

ALAN BURNETT: Fox did not give us a lot of notes.

They had some overall general notes,

but, at least at first, they were pretty hands-off.

BOB GOODMAN: I always look back at this series

and I am stunned at the stories that we got away with telling.

TIMM: We did push back, aggressively, because we felt like we kind of had to.

There was many, many days when I would drive home and think,

"Oh, I'm gonna get fired tomorrow."

(TIRES SCREECH)

ERIC RADOMSKI: We got an education while we were producing this series.

RUEGGER: And it really was like watching these mini-movies.

We didn't treat them like a TV show. We treated them like a motion picture.

-(GRUNTS) -(GLASS BREAKING)

-(ENGINE REVVING) -(TIRES SCREECHING)

(EXPLOSION)

(LAUGHING MANIACALLY)

(SIREN WAILING)

TIMM: We knew what we didn't want.

We didn't want the show to seem like every other adventure show on TV.

We wanted the show to be appealing to kids,

because we knew that they were our primary intended audience.

But at the same time, we wanted to show

that we ourselves would watch, as adults.

MIKE CARLIN: Every single project is a puzzle.

And every puzzle has only one set of right pieces.

And in Batman: The Animated Series,

every single piece was the right piece to the puzzle.

ANDREA ROMANO: This was a big paradigm shift in animation,

this Batman series.

Everybody looked at superheroes differently,

everybody looked at cartoons differently.

JEAN MACCURDY: The challenge was in the beginning.

And convincing the powers that be

that this look and the edginess of it could be successful.

That, "Oh, it's so dark."

Yes, that's why it's good. That's what's good about it, you know?

And everybody was like, "Oh, I don't know."

So, getting over that hurdle

to the point where they'd let us go that way,

that was the biggest challenge.

Fortunately, you know,

Eric and I were kind of in the right place at the right time.

You know, we happened to be working at Warner Bros.

When, you know, the prospect of doing an animated Batman show came up.

And, you know, Jean's, like, dangling that brass ring

and we're like, "Okay, grab it."

RADOMSKI: And there's just an artistic integrity

that was inherent to this series.

And it was absolutely because of all of the people

that really cared about what they were working on,

and put their whole selves into it.

And it just shows in the work.

And the fact that it resonates with people and fans as long as it has

is a testament to it.

There's no other explanation other than that

because it's just an animated show.

But the fact that it had that impression,

for me, is a result of the fact that, you know,

that passion lives within the entire creation of that experience.

So, to be part of that collective is just truly unique.

The '66 Batman show with Adam West

was actually my first exposure to Batman as a character.

It was like my gateway drug.

ROMANO: It was a show that we could watch with our parents

and everybody was entertained.

It was very cartoon-y.

So, it was all that "pop"' "pow"' kind of Warhol pop art kind of way

of viewing the story.

TIMM: There was just something about it, you know,

the whole "larger than life" aspect of it.

The costumes and the sets.

PAUL DINI: I was really invested in the show because for crazy villains

like the Penguin and the Joker and everything,

it really did seem to be, sort of, life and death stakes.

And then a year later,

there was a scene where Batman is singing

I'm Called Little Buttercup to Robin.

And I'm going, like, "Nah, I'm out.

"I can't take this seriously."

CONROY: People loved that show.

But it's not at all what Bruce Timm was going to be going for in this show.

ROMANO: And I liked the comedy of it, I liked the silliness of it.

It didn't scare me.

But then we made a cartoon series that was pretty damn scary.

Once you got into the mid-to-late '80s,

obviously, there was a seminal change in the type of stories that were told.

Some of the most iconic Batman stories of all-time

came out at that point, with Year One, Dark Knight Returns,

Killing Joke.

GOODMAN: The thing that really changed for me

was The Dark Knight Returns graphic novel by Frank Miller.

I think for everyone, there were new edges

for the kind of stories you could tell with Batman.

And it really redefined Batman stories ever since.

The late '80s was... It was time for Batman.

The whole world was saying, "We want some Batman."

And that was, well, even before the movie came out.

Before Tim Burton's movie came out.

TIMM: You know, when I first got into the business,

when I got into the animation business,

it was a pretty dark time for the industry as a whole.

There were the three networks. That was all you had.

And the animation was all Saturday morning,

and a lot of it was because they had a requirement

to fill a certain amount of children's programming.

It was always very children-orientated,

even the action-adventure shows.

And they were very formularized.

You had to have a...

An interesting sidekick all the time,

and almost always, you had to have a funny animal character.

So, when you did a show like Super Friends or something, it...

You know, as somebody who had grown up with DC comics,

it was like, "Well... Not the way I would have done it."

DINI: The network had a very skewed vision

of what they felt kids wanted to see.

So, it's all shows about kids and kid issues.

And it's not really funny.

BURNETT: I started animation in '81 at Hanna-Barbera.

The landscape was that animation

was pretty much dedicated to kids two to eleven.

And almost all of it was on Saturday morning.

They always had in mind, whatever show it was,

"Is this going to be okay for two-year-olds?"

And that's what held back, for me, a lot of the creativity.

SIDNEY IWANTER: They had to worry about making sure that the toys were sold,

but also keeping the various pressure groups off their backs.

And there was plenty of that.

Not just, like, the PTA,

but there were various... Action for Children's Television.

You know, a lot of these people were constantly being called up to Congress,

you know, to explain themselves.

Children's programming, back then it was really rough.

Congress got involved.

And you know how great things are when Congress gets involved.

The answer is... No!

DINI: They would say, "Make it goofy, make it wacky, make it zany."

But they had no idea what that was.

It was never funny. It was just sort of on.

(CRASHES)

BURNETT: We had a wonderful broadcast standards woman on this show.

Avery Cobern.

She understood this was an afternoon show.

And that we would be appealing to an older bunch of kids.

That there would be guns and there would be fistfights.

(YELLS)

If there was something awry, she would have an answer for us.

AVERY COBERN: I've had to do this at countless parties.

"What do you do?"

"BS&P." "What is that?"

And I... Usually, I tell them and they still don't get it.

And then I wind up saying, "You know, I censor the shows."

But, really, I don't think of it as that.

I think of it as an editor would work with a writer on a book.

IWANTER: She is an unsung hero of this thing because if we had had

a normal broadcast standards person from, like, the '60s or '70s,

I would've been flayed alive.

You couldn't have someone hit someone with a frying pan.

(WHAM)

Because a child would have access to a frying pan.

You know, you'd have to show seat belts when a child rode in a car.

All of those examples of a general policy to keep kids safe.

IWANTER: The idea came

to try and create a Saturday morning network.

That would... That was going to be the very first one created

since the very early '50s.

We have to have cartoons. We have to have advertisers.

We have to have eyeballs.

But what about the content?

How's the content gonna be different?

'Cause now you're talking 1990 and not 1952.

COBERN: We decided that we were going to do something different.

And it would be a show

aimed at comic-book lovers in their tweens.

We would go over every scene

and all the action and talk about standards.

I definitely had great respect

for those people that were producing this show.

I'd started working in the '80s

and the very first show I worked on was a very...

It was a puppy show for ABC.

You know, they had the Wuzzles and the Gummi Bears.

So, we're talking fairly light fare.

The early part of the '80s, we were pushing the wheel.

And we were doing what we could in Saturday morning

but it was very restricted with the programming rules.

With the broadcast standards.

It began to get hard to come up with stories

that would interest me, the writer, as well as the kids,

because of the BS&P pressure.

I had to make shows that were essentially, you know, action shows.

But the action had to be so toned down that

you could hardly call it an action show.

We ended up with having the hero standing around talking a lot.

You won't get away with this, you rotten rug jockey!

Don't worry, General. We'll take care of him.

RIBA: We had the army in there

but they weren't allowed to have weapons.

No guns were ever allowed.

They could have shovels.

RICH FOGEL: I worked on the last incarnation of Super Friends

with Alan Burnett at Hanna-Barbera.

And it was very frustrating trying to tell a superhero story

at that time on the networks.

Be careful, Robin. One slip and we're done for.

I was about five shows into it

and I said, "I'm going to have somebody shrink the superheroes

"so that they fight small things."

And that's a sign

(CHUCKLES) that there's trouble.

When you shrink your superheroes.

Cause that's... You're desperate for stories.

You won't be bugging me much longer.

We had a scene where

Robin kicks a spider off a table, that's gonna attack him.

And we got the BS&P note,

"Is the spider okay?

"We have to show that the spider is okay."

And so, we had a panel put in the storyboard

where you see the spider crawling away. (CHUCKLES)

That first year on Super Friends was just...

I don't even wanna... I've never gone back to see them.

I'm sorry, Dr. Gulliver,

but there's got to be a better way than shrinking people.

ROMANO: My introduction to the superhero world

in animation was with Super Friends,

which I just thought was goofy as hell.

Forgive me, it just was.

The drawings were not good.

The voices were god-awful.

(LAUGHS WICKEDLY)

And the scripts were really pretty bad.

You really had your hands tied in terms of how the stories worked out.

You could not have conflict.

You could not have violence of any sort.

They didn't like punching.

I mean, I'm talking about Superman hits a wall instead of a person,

but that was too violent.

FOGEL: The standards and practices were so restrictive

that I remember in the last season of Super Friends,

we introduced Darkseid into it.

And there was a great deal of conversation about

whether or not we could use the name "Darkseid"

or whether it was too scary.

That was the climate that we were in.

The industry just wasn't thriving.

(LAUGHING MANIACALLY)

A lot of the earlier generation of, you know, the famous Nine Old Men,

the star animators from going back to like, the Snow White days,

a lot of them were, you know, retiring or dying off,

and there wasn't... There didn't seem to be a whole new generation of people

who were being mentored

and, you know, brought into the business to further that.

DINI: There was really nobody in the middle-age range doing animation.

There were young guys

like myself and Bruce Timm and Tom, I think, is a little older,

in our 20s, and we were just starting our careers

in, like, '79, '80, '81.

And then there were the guys

who had been on the original Disney features and at Warner Bros.

And they were all in their late 70s and 80s,

and they were looking to retire.

TIMM: And then here at Warner Bros.

In '89, I think, was when we first started doing Tiny Toons.

That was our first big show as a...

As a newly revamped studio for TV cartoons.

And fortunately, it was a huge hit.

RUEGGER: I met Jean MacCurdy when I was working at Hanna-Barbera

and I had been there for a number of years.

I had done a lot of Scooby.

Jean MacCurdy was my boss there.

She was in charge of all the writers at Hanna-Barbera.

And at some point, she said,

"I can't do this anymore, I'm out of here."

Boom! She was gone and she was over at Warner Bros.

And they had no real production facility

going on at all at Warner Bros.

Steven Spielberg and Terry Semel at Warner Bros.

Got together one day and they said,

"Hey, let's make sort of a junior version of Looney Tunes."

(TINY TOONS THEME SONG PLAYING)

I came to Warner Bros., it was late in November.

It was right around Thanksgiving.

And the first week, in January of 1989,

there was a press conference with Spielberg announcing

we were going to produce 65 half-hours.

I had been there, what, six weeks.

RUEGGER: And they went to MacCurdy, who was in charge

of the animation department,

which was really inactive.

And they said, "Who do we get to make this?"

They said, you know, "What's it gonna take to put this together?"

Because at first they were talking about farming it out to HB.

And I went, "No, no, no. You can do this here."

And she said... She had the nerve to say,

"Why don't you let us do it?

"Why don't you let me start a division of animation?"

And they said, "Well, that's pretty chancey."

She said, "Let's give it a try, I know some really good people."

And so, it was like,

"How am I gonna do this?

"I don't... I'm not real sure."

And, you know, thank God for Tom Ruegger,

who I'd worked with at Hanna-Barbera.

Tom was willing to come on board and take it on,

and really had a vision for what it should be.

I was fortunate enough to be the first hire

and was asked to come in and do development on Tiny Toons.

At that point, Warner Bros...

They just wanted to please Steven Spielberg.

RADOMSKI: Spielberg was at his peak.

So, Warner Bros. was all in on getting Steven...

Maintaining Steven's happiness.

RUEGGER: Please, Mr. Spielberg.

We don't care if the show's a piece of junk.

I don't care if this is on-budget or over-budget.

Don't care if it's, you know, a hit or a failure.

RUEGGER: We don't care if it's a disaster.

MACCURDY: All we care about is keeping Steven Spielberg happy.

But if Steven's happy at the end of the process,

we'll be happy, because we'll have this great relationship.

TIMM: You know, he was a big part of

why Tiny Toons had a lot more money thrown at it

than previous cartoons for TV.

MACCURDY: They were so supportive in terms of money, time, all of that.

And Steven attracted talent,

and the fact that we wanted to be really competitive

and were willing to pay to be competitive

really made a big difference.

We got good people.

TIMM: Had a really decent-sized budget, we had a decent-sized schedule.

And, of course, the writing and the animation was all really good.

It was good.

GLEN MURAKAMI: Tiny Toons had happened at Warner Bros.

And that was kind of the golden age of...

Like, the new revival of animation in the '90s.

Frank Miller's Dark Knight had come out as a comic

and then the Michael Keaton, Tim Burton Batman came out.

So, things were pushing in a different direction,

Batman-wise and comic-wise.

USLAN: There was a revolution going on

that was changing the movie industry,

that was changing the television industry,

that was changing the comic book industry.

And the two culprits behind this

were our first Batman live-action movie in 1989,

followed by Batman: The Animated Series.

And you can't talk about one without also talking about the other.

Tim Burton's Batman feature film was a monster hit. Just huge.

It was like printing money.

The revolutionary aspects of this were amazing.

Tim had to wrestle with the concept

that any move he made

could wind up having people unintentionally laugh.

At the movie, at Batman, at the situations.

That was pretty terrifying, but he figured it out.

And I'll never forget the day he said to me,

"You know, Micheal, in order to do this seriously,

"this movie is not going to be about Batman."

And I said, "What are you talking about?"

He said, "No, this movie has got to be about Bruce Wayne."

RIBA: It was very popular with kids.

The stage was really set for Batman to appear in some form or another.

Warners wanted to make the cartoon, Fox wanted to air it.

And they realized that it was different than what had gone before.

Every single genre movie since 1989,

I don't care if it's a superhero, if it's a general comic book movie,

if it's sci-fi, whatever.

Every single one is still, to this day,

being influenced by the vision of Tim Burton.

TIMM: There was a lot of other adventure shows on TV.

They were, pretty much all of them, were all toy tie-ins.

RADOMSKI: Prior to that, a lot of the influence

came out of companies that wanted to capitalize on

brands that may have had some life in theatrical,

and to build on that they could do an episodic series,

which basically advertised the toys for a series.

So, the focus on quality entertainment

and storytelling was not at the forefront.

GOODMAN: One thing I remember coming into work

on the Batman: Animated Series was a sense of relief.

That it was a new day in animation.

I remember the other writers and artists on the series

talking about this opportunity that Batman presented.

That, kind of, the cuffs were off.

I think even to us working on it, it was not...

We didn't believe they were actually gonna do anything like...

Like we ended up creating.

TIMM: When we were finishing up the first season of Tiny Toons,

my boss, Jean MacCurdy, had a big meeting with the entire crew

and basically said, "Yeah, we're probably gonna do a second season.

"We're still waiting to get a pick-up on that.

"And in the meantime, we're gonna develop other new shows,

"and one of the things we're thinking about developing is Batman,

"as an animated property."

KEVIN ALTIERI: Warner Bros. is doing a new Batman.

Well, I've heard that one before.

"Oh, boy. Here comes another Super Friends."

These guys have been doing Tiny Toons.

I love Tiny Toons,

but it's goofy comedy, it's Tiny Toons.

It started off very experimental at the beginning.

Jean MacCurdy wanted to see who on the crew

would be interested in doing a Batman show.

And Eric Radomski came up with this

really stunning background design

where he was using very vibrant colors on black paper

to sort of mute the look and give it a darker look.

RADOMSKI: Because of the Tim Burton influence,

I chose to present the piece I felt was influenced by

the dark noir sort of beginnings in...

Picking up on Tim Burton's direction of that first film.

His influence on my, sort of, perspective of the character

was probably the most influential.

Because I wasn't particularly a comic book reader, as a kid.

Eric's not really a comic book fan.

He is not like me. He's not a lifelong comic book fan.

All he knew about Batman was the Adam West show and the Tim Burton movie.

And he was not even a fan of the Adam West show when he was a kid.

RADOMSKI: Growing up to see Adam West in a campy television series,

you know, kind of left me uninterested.

TIMM: But he loved the first Tim Burton movie.

That's why he was into doing the Batman show.

Yeah, it's true.

The opportunity to bring some influence into animation

that could at least be in line with what Tim Burton's movie was,

was just unique and that's kind of...

Why my direction came out the way that it did in the very beginning

was that was the main...

The main influence for me for what this could be.

And if they were willing to consider that,

that was the only piece that I'd submitted.

(GUNSHOT)

USLAN: Bruce Timm

is the hero to those of us who love and care about Batman.

Because he was the right person at the right moment in time.

He was able to see the door opening

and jump in and pull it wide open.

DINI: And Bruce Timm, I think he's been drawing Batman all his life,

in some form or another.

And he just went to his office, drew a model sheet.

Within, like, about an hour or so,

I filled up an entire 81 /2"by 11" page

of just different Batman designs.

So, the next time Jean had one of these big meetings,

I showed up with this sheet of Batman drawings

and she went, "Wow, that's really cool."

He brought it to me. You know, I didn't...

He's the one who said, "Here, this is what I would do."

Okay. That looks good.

You know? It wasn't hard. (CHUCKLES)

It isn't hard to recognize something that's working.

And he was working. It was good.

It's like, "Yeah, if we do a Batman cartoon,

"that's exactly what he should look like."

And she said, "Yep, that's him.

"Why don't you and Eric work together?"

They were both great.

And it was an interesting pairing

because they're very different personalities and styles.

But each very passionate about what they did.

Bruce Timm and Eric Radomski barely knew each other.

They, you know, they had seen each other

but they were working on different things.

RADOMSKI: Jean literally called us together,

basically said, "We like both of your take on,

"you know, at least an art direction for this show."

She took Eric's background concepts

and married them with my character designs.

Said, "I want you guys to make a Batman short.

RADOMSKI: "Would you be interested in producing a sample piece

"that we could see what this might look like as a show?"

"Two minutes long, whatever. Two, three minutes long.

"Here's a certain amount of money. Go for it, you know.

"Do exactly what you want it to do

"and we'll show it to Fox

"and hopefully, that'll light a fire under them

"and say, 'Yeah, let's make this show. "'

MACCURDY: I remember Bruce

with his, you know, Tiny Toons storyboards

and him being very happy that he could now do this instead.

I remember that. (CHUCKLES)

RADOMSKI: I think it was maybe six weeks to animate the whole piece.

And then we did a...

Just a very basic mix on it with existing music and sound effects.

And Bruce and I participated by recording some of the fight sequences

because we couldn't afford real actors at the time.

So, we were in the booth doing our grunts and groans and fisticuffs.

And by the time we got it done, they'd already signed the deal, so...

But what was good about it was that it gave Eric and I

kind of a calling card.

Wow, it was... I'd never seen anything like that.

Nobody had seen anything like that, with the cinematic quality of it.

Even though it was just, you know, a minute or two long,

it captures everything about Batman.

Everyone took a real liking to it.

TIMM: If we can do that on a weekly basis, that would be awesome.

Out of the blue, Jean had called Eric and I into her office and said,

"How would you guys like to produce the show?"

I think both of us didn't really know what the producing job was.

TIMM: I was a storyboard artist on Tiny Toons when that meeting happened.

So, at that point...

I really had no deeper ambitions

or wider ambitions than just, you know,

art directing the Batman cartoon, if it came to be.

RADOMSKI: Well, you know, we were certainly dumbfounded,

and at the same time, it was like, "Yeah, sure."

TIMM: "Okay. "So, you know...

Like, it was...

You know, I'd have to be stupid to say no.

Until you walk out of the room and literally go,

"How in the hell are we gonna do this?" We've never produced a show.

We don't know...

Certainly don't know budgets and schedules and, you know,

what's going to be involved and who's going to be involved,

and what is our real role.

Because we were literally two artists that were just production artists,

you know, yesterday,

and today they're asking us to produce this series.

TIMM: We had a green light and we had a deadline.

So, we had to kind of get going.

Because we were, I think, too new to realize

the potential disaster it could have been,

we just trudged forward.

Ended up working with a lot of people that I'd never worked with before.

But, you know, we had to take chances and fortunately, a lot of it paid off.

The art is useless if the stories aren't any good.

And when we first started, we didn't even have a story editor.

RADOMSKI: Jean was able to step in

and understood where we were coming from.

And actually, that brought us Alan Burnett in the beginning,

because we needed... Bruce and I, neither of us had experience as writers.

Alan is just a god.

BURNETT: Jean MacCurdy and I go back a few years.

I was a page at NBC

and got an internship at children's programs,

and the person who hired me was Jean MacCurdy,

who was the manager of children's programs at that time.

Alan Burnett has been part of my life

my entire creative life, I suppose, or television life.

So, when I got to Hanna-Barbera, Alan was there, as a writer.

And one of the shows that we were gonna develop

and try to sell was Super Friends.

NARRATOR: Dedicated to truth, justice and peace...

And Alan and I both felt that it needed to be serious.

That it should be... It couldn't be Adam West.

That we needed to do something that really took the characters seriously.

So, we tried to convince ABC that this would be the way to go.

And they didn't want to do that.

I had another vision of what kids would like. (LAUGHS)

She knew that he was a big comic book fan.

And specifically, a big Batman fan.

And she had since, I think from the very beginning of the show,

had tried to get him over to come work here.

And he was over at Disney, you know, doing...

One of the duck shows.

(QUACKING)

And I kept saying to him, "That's ridiculous.

"You shouldn't be doing that."

Wait a second. DuckTales? Really? Come on.

You know, it's like...

I mean, I like DuckTales, but are you kidding me?

It wasn't until he got the assurances that

we would be able to tell the kinds of stories

in an honest way

that he committed to come on board.

(EXPLOSION)

BURNETT: Jean MacCurdy promised me I'd have

guns and I'd have fistfights.

Because I wouldn't come over otherwise.

And I didn't believe her. I really didn't.

And then they had a trailer,

and there's guns going off and fistfighting, and it was great.

And even then, I said to Jean,

"Are you... This is okay? We can do this?"

And she said, "Yes. Yes, we can."

Almost.

We had a policy against showing gun use.

We never showed impact

but you hear the bullets and you see the reaction.

Mom.

Dad.

COBERN: It was very moving, very dramatic.

But more mature, more adult

than you would see in any other show up to then.

BATMAN: Stop! No!

(GROUND RUMBLES)

(GASPS)

(SCREAMING) No!

MACCURDY: I wanted Alan,

and he was like, "No, I'm under contract." Blah, blah, blah.

BURNETT: But I did not come over to Warner Bros. until the very last...

I didn't make a decision till the very last day of my deal.

And I finally said, "Okay, I'm gonna come over."

And, so, I was glad that I did.

He's made his move.

TIMM: And so, he took a chance and came on board,

and from that point on, it pretty much saved the show.

His vision of the show was

really, really close to what Eric and I both wanted it to be.

BURNETT: And it was true. I could finally have...

A noir-ish show.

With guns and fights.

Impactful stuff.

DINI: He seemed to have a vision of the show that was very sharp and very smart.

And it was really the words to Bruce's visuals,

and to Eric's, you know, stylizations. It really was like the missing piece.

He was a little older than us and had more experience, and obviously,

had his career as a writer prior.

But he understood what we were trying to do with the series,

as well as, he was a huge Batman fan.

So, he, I think he was able to assure the executives at the time

that we had a solid team.

It wasn't just two rogue, you know, young first-time producers

saying, "Leave us alone. Let us do whatever we want to do."

DINI: So, thank God for Alan. He put the whole thing...

He put all the pieces together and got it up and running,

and humming like a fine machine.

And so, the rest is history.

We, you know, we were hiring people, like, not off the street,

but people who didn't have much experience or whatever.

Glen Murakami was a guy who, he'd never worked in the business.

He'd never actually held a paying art job before.

But he was a comic book fan and he worked in a comic book shop.

I will say it's the first time I felt like I found "my people."

I mean, growing up and being into comic books and movies

and illustration and stuff like that,

I think that was the first time I found a collection of people

who all saw all of it the same way that I did.

I think everyone was striving for the same goal.

Everyone wanted to make the best show that they could.

So, that's pretty unique.

I was too, kind of, naive to know any better.

It came as just a team effort,

to say, "We've got to get this thing done.

"I've got ideas, you've got ideas,

"they clearly like what we did together, let's see what we can do."

(SCREAMING)

The shock of my life was, I was sitting down

and Bruce shows me that trailer that they did.

And I was, like...

"You gotta be kidding me. You're doing Fleischer's Superman?

"You've gotta be kidding me."

You know, just sign me up.

JEAN MACCURDY: Warner Brothers had seven-minute Fleischer shorts

of Superman that I thought were awesome.

You know, Jean liked those Fleischer cartoons.

And she watched them on Moviolas down in the Warner Brothers' basement.

MACCURDY: They were dramatic,

and the look of them, everything about them.

TOM RUEGGER: Eric and Bruce wanted to make a series

like the Fleischer Superman.

But they wanted to make it for the '90s. They wanted to make it even darker.

And I think maybe I said something about Fleischer to them. I probably did,

because Fleischer was always something that haunted me.

I don't know why, but it just did.

It was funny because Eric and I were both really big fans

of the Fleischer Superman cartoons.

But we didn't actually want to just recreate that look.

We kind of wanted to put our own spin on the superhero world,

incorporating film noir and German Expressionism and Art Deco.

But we specifically were trying to do something

that wasn't exactly Fleischer-inspired.

And then one day we were meeting with Jean MacCurdy,

and she just kinda said,

"You know, the show should look like a Fleischer Superman cartoon."

We were just, like,

"Yes, it should."

I was like, "Yeah, we were trying to not do that,

"but it totally makes sense to do that."

So, yeah, why fight it?

So, I may have mentioned Fleischer to them, but...

I mean, it sobers Timm, those designs that I...

He would have done that that way anyway.

I didn't know that I had to say it out loud.

(CHUCKLES) He knew what he wanted to do.

I thought it was an upgrade of the Fleischer stuff.

And I thought, "Damn, that's good. That's great."

Visually, that thing was handled.

Bruce and Eric, and the entire artistic staff and the director...

I mean, they had this thing. Visually, it was like...

It was poetry in motion.

I mean, they knew how to tell a story without dialogue, without sound.

(SIREN WAILING IN DISTANCE)

TIMM: Dark Deco is a term that I came up with

on the spur of the moment once,

just because it was combining two different things.

The dark look of the show

was something that Eric and I were both really into trying to achieve.

We both wanted to bring kind of

an old time-y, film noir kind of sensibility to the visuals.

And that meant dark. That meant, like, you know,

just having the show take place almost all the time at night.

Working with a lot of silhouette

was going to be part and parcel of the show.

MIKE CARLIN: A darker setting lends itself to

just the graphic side of what a comic book is.

And Eric had come up with this brilliant plan

of doing all the backgrounds on black paper, on black board.

STAN BERKOWITZ: I really liked it.

I mean, the idea of doing everything on the black paper was very stylish.

BURNETT: It really looks like it's painted on black velvet.

And it's just beautiful.

RUEGGER: You're not pulling drawings out of the light,

you're pulling the drawing out of the darkness,

which is, of course, where Batman lives.

Having been a painter for the two years prior to producing,

it was like, "I don't want to paint that entire city

"over and over and over again."

And especially at night, because all of that dark imagery,

you've gotta paint in.

So, it just occurred to me, what if we started with the dark environment

and we just brought light into it?

And the Deco aspect of it came,

basically, just from me being a fan of architecture of that era.

GLEN MURAKAMI: Batman was created in the '40s.

So, it's almost like it just never stopped being the '40s.

There's cell phones and there's VCRs, but it's Art Deco.

It's like Batman lives in this forever Art Deco world.

So that's the way we handled it.

I mean, the cars, some of those cars look like they'd come from

the giant cars of the '40s.

But then there's helicopters in the sky

that don't look like they were from the past at all,

but something from the future.

They turn on the TV and it's black and white, you know.

So, it's like it's black and white,

but yet you have this incredible Batmobile and Batwing,

and these very hi-tech gadgets.

AMES KIRSHEN: There were computers and portable phones,

and there was technology of the time

but done and executed in a way that was more kinda reminiscent

of this very classic look and feel.

FRANK PAUR: A lot of film noir was the feeling you wanted to have

with all the heavy blacks and the shadows.

That high-contrast photography, especially in the '30s and '40s,

and Orson Welles was the king of it.

Just where you'd get that shadow, just jet-black black.

We did that.

It was the Universal monster movies, and The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari

and Fritz Lang, Metropolis,

as well as M, and Citizen Kane.

MICHAEL USLAN: The whole concept of film noir,

that all influenced the writers and the artists

and the editors of Batman comics.

All of that were just as influential on the people involved

with Batman: The Animated Series.

And you can see it. You can see it clear as day.

BOB GOODMAN: We definitely were informed by noir fiction,

and pulp stories.

And Hitchcock was kind of a guiding light of how to tell a visual story.

How to tell a clean visual story.

How to deliver mood with camera.

This was a Warner Brothers gangster movie show

that had a superhero in it.

And noir, not just stylistically, but thematically,

where we were focusing on villains,

and focusing on somebody who felt wronged

and wanted vengeance.

And sympathetic people that actually were the criminals.

And that's a very noir trait.

It's not just about dark shadows and cool buildings.

It's about the people, and the darkness in society. (CHUCKLES)

It's really cool.

TIMM: We, early on, decided we wanted to have

individual title cards for each episode.

This is something they used to do back in the old days

in classic cartoons.

When they would have those wonderful lobby cards, you know.

And going back even further than that, hand-painted lobby cards, you know.

So, that kind of stuff was a great throwback.

TIMM: We thought, okay, why not? We got nothing better to do.

There's a little bit of time left in those 24 hours of every day,

why not throw in a title card as well?

So, fortunately, Eric was really into the whole idea,

and he ended up designing...

I'd say, most of those title cards himself.

Hats off to him, 'cause those, to this day, are still, like,

some of the coolest title cards you've ever seen in a cartoon.

When we came down to designing the title sequence for the show,

Eric and I, I don't remember whose idea it was,

but between the two of us,

one of us said, "Well, why don't we just redo that pilot film

"that we did that sold the show?"

With Batman fighting some thugs on a rooftop, kind of thing.

CARLIN: It was dark and gritty and scary.

It's all shadows.

You don't hardly see anything

until Batman's lit up by a bolt of lightning.

TIMM: I think, all along we had planned at some point,

to put Batman as a title, the series title on it.

And at some point we were just, like,

"What image do we want to cover up with that title,

"because they all look cool?"

I don't think we need the title.

You know who that guy is on that building.

That lightning's...

(MIMICS LIGHTNING STRIKE) ...around him.

You know who that is.

CARLIN: It just said, "This is something you've never seen before."

And you almost had to do it because it was so compelling.

And so, that title sequence is...

It still holds up. It's phenomenal.

I think a lot of people think to adapt a comic book into animation,

they're trying to achieve the look of the comic book.

RICH FOGEL: Previous attempts to try and do comic book things

in animation,

they try to emulate the models from the comic books very closely,

that had a lot of anatomy in them,

a lot of muscles, a lot of curves and everything like that.

And one of the genius things that Bruce and Eric did

to bring this to the screen was, they simplified it.

Bruce was aware it needs to be animated,

it needs to move around a lot.

How simple can we make everything?

Every line you draw has to be duplicated thousands and thousands of times.

RUEGGER: And then you're painting them all up.

This is back when we were still doing cel animation.

Oh, my gosh.

So, it really behooves you to simplify your character design

so they don't have a lot of muscles and rendering and all that stuff.

Voila! We do that 19,999 more times, and we have a 20-minute show.

TIMM: The villains all had their own unique design challenges.

Some of them, I had a pretty clear idea of what I wanted to do with.

The Two-Face character,

I pretty much nailed him right out of the gate.

The most obvious thing I did with Two-Face was to simplify his clothes.

Because in the comics, he traditionally has, like,

a purple suit on one side and an orange suit on the other.

And the purple side has, like, a plaid.

Because in comics you can do that.

You really want to emphasize

how different the two sides of his personality is.

And, so I was looking at that in the comics and I went,

"Well, I'm not going to animate...

"I don't want anybody to try to animate plaid.

"That's just way too many lines to animate."

And purple and orange is really ugly to look at

as a color combination.

This is intentionally ugly.

But it was just... I couldn't stand to look at it.

And I thought, "Well, wait a minute.

"You can't get any more opposite than black and white.

So I'll make his bad side dark,

and I'll make his supposedly good side blindingly white.

And it was such an obvious idea.

It was kind of like, in retrospect,

kind of surprising nobody had ever done it before,

but it worked really great for our show.

The funny thing about the Bruce Timm style,

it is so appealing, and so many people seem to think they can get it.

It's a very tough thing to actually do.

DICK SEBAST: When I looked at the characters

and saw how simple the designs were,

I thought, "Well, I guess this will work. I don't know. We'll see."

Ultimately, it was a brilliant stroke.

The Bruce Timm style really is... You know, it's curves against lines.

I mean, people at Disney were doing it for years and years in feature.

We just utilized it down in TV animation.

I was working at the Don Bluth studios in the early '80s

on the video games and on The Secret of NIMH.

The whole Don Bluth aesthetic was very much classical Disney.

That's where I first heard concepts like straights against curves

and talking about different masses

and stylizing the shapes so they'll animate well, et cetera.

People loved it. They ate it up.

An interesting thing about Bruce Timm, though,

is, you know, Bruce Timm is self-taught.

That's the thing that I just find wacky and remarkable.

And maybe that's what's made him so unique,

that he didn't have anybody tell him how to do it and what to do,

which is also always an issue with Bruce.

For years when I was just drawing for my own amusement,

I was, uh... I pretty much taught myself how to draw

from mostly copying my favorite artists

and comic books.

TIMM: Later on, when I got into the animation business,

Dan DeCarlo was one of those artists who got passed around a lot,

and I really started paying attention to his comics and the way he drew,

uh, girls, especially... Uh, their facial features...

And so, there's definitely a little bit of DNA,

Dan DeCarlo DNA in the way I draw the female characters

in The Batman show.

I think you can see it in the smiles

and the kind of heart-shaped faces, et cetera.

Alex Toth was another artist that I had kind of gotten to later

in my career.

He had designed a lot of stuff for the Hanna-Barbera cartoons

in the '60s, you know, specifically, Space Ghost.

When I eventually got to design Batman for animation,

he was kind of a subliminal design in the back of my head.

I wasn't specifically trained to draw like Alex Toth,

but there's a ghost of an Alex Toth drawing,

the Space Ghost drawing underneath my Batman drawing,

even though I wasn't subconsciously, you know, channeling Alex Toth,

but it was just kind of there, and it kind of came out.

RIBA: With his animation expertise

and his comic book background of people like Kirby and Toth

and his experience of both, you know,

all melted into this Bruce Timm style.

And once I eventually got to do The Batman animated show,

all that stuff all kind of just rushed together

and became The Batman style.

IWANTER: It wasn't your typical Filmation look or Hanna-Barbera look.

It was a design look that had never been seen

on Saturday morning.

MURAKAMI: I used to have nightmares of...

My nightmares were very literal.

My nightmares were taking artwork to Bruce's office to show him.

Here's my design.

Bruce had a long corner office,

and he kept it very dark.

MURAKAMI: And back then he could smoke in the office.

So, you'd knock on the door and the room would be filled with smoke.

And you'd have to walk across this long room

to get to him at the end of his desk.

And it was filled with toys,

but it was dark and stuff like that, and smoke.

And he would look at the drawing, he would sigh,

and then he would reach down and pull a piece of paper

and put it over my drawing and, like, redo my drawing.

And then I'd look at it and I'd go, "Okay." Like, he'd make it better.

And then I'd have to take that walk of shame back to my desk

to redo the drawing. (CHUCKLES)

But he was right.

I mean, that was like a good learning experience.

And little by little, I think he could see that I was getting it.

And then, little by little, he would start going,

"Okay, don't do this." "Okay, do this."

And, um, I apprenticed.

You know, I graduated up,

but I think that's rare to apprentice like that.

I mean, I learned a ton just by going through that process.

TIMM: There was just so much of the show to design,

and before I had my own in-house crew to help me design the characters,

we had to kind of get going quickly.

I actually listed some of my favorite comic book artists.

I just reached out to them. They had nothing to lose.

So, I reached out to both Mike Mignola and to Kevin Nowlan.

Like, I didn't know either one of them, but through DC comics

who we were working with on the show,

I got their phone numbers, and I just called them up and said,

"Hey, I'm doing this Batman animated show,

"I'm a big fan of your work,

"Would you like to do some dot design work for the show?"

And they both said, "Okay, sure."

TIMM: Mike ended up designing Mr. Freeze.

The designs he came up with for Mr. Freeze

is very much an old school, kind of robotic, you know.

To me, it looks like Lon Chaney in the old man-made monster movie.

FOGEL: You try and scrape off all of the barnacles of the story telling

that have accumulated over the years,

because there have been so many stories told about these characters,

and try and get back to the essence of what they are.

All that anybody knew about Mr. Freeze at that time

was that he was the joke-y guy in the old Batman show.

He made weird ice puns, you know.

TIMM: And he was either dry-as-ice George Sanders,

or he was crazy Otto Preminger.

I said, "Bob, what if we took a character like that

"and added emotional depth to him?"

GOODMAN: You look at Heart of Ice, it looks so good.

It's one of the best episodes, if not the best episode of the series.

And it took a character, Mr. Freeze,

that previously didn't have this origin,

didn't have this emotional story...

And when Paul did what he did there,

it changed the landscape, you know.

It changed people's understanding of Mr. Freeze,

and the depth of which we were looking at these villains, forever.

BURNETT: I didn't know Paul well.

In fact, I hardly knew him at all.

We'd passed on the hallway.

And I knew him from the fact that he worked for Lucas,

everybody knew that.

That was the big buzz, that Paul Dini's writing the Ewoks show,

because everybody wanted something like that.

And he was disenchanted at that time for various reasons,

and was thinking of making a career move, leaving Warner Brothers.

BURNETT: And I wanted him to stay on because he was a good writer.

I was sort of over on Tiny Toons, and sort of somewhere else,

and I kind of left the studio for a while

to work on some other stuff.

And I wasn't really sure if I wanted to go back,

or to what degree I wanted to go back.

BURNETT: And I said, you can't go.

There's gotta be something you want to do.

He said, "Well, I have this idea,

"nice idea for Mr. Freeze's story."

And he told me a sentence or two, and I said, "Write it, do it."

A day or so later, he came back with the outline.

I'm reading the story, and it was Heart Of Ice,

and it was just great.

It was exactly what I wanted.

And so he started writing it,

and he was, you know, he was in, he was back in.

DINI: By that time, he said, "Just come back and start writing."

And like, "Yeah, all right. This is great now."

It's a lot of fun.

BURNETT: Thank God,

because he wrote some of the most important scripts for that show.

PAUR: Mr. Freeze has never been more

understandable, more relatable to.

They found a humanness in the villains.

They found a why, and they let us know the why.

DINI: How much can you feel for a character like Victor Fries?

Can you empathize with him?

Can you love a character like Harley Quinn,

who makes bad decisions?

Who still keeps going back to this maniac.

Can you empathize a little bit with the Riddler

and his ongoing need to try and prove himself over Batman?

The idea is to make every character human.

Even the bad guys.

BERKOWITZ: Part of that was Paul, part of that was Alan,

and part of it was, the two of them made sure they that had a lot of writers

who were inclined to take the character seriously

and not write in stereotypes.

You know, not have some crazy villain doing crazy stuff.

The villains wanted things.

They wanted human things.

DINI: Those made me care about the characters a little bit more.

You know, it's important, because that sets it up for the next generation.

They can take it a step further

and make the characters a little more human,

a little more funny, a little more interesting.

In our show, we were able to end something

without necessarily a happy ending.

The villain gets his comeuppance,

but because we've related to the character and we felt sorry for them,

it's a tragedy.

Uh, again, very noir. Very, very noir.

All the villains are not just treated as like, toss-away characters.

All the villains are not just treated as like, toss-away characters.

It was a soap opera.

PAUR: And it opened up the possibilities of animation

not just being for children.

That you could really get involved into the characters.

ALTIERI: Harvey Dent, that was such a great character.

One of the fastest storyboards I've ever done

was the ending of that one,

where Grace is coming down the hallway, and he screams.

It's Richard Moll doing that death-defying scream.

(SCREAMING)

When I saw that played in an audience at a convention once,

and at the end, when Grace, like, goes"'Harvey."

And he turns to the camera,

I heard this girl in the audience just started sobbing uncontrollably.

Like, it is. It's so sad, it's so tragic.

Harvey. (MOANS)

Villains suffer, not because they're villains,

they suffer because of something they wanted.

And it's not just some cheerful, happy ending, usually.

Goodbye, Grace.

One of the things that was unique about the working environment

on The Batman show, was that we were working as a unit.

That we were all together.

The writers and the artists were all together.

And that made a huge difference.

It meant that if there was something that was unclear in the script,

the director could come down and say, "Hey, what did you mean by this?"

So, there was a lot more interaction between the art and the writing staff

than there were on most shows.

The show was just...

It was a juggernaut. It was just huge.

And we were putting out, I think, three scripts a month

or something like that.

Oh! It was chaos. (LAUGHS)

I mean, we really were...

You know, falling by the seat of our pants.

MAN: It's Sherman Oaks.

This is the animation studio for Warner Brothers,

where they put together the Batman cartoon.

And as you can see,

Batman himself trying a beating up on one of the animators.

Warner Brothers started at the Sherman Oaks Galleria.

The large... It was the Imperial Bank building.

It was the way we referred to it. It was, like, a 14-story building

right next to what used to be a shopping mall.

TIMM: It was amazing that it was an office building.

I heard a lot of people used to complain that it was a ratty old dump,

and... (SIGHS) I don't know. I'm used to working in ratty old dumps

almost every studio I've ever worked in.

TIMM: They were all kind of low-rent.

We shared a floor with a real wild group of people.

I mean, I remember there was a fist-fight one night. Ay-yai-yai.

TIMM: It's a big bunch of offices,

and there was a big bullpen area where there's a lot of cubicles and stuff.

It looks like it could be, you know, any corporation.

Except that there's, you know,

usually a lot of artwork tacked up all over the walls, everywhere.

MACCURDY: Everybody was making it up as we went along.

I mean, that was part of the fun of it.

It was figuring out how to do it

and how to get the best out of people.

And to let people...

I was a real firm believer in letting people work

on what it is that they wanted to work on.

What they liked.

MACCURDY: And because that's when you're gonna get good work.

PAUR: There was a lot of fun.

There was a lot of discord at times.

There were a lot of fights,

because everybody cared about the characters.

MACCURDY: Animators and cartoons, I think...

They're very rebellious.

And you need something to rebel against,

in order to help feed that creative juice.

I don't like this. It's kind of stupid.

I mean, look. Have him jumping out of a third floor window,

and he's walking away.

Why don't we have him sit there and break his ankle?

And we see him in a cast...

A lot of them wouldn't do that. And I would say, "Why not?"

And then maybe we get something else out of it

that's completely unrelated to what we're even talking about.

It just evolved from that discussion.

But the point was, we would have those discussions.

There was a lot of that type of...

Sort of creative energy...

That was fun. It was fun.

We had a good time.

PAUR: We had some strongly-talented people on the series.

You know, playing pranks on people, while they're working,

Seeing images of Dan Riba stumbling down the hallway

into these booths in a Batman costume.

Getting in a fight with Eric, you know.

Stupid stuff like that.

This is generally a very congenial place,

people here really get along.

It's lots of fun. Well...

Oh, you saw this last hour, there they go again.

It's Batman and the writer. (CHUCKLES)

MACCURDY: And, you know, it's funny,

we finally built a fancy studio over at Sherman Oaks, over there.

That's when we started to lose it, I think,

'cause it was better when it was still sort of, the Termite Terrace feel.

We weren't successful.

You know, you kind of want to be the scrappy kids.

We always had Disney as our foil.

Um, yeah.

We always thought we were much better. (CHUCKLES)

We made a very good series...

I'm not bragging... I'm telling you, after the fact that

everybody put their heart and soul into it and worked together,

and we succeeded in making a series that I'm so proud of.

Let's go 38 to 40...

Seven. Just that far.

We had Andrea Romano as our recording director.

BURNETT: And she also cast the show.

KEVIN CONROY: The real secret of the show was the casting.

Andrea studied acting in college, in New York.

And then she became a stage manager, I think,

and then she became an agent,

and then she eventually became director of animation.

So, she understands what actors go through.

She understands the process.

CONROY: So, recording sessions were always really wonderful.

A wonderful experience that everyone looked forward to.

TIMM: You know, I had a meeting with her,

BRUCE TIMM CO-CREATOR

and kind of told her the kind of...

Overall feel that we wanted the show to have.

It would be very much, you know, realistic and straight, and serious,

and not high-pitched and super-high energy,

you know, like, say, Tiny Toons.

I think we mentioned that...

We said, "Yeah, ideally it would sound like a movie from the 1940s."

(SNAPPING FINGERS) "You know, that kind of fast-paced,

"but realistic, kind of naturalistic."

And she seemed to get it immediately.

She was, like, "I know exactly what you want."

ROMANO: For a show like Batman, I need killer actors.

Ideally, actors with stage credits, because it's that energy that's needed.

I had never done an animated voice before.

CONROY: I had never auditioned for an animated voice before.

I was a stage actor.

I went to Juilliard,

I worked on Broadway, I worked off Broadway,

I worked for Joe Path at the public... I was a New York actor.

ROMANO: For the single character of Batman itself,

I know I listened to well over 500 voices. Well over.

So many actors.

We didn't fall in love with anybody.

And when you're casting something as awesome as Batman,

for a series called Batman, you want to fall in love with them.

You really want to fall in love with them.

CONROY: I had done commercial voice-overs in New York,

so I had a voice-over agent.

And he said, "They're putting together a new show over at Warner Brothers.

"I know you haven't done any animation,

"but why don't you go over and give it a shot? It's Batman."

And I said, "No."

I said, "Batman's been around forever. It was on when I was a kid."

CONROY: I didn't go with any preconceptions.

I didn't go with any preconceived notions

or anticipation of who I was gonna meet.

I didn't know who Bruce Timm was, I didn't know who Andrea Romano was.

I was just an actor going into an audition.

So, we bring him in on the callbacks, and he walks through the door,

and he asked a couple of very intelligent questions.

And then we let him audition for the voice of Batman.

And it was truly the eureka moment that you wish for.

Bruce and I looked at each other and just...

You could see the stress of months of auditions

just fall from our faces, because we had found Batman.

It was remarkable.

The trick over this long arc has been to not let it get stale.

CONROY: And I learned this early on.

Batman is not the disguise.

Batman is who he went to, it's what he became,

because of the tragedy of his childhood.

It's where he found safety.

It's where he is most comfortable.

In that cave.

And the suit of armor he puts on, the role he plays for the world,

-is Bruce Wayne. -(CAT YOWLING)

That's the performance.

And so, once I found that about the character,

it really made sense to me.

It kept the Batman voice

from sounding artificial.

And it kept Bruce Wayne from...

It made him such a different persona.

Kevin Conroy is just phenomenal. But it's not just him.

I remember, my agent called

and left a message on my answering machine.

And he's, like, "Oh, my God. You're her.

"You're the girl. You're the girl that's a bat.

STRONG: "You're Batgirl!"

And he was screaming, I was screaming,

and I was, like, "Oh, my God!"

It was such a huge thrill to book it.

I was excited about it.

But it was really, like, "This is a really good job.

"A really nice job, and I hope it lasts."

LESTER: You know, that'd be nice, to do a few episodes.

Here we are, talking about it 25 years later.

We're still talking about that show.

I had no idea.

I had no idea that something like that was gonna happen.

MACCURDY: Andrea Romano was able to... You know, she's amazing,

in terms of not only her ability to figure out who to put where,

but to get to them and to convince them to do it.

STRONG: Every week there'd be some incredible guest star.

Efrem Zimbalist Jr., and of course, Arleen Sorkin.

It was just an amazing magical time.

CARLIN: Who thinks of going to Paul Williams to be the Penguin?

It was perfect. And it just sounded like a weird place,

because they were pulling guys,

Efrem Zimbalist Jr. was a great idea, you know. The guy had a voice.

But it's like he wasn't a voice actor up until that point.

And neither was Mark Hamill.

Actors all live, to a certain extent, in a fantasy world.

And to me, doing Batman was a lifelong dream in the sense that,

I always thought that the character actors had the most fun.

ROMANO: Oddly enough, as fate would have it,

Tim Curry, who was voicing the Joker for me,

was not a favorite of one of the new producers who came on the show.

And truth be told, I never would have replaced Tim Curry.

I loved Tim. I thought he was doing a beautiful job.

But I could never please this producer.

So, now I have to find the Joker,

but we're at least two or three, maybe four episodes into animation

with Tim Curry's voice.

So, the animation is done, the mouth flaps exist.

There's an energy, there's a performance, there's a timing

that I have to find an actor who can bring their own Joker to it

and mouth flap match Tim.

And sing, because the character sang in the Christmas episode.

So, I auditioned, auditioned, auditioned people,

and I went, "You know what, I've gotta give Mark a shot."

This might just be the answer to our prayers.

Mark Hamill, oh, my God. Do you think we can get him?

ROMANO: Mark walked in, and he was incredible.

One of the things it said at the top of the audition script,

"Don't think Nicholson."

What a relief that was.

HAMILL: Because I figured

if you're gonna just try and imitate Jack Nicholson,

you're gonna really suffer.

Because as wonderful as he is in the movie,

Jack is Jack. All we can do is imitate him.

That's not something I wanted to do.

I remember hearing his audition for the Joker, and it was the laugh.

Once I heard the laugh, I was going, like, "Oh, God, that's it."

(JOKER LAUGHING)

HARLEY QUINN: You're really sick. You know that, boss?

Mmm-hmm.

It just sent goosebumps down my spine.

He has so inhabited that role,

and it would just, sort of, physically take over his body as he did it.

It was an amazing transformation to watch.

If the world decides to build a Mount Rushmore for the Joker,

it's going to be Jack Nicholson, Heath Ledger and Mark Hamill.

USLAN: Because Mark is the definitive voice of the Joker.

The Joker that you hear today on the cartoon by Mark Hamill,

is exactly the Joker he did for us when he walked in and auditioned for us.

DINI: It was manic, it was funny,

and there was a little element of tragedy to it.

It was just a little bit of, like, "This guy is a lost soul."

And he doesn't care.

And that's what made it scary.

ROMANO: It was as if from childhood

he had thought about how he would voice the Joker.

If he ever got the chance to do it.

Everyone was doing these incredible villain characters.

DINI: Arleen, wonderful as Harley.

I brought her up and said, "Hey, I'm kind of basing this character

"on my friend. She's a comedic actor.

"I thought of getting her to do the voice."

And Andrea was saying, "Okay, I'll give her a shot."

She came in and she had this sort of

warped Billie Holiday quality to her voice.

And the fact that she hadn't done voice-over,

that made her want to experiment and try different things,

and she brought in a newness to...

To her performance and to that character, and it really clicked.

RUEGGER: Harley Quinn's a great example.

What a character created by Paul Dini and Bruce Timm.

And here she is, this sort of zany sidekick to the Joker.

It came from Batman: The Animated Series, and they're...

Warner Brothers is thinking of giving her her own movie franchise.

RUEGGER: I mean...

This thing really did create some lasting images

and some lasting characters.

So, it's fun to have actors of that caliber, you know.

And we had, like, almost the entire crew lined up,

like a radio play.

A great thing about recording for Warner Brothers,

and Andrea Romano, specifically,

is they really like to get all the actors together in a room.

ROMANO: I can't say that I insisted upon it,

but I really tried to always make that happen

on every series I directed.

Because a major part of acting is reacting.

CONROY: So, you have the other actors to bounce things off of.

I wouldn't be nearly as good in what I do

if I didn't have Mark Hamill feeding me as the Joker.

So, typically, when there's a group cast record,

all the actors will be in a semi-circle

facing the booth so that we can see the director.

Everyone's in the room together. It's just one big room.

And you have music stands, you've got a microphone,

and you got headsets on.

So, we would all be sitting there, all of us,

except for Mark Hamill, who would always stand.

LESTER: I always knew Mark was in the show because I'd come in

and there would be one microphone stand standing.

I'd say, "Oh, Mark's in this episode."

You're really listening to each other and playing off each other,

it's a very collaborative world.

I would say a line, and maybe the other actor would pause

before saying something.

And that would give me pause

and make me think about what are they thinking.

This is what you do in every realm where good acting is involved.

LESTER: And that situation where we were all in the room together,

that lent itself to that.

ROMANO: I wanted to make sure that there was a sensitivity to these pieces,

and that's why you'll see where there are emotional scenes

that are played, I let them breathe.

I wanted them to breathe, I want to take more time.

I wanted the actors to make me cry.

And they almost always did.

And if they didn't, I felt like I hadn't done my job right.

Andrea knew what to say to get the actors to give the performance.

That she and the other people in the booth

were expecting or envisioned.

So, feel free to ask questions as we go along,

I'll describe the action that

I think it's important for you to know, and we'll just go scene by scene.

LESTER: So, remember the animation is done later.

We do the voice first.

And all we get is a script with words on it.

When we record, it's up to Andrea to paint the pictures for us.

And that's what she would do.

She would really paint the pictures of what was going on,

'cause she'd seen the storyboards.

And she would tell us, you know, "Okay, you're in a helicopter,

"and the mountain is coming right at you."

These kinds of things

you couldn't necessarily picture or get from the script.

There would be brief descriptions,

but she would really paint the picture of it,

and if it wasn't quite the right sound, especially in the fights...

There are different kinds of fights.

There's a difference between an "Uh" and an "Oh!"

So, she would say, "Okay, now you're getting kicked in the stomach."

(GRUNTS)

Mmm. And she sees the storyboard,

"Now you're getting really kicked hard in the stomach."

So, you know,

those are things that we would not be able to do

unless we had a wonderful captain at the helm,

and she, you know, was it.

ROMANO: I would never ask an actor to do something that I wouldn't do.

So, I was right there with them.

I would cry with them, I would get angry with them.

I would yell with them.

I would do everything... I would do it first

so that they could see that it's okay to...

To do it that broad. It's okay to cry, to yell, to be...

You know, all those things.

These are super-real, authentic, emotional pieces that we're working on.

STRONG: And that's part of why this show is so well-loved by the fans.

They felt that authenticity.

It was very collaborative how we came to the energy of this show,

and where the quiet moments needed to be.

ROMANO: And those are the moments that I really love to direct,

where you just take that breath, that moment,

and then a huge fight scene happens.

(DRAMATIC MUSIC PLAYING)

Bruce is very upfront.

He did not want wall-to-wall music on his shows.

You know.

Sometimes I wish that we had just a little bit more.

But he was right in saying that we need breathing space.

PAUR: Absolutely. Especially in these types of shows.

-The film noir. -(SIREN BLARING)

Sometimes you just need a sound, a simple sound effect, you know.

The dripping of the water, you know,

a rat scurrying across the sewer line or something.

That's all you needed.

You just let the echo take it. And that's... That's the music.

That little sound effect carrying over in an echo,

plays as music, because it serves the same purpose.

Music was equally as important, and as wonderful and brilliant

as all of the other elements that came together

and to say that we knew that would happen,

would be a complete lie.

Because all of those things made...

Made the series become the iconic series that it has become.

For the first time in almost any animated show like that,

we had real orchestral music.

PAUR: It wasn't a synthesizer.

(SUSPENSEFUL ORCHESTRAL MUSIC PLAYING)

It was real instrumentation.

We had Shirley Walker, who is just one of the greatest composers ever.

In my mind, she is such a delightful person as well.

She was phenomenal. She came up with a theme for Batman

that is just haunting.

To this day it's a haunting theme.

When we did Tiny Toons,

we needed to make the music really important.

RUEGGER: And Steven wanted to spend all the money on the music.

We were spending a fortune.

MACCURDY: Steven said to me, "Well, we have to have a full orchestra."

For these cartoons.

And I was, "Oh, nobody does that."

You know, you record these little sound bites, Steven,

and then you just cut them in wherever you need them

and you use them over and over again.

He was, like, "No. We are not going to do that."

And I was, like, "Oh. Okay." (CHUCKLES)

I wasn't sure what that meant, but it meant a lot of money.

And so when we started Batman, there was, like,

"Well, we have to have an orchestra." I mean, that's what we do.

That is now what Warner animation does. We do full orchestra.

(CHUCKLING) So, it was, like...

And, so, thank you, Steven.

Got us an orchestra.

Shirley Walker wanted this Batman Animated Series very much.

She really kind of stepped forward and said,

"You gotta let me score this series."

MACCURDY: She was just...

She was... Oh, God, makes me get teary.

She was really a gift.

Um, she was something else.

MACCURDY: Talk about a strong woman. (CHUCKLES)

You know, in that business.

And she had worked for Danny Elfman, and God, the talent

and the sound that comes out of her...

It was something else.

I have very, very specific memories of

the very first time she conducted an orchestra

to our picture, over at the lot.

Eric and I went over there,

and we were sitting there in the control booth,

and she's out there conducting the orchestra.

She runs the film and we hear the orchestra,

you know, power up, and it's playing that dynamic opening music

to the first episode, On Leather Wings.

It was, like, trombones and strings...

It was, like, really dark and spooky and gothic,

and I was just, like, "Wow!"

I was, like, "This sounds great.

"I've never heard a TV cartoon that sounds like this."

It's like... Yeah, it was something.

(MUSIC PLAYING)

RADOMSKI: And she then whispers to me.

She's like, "Over half of these people are LA Philharmonic players,

"and this is day job for them."

And you just... I don't even know how you describe it,

other than to go, "How did I get so lucky?"

I mean, this is just incredible.

And then, of course the starting of the music,

and it's just chills.

(ORCHESTRAL MUSIC PLAYS)

When I heard the score for that first episode...

I mean, it just brought tears to your eyes.

It was just so beautiful.

And it was just... I couldn't believe that they had, like...

They assembled, like, an orchestra.

It was, like, one of the great moments of my life. (LAUGHS)

(ORCHESTRAL MUSIC PLAYING)

The first episode we got a tape.

And it was a VHS tape sent to DC's offices.

We all stopped working and we went to the conference room,

and we watched On Leather Wings, like regular people.

CARLIN: And we were thrilled because it took the comics seriously

and translated it in a way that we weren't embarrassed by.

And that is not always the case. (CHUCKLES)

So, we were nervous to watch it,

and we didn't know what a Bruce Timm was or a Paul Dini was at that time.

But we were just thrilled.

And after that, we would watch them as they came in,

and just enjoy the show as fans.

And, uh, there's nothing better for us

than to be able to watch something and say,

"We don't have to apologize for this at all."

And that, again, does not happen all the time.

MACCURDY: All shows have a lifespan.

We started to run out of stories.

We start to run out of a new vision.

It's very hard to sustain something too long.

And it'll become detrimental when you do.

MACCURDY: These have lifespans, I believe.

FOGEL: The period of time when we were doing this series,

this was where you wanted to be in animation.

This was where everybody wanted to be in animation.

And the big reason for that is Jean MacCurdy.

She was the best animation executive, bar none.

MACCURDY: I started as a secretary,

and 30 years later I retire as president of the animation division.

I think I was the first division president. Female division president

of Warner Brothers. I'm proud of that, you know.

I have more appreciation for that now,

being out of it, than I did when it was happening.

You're just doing your job.

Listen, I had a great time.

I have no regrets.

I worked with fabulous people. And generous people.

Jean had our back all the time. All the damn time.

We could not have made the show

without her running interference for us.

BERKOWITZ: Yeah, she was the enabler.

She was the good parent, and there was no disciplinary parent.

Do whatever you want. We amused her.

I think that we were like little clowns that amused her.

MACCURDY: We were all so young. You know what I mean?

We were all young.

And there's something to be said for that. (LAUGHS)

There's a juice there, and a need to make your statement...

And you have a real... (HUFFS)

Fierce feeling and...

You're right, you know, even when you're not.

And sometimes it works out.

TIMM: We got a lot of push back from people, you know,

saying, "Who are these two young punks

"telling us this is how they want to do the show?"

I was, like, "Well, that's not how you make a show."

PAUL: You gotta be gutsy. You gotta break your own rules,

and see where they get you.

Take some chances and risk upsetting a few people,

but, you know, more often than not

you'll come up with something kind of fun.

The thing I miss the most are the people and the interaction.

The interaction not only with the people themselves,

but with that creative process.

MACCURDY: It's watching people who got sold with the concept

and visualizing it, and bringing it to life.

That's a rush. That is a real rush.

(STUTTERS)

That I miss.

I don't miss all the peripheral shenanigans

that go on around showbiz, but, uh, that part of it I miss.

AVERY COBERN: I got to work so closely

with such creative people as Alan and Sidney,

and it was just wonderful

to be creative in my job,

and to work with these people who were at the top of their form,

and had this vision.

COBERN: These visions of what animation could be, and...

Yeah, it was a highlight of my career, for sure.

People think of cartoons or comic books as,

"Oh, that's just a cartoon or a comic book."

That's... "It's disposable. It's kids stuff."

And we just played it straight.

I think we were all fans of it, and we loved it.

I'm trying to make it not a big mystical thing,

I think we just played it straight.

DINI: When entertainment is done well,

it works on a level for kids and adults.

I really think it's something that they embrace

and carry throughout the years.

TIMM: You know, I see people at conventions all the time.

The people are, like, in their 30s,

saying, "Oh, yeah. When I was a kid, your Batman was like..."

"That's right. That was my first exposure to Batman."

And it's, like, "We'll, that's kind of cool."

'Cause, like, my first exposure to Batman was Adam West.

TIMM: So, it's kind of neat to be kind of somebody's first.

And when I go to Cons,

it's another opportunity for me to give back and say thanks,

and they get so excited to meet me.

STRONG: I mean, I've had people pass out, cry and shake all the time.

You know, I was at a Con six months ago, and there was a girl talking to me,

and I looked over and I saw her mom really crying.

Again, I've seen people cry many times,

but there was something unusual about her.

So, I went over and I said, "Are you okay?"

And she said, "My daughter's autistic, and she hasn't spoken in five years.

"When she knew you were coming, she didn't shut up for two weeks."

And I'm, like, "Wow!" Like, that's heavy.

That's heavy, that knowing she was gonna meet me

brought her back out. And I take that role seriously.

I'm happy and amazed that the show has had a lasting power

that it has.

That it's still popular.

USLAN: We have learned over the years

that other people can come in with other creative perspectives

on what a superhero should be or not be.

And they are not always quite as successful,

or true to the integrity of a character.

So often you have artists

who have the vision, who have the foresight,

and want to break the molds.

And then you also have people who are trained in the world of business

not wanting to rock the boat

when you have a formula that has proven successful in the past.

So, you've got a resistance to change to boldness and to daring.

And it is only

when both sides of the Gemini coin come together

and listen to each other and be prepared to take risks,

calculated risks, that innovative things get done.

So, until somebody breaks the mold

and gets the ability to do something new and different,

it doesn't get done, it's not successful.

That is why this is so important.

Why the Batman Animated Series

broke through boundaries.

And these were hefty boundaries.

And got people on the other side of the coin

to say, "Okay, let's give it a go. Let's try it.

"You are making a compelling argument, we appreciate your vision,

"and we want to be supportive of your vision.

"Let's take a calculated risk on this and go with it."

And the rewards were incredible.

SEBAST: They always say this is regarded as

one of the best adaptations of a comic book ever done, you know.

Or the best, in many cases...

A lot of people feel it is.

And it's an incredible honor to have worked on that, you know,

and to know you were part of it.

And hopefully, in some small way, contributed to that.

DINI: A child grows up with it.

There are certain elements of it they really like. They...

You know, they'll take with them into their college years,

they'll have a job, and then they'll see a figurine of a character

and they'll put it on their desk at work.

-(FOOTSTEPS) -(SIREN WAILING IN DISTANCE)

IWANTER: I wonder if any of the shows

that have been on over the last, maybe, 10 years,

will have generated

that kind of passion, a quarter of a century from now.

IWANTER: I don't know whether that'll happen.

I call a lot of the stuff today, tonnage.

It's forgettable.

Uh, and it's not the fault of the writers.

It's not the fault of the animators.

But I do think it's the fault of people who are above them,

who are in marketing and merchandising, and are fearful.

They second-guess the writers. They second-guess the artists.

Most importantly, they second guess the audience.

And you can't have a successful show

if you're second-guessing your demographic.

'Cause you'll never achieve anything of merit.

TIMM: It was great to see words that we had come up with, you know,

written down on a page and hear those lines come to life.

And it's amazing how often people will say to me

that it's what got them into not just Batman, but into comics.

They've become comic book fans.

It was like the Batman Animated Series was their gateway drug.

So I was, like, "Well, that's kind of cool."

But, as to why... (SOFTLY) I don't know.

Like I said, I think you kind of had to be there.

RADOMSKI: When you embrace the fact

of the amount of talent that was involved,

and sacrifices that everyone made to make this series into what it became,

um, it's just... Uh, it's personally overwhelming

to know that this is still as popular, if not more, 25 years later,

and it really, again, is just a testament to

the true passion of people.

The artists that worked on the show,

had for the content and for, you know,

for the goal, because it took that team effort to pull this off

and keep it consistent for the time that it took,

um, to produce this show.

BURNETT: After he died, I was asked to go to a memorial lunch

for Bob Kane's passing.

It was the secret dining room that studios have.

Paul Levitz, one of the smartest guys I've ever met, ever, said

this wonderful little memorial statement

about how Bob Kane had created this character,

who had a core that was so strong,

and so deep that he...

It was... Other writers could come in

and add their vision to this character.

And change the world, create the world,

do things with him and then let him go for the next person to come in.

That really is a remarkable thing,

and the way Paul said it was beautiful.

And that's how I felt about us, the Batman group at Warner Brothers.

Suddenly this Batman's character came to us.

Having had all this added to them over the years by other creators.

And now it was our turn.

BURNETT: And we took our turn, and he goes away for the next person.

So, it's quite... I mean, Batman is

an amazing character with legs that will go forever.