Batman: The Animated Series - Behind the Scenes Movie

It was 1990. My boss at the time, Jean McCurdy, called a big group meeting where she got the entire studio together and said, "Well, you know, yeah, we're coming to the end of Tiny Toons. You guys did a great job. We're looking to develop other properties to, you know, sell another series, and one of them was Batman." [Music]

After that meeting, I went back to my desk and I had Tiny Toons work I was supposed to do, and I just shoved it in the corner, and I just started drawing Batman. The next time Gene had one of those meetings, I showed her this sheet of drawings that I had done with Batman, and she went, "Wow, that's great. That's exactly what he looks like. Yeah, Batman animated, that's perfect."

A month or two later, she specifically called me and Eric Radomski into her office. Eric was uh, he was a background painter on on Tiny Toons, and he had also, independently of me, had done some background treatments of what he thought Gotham City would look like. Gene said, "I want you guys to put together a short Batman cartoon, kind of like a little mini pilot show, that the studio has what we're talking about, what we would be doing."

When Gene called Bruce and I together to say, "You know, we like your take on this thing. We'd like to see what you guys do together," that was the first time we met each other, and and thought, "Okay, cool. Let's see what we can do." So the first thing I did was I made um, color Xerox blow-ups of a whole bunch of old pulp covers from the 30s and 40s. Um, so I had those plastered all over the walls for inspiration. The Fleischer Superman cartoons from the early 1940s, those were probably the strongest influence on the look of Batman and the series as well. We were just kind of like pushing the envelope, trying to say, "You know, let's let's make this as different from every other cartoon on TV, you know, as possible." [Applause]

Bruce pitched out the idea of what that scenario should be: a couple thugs on the roof, Batman shows up, dark and mysterious, you know, takes them out and flies off heroically, and you know, it made sense, of course. You know, it was appropriate for the character. It was it was just what we needed, just a couple minutes worth of material. Once it was an assembled piece and you saw that pan moving in multi-layers, suddenly Gotham City had life, and Batman was, you know, absolutely going to work in this world.

The ironic thing about it was that, in the meantime, while we were actually putting this cartoon together, the studio decided they were going to go ahead with the Batman cartoon. The nice thing about it for me personally and for Eric was that we had this nice portfolio piece, so Gene was able to go to the the studio heads and say, "I want these guys to do this Batman cartoon," which again, you know, Eric and I really weren't expecting that. And lo and behold, you know, they came back to us and asked us if we wanted to produce it. And I think both of us were just absolutely stunned. We thought, "What are they thinking? Hey, you know, we've never done this before. What the hell are we going to do?" But it really, the promo stood on its own, and I think that was enough for anybody to think that, "If you guys pulled it off in this time frame and it looks this unique, you know, it's we're going to have to try really hard to screw up the series."

Bootleg copies of it have gotten out, and it does show up at conventions occasionally. They're probably like, you know, 18 million generations away from the original at this point, but um, but I know people have seen it, so yeah, it's uh, but it's still kind of a rare item. The show is just dark. I mean, it's like dark, dark, dark. It's like black on black. The approach to the series in general was to try and make it feel timeless. I wanted to go back to the comic books and really do a serious Batman show, and it worked great, and it was just a show you wanted to watch again and again. There was something about it that just punched right in the face when you turned on the TV. [Music]

What made Batman the Animated Series just electrifying is that it was unlike anything else we'd ever seen on TV before, and that's what made it just so compelling. The thing about the Batman Animated Series is that it it took this world and it took it seriously without taking itself too seriously. So you had a world that you could believe in.

Early on, there were a lot of discussions about the direction of the series, and I would speak at length with Bruce about where he wanted the show to go and how he felt Batman should act and speak. Initially, my own personal idea of Batman is quite a bit different than the way he is actually in Batman the Animated Series. Just the logistics of telling a story for television in a film medium, a lot of the ideas that I had for Batman I knew really wouldn't work for a cartoon.

What Bruce and I both found a meeting of the minds on, once we got to know each other and we started talking about what we wanted to do with the series, we both were interested in telling real stories, telling many movies is the way we were referring to them at the time. We didn't want to have a typical Saturday morning type approach to the show. They really knew the comics industry, and they knew Batman's history, and they knew all of the different years and different styles that went into making these characters what they were, and that's why the Batman Animated Series works so well.

When I first saw Batman the anime series, it was groundbreaking. Um, what it did, it captured a style and tone that was completely different from anything else that we've seen in cartoon at the time. We call it dark deco, dark deco world, which with um, some computer technology going for it, it's just another dimension of a contemporary world. In my mind, it was sort of like, "What if the 1939 World's Fair had gone on another 60 years or so, and that cool sense of design and stylishness from the art deco years was in operation well up until the 90s?" That way you could have kind of a rounded look to the cars and a stylish look to the buildings. You could have television and computers, but everything would have a black and white screen. You could believe that Batman could operate in a world that looked like that.

Eric Radomski was the architect of the architecture, so to speak. He was mostly, I think, involved with the background. One of his ideas was to create the backgrounds on black paper so that people were drawing with lighter materials on this dark surface so that it created a moody atmosphere. "As dark as I can do the show, this is the way I would play it," I'd love to have characters moving in the shadows at night. You only see elements, you fill in the gaps, kind of the perfect approach to Gotham City in terms of Batman the Animated Series. The image that pops into my head every time will be the very first thing I ever saw, which is that shadowy figure, Batman standing on the rooftop.

Somewhere along the way, they decided, "We don't really need the titles of this thing. It's Batman." Nobody was doing anything like that before, and actually incorporating the Warner Brothers logo was really very old world. It was really cool. It made the show feel like it belonged in another time. And the greatest shot is when Batman just leaps onto one of them, and you don't even see what he did to the guy, but the guy is just out. Everything you need to know about Batman is in that 30-second opening. If you look at the main titles, there's no word that tells you it's Batman. We figured anybody in any language will be able to look at and go, "Oh, it's Batman." [Music]

Bruce was very determined to tell the show as visually as possible, which was a challenge and a very bold direction. It was kind of, you know, guerrilla cartoon making to a degree, you know, because we were just taking our skills and knowledge that we had accumulated, but at the same time willing to throw the rule book out if we thought that we could get a cool cinematic effect out of it or a good storytelling device. You know, as a writer, I was always looking for ways I could bring little flourishes or extra value to every scene or every episode. I remember "Heart of Ice," one thing I I wrote in the script, you know, it's a cool way to show off Mr. Freeze's powers. He had to get into a building, so he ran over to a fire hydrant, kicked it open with his big old metal boot and shot his freezing gun into the water coming out, and that acted as this big frozen geyser, lifted him up and put him in the building.

The thought process on Batman was great. Here he's a character who doesn't talk much, which is as he should be. I thought the more you can tell stories like that, the better the show is going to be. You just feel a lot of responsibility about it because he's an institution. He's a special icon to a lot of people. You're not reinventing him, you're building on what he was and has been. They went back to the core concepts of who Batman is: what was the motivation of the character, what were the things that mattered most of the character. I've told Bruce and fault in the beginning that I thought Batman is the real character and Bruce Wayne is the disguise, that's the face he puts on for the world. Batman is who he is and his heart. I think there's a lot of different levels to appreciate the character. There's a fun, chummy pal thing with him and Robin that's that kids can latch on to when they're little, and there's also a dark, tragic aspect of it that as you get older you start to understand and it feels more realistic.

I think one of the things I loved about Batman the anime series is that you can see the first episode, you can see the tenth episode, you can see the third season and still walk in as a first-time viewer and feel like it's touching upon everything that you know true to be about Batman and the characters that he fights. "Who are you?" "I'm your worst nightmare, Batman." Batman has by far the greatest collection of villains in all of comics. "Looks like we're experiencing technical difficulty, but don't worry folks, we're still on the air."

So often the Joker's been played as sort of like a harmless clown or a total raving psychotic madman, which actually defeats the purpose of doing the character because then he becomes totally unsavory. He had these really demonic, scary eyes and this this two-filled grin that looked like the Blue Meanies and Yellow Submarine. With the Joker, I felt we struck a nice balance between the clown and the killer. We also got into his personality a lot and really made him kind of a scary character, and he was a character that you didn't get bored with seeing. Sherlock Holmes has his Professor Moriarty; Batman has his Joker. That's why the Joker's endured for so long. Most people would just go out and commit the crime. He likes to announce that he's going to do things and challenge you to stop him. "It is to laugh, huh, Mr. J?"

"Harley Quinn. Yeah, my favorite. He's here." Paul was right in this episode where he just kind of had this weird idea. It's like, "Oh, wouldn't it be fun if, you know, if one of the Joker's henchmen was a hench girl," and then I just made her kind of a kind of a screwball who would would say things with a goofy attitude, yet when the Joker called on her to pull a trigger, she could do it. Harley Quinn was such a big hit. I mean, they've made toys and statues, they've incorporated her into the comic books, she has their own series. You know, I think Harlequin is a great foil for Joker.

"I'm not an actor anymore. I'm not even a man." I love the visuals of Clayface, and they did a terrific job with him, from being an actor to being this monster that can look like anybody. Clayface was really great. All that dripping and all that, oh my gosh, it was a lot of hard work. The transformation effects that they did on the Clayface character, they even went beyond what we had actually put on the board. I mean, we actually tried to throw in every trick we could think of at the time on how to make the shape-shifting look great. You know, they would have the head like, you know, spin up and rotate and then morph into something else. To this day, that really stands out as like a real stellar piece of animation in Warner Brothers animation history. "Don't bother to adjust the picture for the next five minutes. I'm in control."

Two-Face was the first character that kind of we put our own stamp on. Fortunately, Alan Burnett came up with some really good psychological twists for the character that really had never really been seen before in the comics or or elsewhere. I actually consulted with psychologists to come up with a back story that would be suitable for children's programs. I was interested doing a show about a split personality who was already in trouble before he actually changed into Two-Face. That whole play on the psychology of that character was really the most satisfying from the villain pool because again, he was human and he had, you know, he was torn, and that part of it was great fodder for good storytelling. [Music]

I've read every single Batman story ever published. I've listened to every radio show. I've seen every cartoon. There's I've read every book, and "Heart of Ice" is easily one of the best Batman stories ever told. "Since you ally yourself with my enemies, you leave me no choice." My first script was the Mr. Freeze episode, "Heart of Ice," and I talked to Bruce about, you know, "Hey, wouldn't it be cool to take the Mr. Freeze character in this direction?" We had discussed the idea of a man with no emotions who had suffered a great tragedy and that made him very cold. Up until we got a hold of him in the Adam West show, he was, you know, he was obviously played kind of silly. He was always just kind of a generic, you know, cold villain. He never really had any kind of psychological motivation or anything. I guess it strikes a chord with me seeing that villain portrayed so sympathetically and seeing Batman trying to understand that, and Mr. Freeze is almost more emotionally balanced than Batman is. It's really a cool dichotomy. The best episodes of the of the animated series were moving because they were genuinely about characters, generally about emotions and generally about deep feelings, and they weren't just about people punching each other, and that's what made it a great show. "Now, the man who impersonated Bruce Wayne, I want his name."

They didn't just hire generic cartoon voice actors. Bruce and his crew set out to hire actors who happened to be in a cartoon show, and that made all the difference. The name. Now, some of the characters we filled fairly easily, and then some of the ones we kind of had to keep looking for because we just weren't hearing what we wanted to hear. And Batman himself, being the most important character in the series, was also not surprisingly the most difficult part to cast. "Last chance, talk." And then we had one of those fine casting moments where an actor walked into the studio, his name was Kevin Conroy, and he got in front of the microphone, and he opened his mouth, and he finished his audition, and the room of producers and writers and people sat together and said, "We are done."

The minute he opened up his mouth and started reading the Batman dialogue, his voice went down into that Batman voice. I just went to a very dark um, and private place in my in my vocal range because it seemed like such a dark, private world he lived in, and we all just kind of went, "Oh, I think we got him. I think we got our Batman. He's good, but no actor is that good." The directive always was, "Don't think of it as animation, just read it like you were acting in a play." "I'm sure all the folks at home will enjoy sharing this special occasion with uh, the Joker." Uh, I imagined I was in a 1930s radio drama. They told us from the first day of recording, "Forget cartoon sounds. We don't want any cartoon voices." We cast a lot of actors who have what we call a voice with character as opposed to an actor doing a cartoon voice. This is people who have either a recognizable sound or quality to their voice that is special and um, identifiable more than familiar. It's identical.

One of the reasons why I remember the Grey Ghost story is because Adam West was the voice of the Grey Ghost. You like, you said, "You need my help." When we were casting the uh, the part for the Grey Ghost, somebody suggested Adam West. "We should get Adam West to play the Grey Ghost," and we all just kind of went, "Yeah." There was a great parallel story being told between Grey Ghost's origin and Batman's origin, and the fact that they had Adam West playing that role just gave it more meaning and more resonance for me, somebody especially who grew up on the original Batman TV show. That's one of the things that uh, really helped set the the Batman show apart from other cartoons on at the time was that the uh, the high caliber of the uh, the vocal performances. "I'll cancel Master Bruce's rendezvous with the Bambi, was it, sir?" "Yes, Alfred, do that." [Music]

Everybody was very impressed by the music that Danny Elfman had done for the first Batman movie, and we thought that was definitely the right direction to go, that kind of retro noir, you know, mysterioso kind of score. I'd remembered seeing a making of Batman documentary on TV, and I remember at the time being kind of surprised that Danny Elfman wasn't conducting the orchestra. Shirley Walker was conducting the orchestra, and I went, "Oh, who's this lady who's conducting the orchestra?" And speaking with her, she she totally respected what we were doing. She was very collaborative in terms of what we wanted to do with this, and we had hoped for something that would sound like a movie score again, in keeping with the whole idea of mini movies, and she just nailed it. We owe so much to her in terms of again, keeping up this this level of class for a show from day one. The very first time, you know, we actually went to the recording stage to to listen to the orchestra play one of our scores or play one of Shirley's scores for for our show, it was, you know, the opening of of the Man-Bat show. I can clearly remember, you know, those trombones going down. It was like like chills up and down up and down our spines. You know, we were just like, "Wow, we're really onto something. This sounds just awesome." You didn't experience anything like this before. It's an animated show, half-hour format, and suddenly you're totally taken into the world. You feel like you've seen a movie every time you watch the show. It never ceased to satisfy. [Music]

When we got the first show back animated from Japan on "Leather Wings," Eric and I both just breathed a huge sigh of relief, and even without the score or the sound effects on it, we knew, you know, we'd kind of struck gold. We were so jazzed when we saw that first footage. We saw Batman doing Batman stuff, and it was so cool, and it worked so well. It was so stylized. And at first, it took me a little while to get used to it because I looked at I would say, "Boy, that's an awfully square jawline. Those ears are awfully pointy on Batman's costume," and then you watch one, two, three episodes, and you realize that is absolutely right. It fits with the voices, it fits with the style. You hear that music and you see those images, and it blew me away. I thought it was stunning. I think that the show really did help to define the way people looked at Batman.

Batman the Animated Series as a touchstone of Batman history and as a like a clear marker in the Batman timeline is as prominent as anything. I think is going to be as important to Batman's history, perceived that way now and in the years to come, as important as the new look Batman in the 60s or the the Dick Sprang Batman in the 50s. It really was a touchstone that not just cartoon guys, but comic book creators themselves have been able to draw from since then, and that sensibility and that sense of giving Batman that darker edge and that timeless quality to him, it's very much an important marker in Batman's history. The legacy of Batman the Animated Series is going to be that it raised the bar for the standard of animation. I thought some of these early cartoons, especially, were so well written, so beautifully animated, such a wonderful gift to those of us who love the comic books. The greatest thing about the Batman series, it pioneered it for so many other things. Without what all these guys did on Batman, we wouldn't have Justice League, we wouldn't have the Superman Animated Series, we wouldn't have the Teen Titans Animated Series. We want them to survive and thrive and grow and change, but at the same time, they have to keep their iconic status, and that's what these guys did. Batman's character is going to be ongoing, so this is a nice chapter. I'm just pleased to have been part of that series.

You know, looking back on it, it was it was a pretty great time. It's hard for me not to idealize it as a sort of wonderful moment where we were all happy and blissfully doing our job and thinking, "Oh, we're making the Heart of Ice episode. We're making On Leather Wings. You know, we're making something great." It's like, "No, we were guys doing doing jobs, and a really good one came along." For my money, this is the quintessential ultimate Batman because it incorporates all aspects of the history of Batman. It's definitely was the turning point in careers for all of us, and that was that was pretty cool because it I think threw a lot of the guys on the show back to when we were kids and the shows and the films that we'd seen and thought, "You know, wow, that's great. I'd love to do that for a living. You know what a cool job." Suddenly we were in that place, and to have people react to it and enjoy the same things that we were enjoying, that was the ultimate satisfaction in a way. Our version of Batman is, I think, at least I've heard from a lot of people from, you know, who grew up watching the show that that's the Batman they think of when they think of Batman's like, "Oh yeah, that's you know, the Batman Animated Series is is Batman to me." So that's neat to be a part of that legacy.

I always thought you dubbed in uh, your voice to match the actions of the drawn character, but not so. The voice becomes the structure of the performance, and the the animator matches his drawings and sound and everything like that to that performance. You know, the rules. There are times when I can't explain my actions even to you. "Hey, that line worked great in sixth grade, but in case you hadn't noticed, we'll discuss this later." We record ensemble, which means all the actors are in the room, ideally at the same time, so they can not only act but they can react, which is a big part of acting. It makes their editing process a lot more complicated, I'm sure, but it gives the performances that feeling of a real dramatic interaction. "Half of me wants to strangle you, and what does the other half want? To hit you with a truck." "We used to date." Ah, I liken it most to the old radio shows where all the actors are standing in front of their microphones with the music stand and they've got their scripts, and that of course is one of the joys of voice acting is you don't ever have to memorize a line of dialogue. Your script is right there in front of you. "My word, you can't turn to deliver a line because then you're off mic," so we really were just totally dependent upon ears. "Thanks for coming after me. I owed you." "Well, I'd like to think our relationship isn't just restricted to saving each other from freaks and weirdos." And that maybe we'd have a place for each other without Gotham, without

The freaks, maybe without masks. There's always a great temptation there. There's always a lot of wistfulness between the two of them. There's always a lot of longing and wondering, "What if it could happen?" And they've been close, very close. But part of the curse of being Batman is that you know, whereas she is probably the perfect woman for him, she will always be just forever out of reach.

The cool thing about the environment, the universe that was created, was that we were allowed to explore different manifestations and different characters. You got to have this supporting cast, you know, around Batman, and it creates this interesting, colorful world and creates the world of contrast. We didn't have to just have a, you know, a cast of hundreds of nameless, useless characters that did nothing more than voice the dialogue. These characters added value to the history of Batman, as we were trying to make it [Music].

Robin brings a certain child appeal to the Batman universe. A lot of times, kids really look for a stronger, uh, heroic role model to identify with, and they fantasize, not so much, "Could I be that character?" but "Could I work with him?" What we've got here is a variation on the ancient Chinese puzzle box. Can you solve it? You kidding? You're looking at the guy who solved the Baxter's Box puzzle in 37 seconds back in the day.

When they first created Robin for the comics, the idea was supposed to be a point of view character for the kid audience. You know, theoretically, the idea was that, you know, kids could read the comic and know that they couldn't actually be Batman, but they could be Robin, you know, so they could like envision themselves having adventures with Batman. "Thanks for saving my bacon, Robin." "Hey, no problemo, Batman." They love the idea that they, they could be standing side by side with Batman, riding in the, in the Batmobile, fighting the Joker and the Penguin and all the bizarre villains.

We initially kind of used him off and on. He would appear in some episodes; in other episodes he didn't, uh, just where it seemed to make a lot of sense. "Why can't I go with you? What's the deal?" "I'm working alone tonight." People expected to see Robin; he's part of the Batman world, and you can't go too long in there without wondering, you know, "Where is he? You know, what, what's he doing? What, what take do they have on Robin this time?" Robin was there in several of the first scripts; we just didn't put him up front. "Listen, it'll only take a minute to get into my costume." "Not this time, Dick."

But Robin does have a really good origin story, so we thought that was a really good, um, you know, springboard for, for an episode. I think, uh, you know, Robin's Reckoning was the opportunity to present the character and give him some, some backbone for our series. Bruce Wayne saw Robin orphaned as a child in this, in the circus. He immediately identified with, uh, with what he had gone through himself when he saw his own parents murdered. I think he also saw in him, you know, a child at the crossroads who, who needed someone. "For however long it takes, you have a home with us."

The relationship with Dick Grayson was kind of one as, as a foster parent. So, just as Alfred was kind of the father figure to him growing up, he was the father figure to Dick Grayson. Kind of what we did was to make Robin a grown-up and put him in college. So he and Batman get together occasionally and fight crime together, but for the most part, Dick Grayson's away at college, and occasionally he comes home for like the holidays or whatever, and, uh, you know, he and he and Bruce go suit up and go out and beat up the bad guys. "I don't get to do this much since I started college." I was pretty glad that, uh, the decision was finally made to have Robin be older in our show. We can have Dick Grayson get into slightly more sophisticated, adult situations where a child would be, you know, would be suspect. Um, you know, a kid can't go easily into places where a college student can. "Listen, dipstick, Batman's my pal. He can be a major jerk, but you gotta love him, and nobody tries to fillet him when I'm around."

It was actually kind of a stress on making Robin like this, uh, happening, a happening teenage hero. Had a bunch of character designs that he just had done. I just looked and like, Robin, I just thought, you know, he just made him punk and cool. I've waited a long time. In the comic books at the time, um, Neil Adams had redesigned the costumes, so he wasn't, you know, he didn't have the bare legs and the little pixie boots and stuff anymore. They'd kind of given him a little bit more of a, the multi-colored ninja outfit, and it was still multi-colored, but it was a little bit cooler looking than the traditional Robin costume. So we took that as our starting point visually. There was a little bit of confusion because we were using a more modern costume, but, you know, it was clearly Dick Grayson. We made it, you know, we wanted to make it traditional in other aspects. You can do it.

When we take a character from the comics and translate them into the animation, um, quite often there's not one specific version of that character that we want to translate exactly to the screen. You know, we looked at a lot of different elements that had gone into Robin over the years, just as we looked at the many different elements that had made up the more successful parts of Batman and picked and chose from, from them. He's a composite of all of the, the old Robins, from Burt Ward to the Neil Adams international. In the comics, we didn't want to do the, the goofy, you know, "Aw, shucks," uh, wisecracking sidekick, you know, we, we avoided that. Was a hard and fast effort to, to toughen him up a bit, to give him a little bit of a, little unique quality to our show, but also a strength of his own. And still, we had to deal with, you know, red and green color. So, uh, it was, as far as I was concerned, I think we even joked, "May as well just paint a target on his back," because there was no way he was hiding in the shadows. "Let's take it by the numbers, nice and easy. Yeah, time to kick some butt." "Good thing we had that little chat."

When we had created our version of Dick Grayson, we put that character on sort of an emotional journey, going from the young daredevil partner of Batman to someone who was growing up to juggle college life and crime fighting, to someone who had realized over a period of time that crime fighting Batman's way was not really working for him. "Oh no, he's not going to ace me out." "Did you not this time, Alfred? Maybe not ever again." I mean, he was just as committed to crime fighting, into justice, but he wanted to be his own man. So a new identity was called for. So he chose the identity of Nightwing. There was still that need for Batman to have a young partner, so we decided, "Let's go back and make him the younger version of Robin," the kid Robin that we did.

The New Adventures of Batman was a combination of both Tim Drake and Jason Todd. Jason Todd was a version of Robin that was created for the comics in, I believe, the, uh, late 70s. Served as Robin for several years, and the fans liked him. He ultimately went down a darker path and wound up being murdered by the Joker, which was a very strong story and one that we couldn't do in our series. So we ultimately abandoned it. The current Robin that they had in the comics was Tim Drake. We decided he should be Tim Drake, but Jason had a really good origin story, so we made him Tim Drake. He had Jason's origin, and he had some of Jason's characteristics. So he's really kind of a half and half, you know, conglomerate of the two different Robins. Kind of felt we'd done the dark stuff enough, and there was a chance to lighten and have the show be more fun. Just worked having a younger character in there. I don't really know why the concept of Robin works as well as it does. I'm thinking, I'm thinking, except for the fact that it gives Batman somebody to constantly be, you know, bouncing dialogue off of. "Sure about this extortion ring?" "Uh-huh." "It's been four hours." "Uh-huh." "You still think they'll shell?" "Uh-huh." "Lucky for me you're such a good conversationalist."

Robin is necessary in that he yanks Batman back from the abyss. It served its purpose to have, uh, to humanize Batman a little bit more, and that was the goal. Uh, Robin did that well. Robin, just by the nature of his personality, kind of prevents him from being quite as dark a person. "I love that trick, but I can never make it work." Bruce Wayne is so totally close to the darkness; he'll always have that in him. Robin, however, has in him other qualities which his association with Batman really brought out. He's a, a bit of a more optimistic character. I also think he's a bit more of a leader, as his career went on to prove.

From day one, we thought that we'd eventually get Batgirl into the show [Music]. There was some, "Oh no, why does it have to be a Batgirl?" Many more people were curious to see how we'd approach it. The girl audience, they have a character they can identify with that can be a superhero [Music]. There's a big part of Batman lore going back to the comics and the TV show and the serials, and that included Robin, and another big part of the Batman mythos was, you know, Batgirl. There's always been a basic appeal factor of Batgirl. We always liked the character, and it was just a matter of integrating her. She's had many different incarnations, from being Commissioner Gordon's niece to being his daughter, and eventually ended up being a wheelchair-bound and the computer genius and character called Oracle. "Touchdown!"

Looking back at all the different previous versions of the character from the comics and the TV shows and what have you, and, you know, picking and choosing elements of the characters that we liked and kind of smooshing them all together and create, you know, the Batman Animated Series version of that character. "Dad, you in here?" The version of Batgirl that always worked best for us was Commissioner Gordon's daughter, because that made it a little bit more of a family. There was a direct link there. She's basically based on the previous looks from the comics and, and the TV show. Of course, we did want to put our own spin on it. In the comics, her costume was black; in the TV show it was like a dark, dark purple. We figured she would, you know, make it as much like Batman's as possible, so she would make it dark gray like his costume, but she would like swap out the black on the leather parts for blue, just because it's girlier. When we later on did what we call the revamp episodes, we took that opportunity to go back and tweak her design a bit and actually put her in the black costume, just because it looks better. I think it was much more like the character herself sort of evolved, so her visual look sort of paralleled her emotional development as well.

The way that the animated series handled her so successfully is by introducing her slowly as the daughter of the Commissioner, not just having her first appearance be the first appearance of Batgirl, which made fans like myself just anticipate, like, "Man, when is she going to become Batgirl?" We actually got a chance with the Heart of Steel episodes to give a little foreshadowing of her intelligence and her pluck and where she could go, and it was pretty cool. It was a good setup. "What am I gonna do? There's nobody I can trust." What we wanted was a reason for her to become Batgirl as opposed to say, you know, Weasel Woman or something like that, and so we gave her a reason to dress up in the Bat costume. "The public respects you. If they see you there, they'll know Dad's innocent. Sorry."

When she puts on the Batgirl costume, she realizes that having the Batgirl persona actually is a plus for the mission that she has to do. Initially, she's a fan that dons a costume but comes into her own entirely independent. She's not raised by him or influenced by him in any direct way except by being this, this mythic character. She has seen his heroism and wants to emulate that, and despite the obviousness of her red hair, she puts on a costume that allows her to go out there and create her own identity as an adjunct to this famous superhero in Gotham. In the original animated series, she never became a full-time member of the group. She wasn't a part of the team, so to speak. She was more of a, more of a freelancer. "I think I may not have a diploma from crime-fighting school, but I can do fine on my own, thanks." She's very capable, but on the other hand, she is new at this, and Batman has had years of training and experience, and he knows exactly what to do, where it may take Batgirl a second or two to figure out, "Oh man, I'm over my head. You know, how the heck do I get out of it?" "Don't worry your pretty little head."

One of the things that we really didn't want to do with the character that we knew right off the bat was that, one of the things that always bugged me about Batgirl on the old Adam West, she was never allowed to hit anybody. She always like stood on a table and did these little dainty kicks at the villains, you know, she was never allowed to just slug the villain, you know, so we wanted to make sure that she was fully athletic, and again, being the daughter of a cop, you know, she would have taken self-defense courses and stuff, so she's just as much a brawler as, as you know, the two boys. We never made a conscious decision to only pair up Batgirl with, uh, female villains in her early appearances, you know, she's taking on the big boy. She goes up against Two-Face [Music], and she goes up against big city corruption and a smear campaign against her father. There's a great scene on the boat where she, you know, faces off against the guy and takes him down. On her first case, we had her go up against Scarecrow. We had her go up against a number of villains. "Yes, am I glad to see you? Do you mind?"

At first, I, I don't think Batman particularly welcomed, uh, her presence. "It takes more than a costume and an attitude to do this work." She was the girl on the outside who kind of wanted to play with the boys, and the boys were kind of like, "Oh, now, you know, you know, no girls allowed in our club, run along home now." Where she does not have necessarily the same driving force in her background that Bruce has; it keeps him out on the streets every night. She does have a sense of adventure and a dedication to preserving the common good, and he respects that, and so he allows her, he came to allow her along. Batman entrusted her as an ally, not an equal. In the first Batman Animated Series, we tried to keep Batman alone as much as possible, but a lot of the New Adventures of Batman wasn't just a revamped look. We kind of wanted to take a look at the entire thing and say, "Okay, what can we do differently that we didn't do last time?" So we pretty quickly, you know, brought her right into the Batcave and had her officially joined the team. "Miss me?"

We had hinted that there was going to be a relationship between her and Dick Grayson, but by the time we had approached the fourth season, Dick had evolved into a different character and a darker character when he came back as Nightwing. The relationship that he had with Barbara had changed. I thought it'd be much more interesting if Batgirl had a crush on Batman. We even suggested that they had a relationship and, you know, said as much in, in the later episodes in Batman Beyond, and of course the fans are all going, "Oh, that's just so wrong," and it's like, "Well, that's why we did it, because it's more interesting," you know, it's like, "Yeah, it is wrong. It's meant to be wrong." "Batgirl, what's next?" She seemed to be favorably received by the fans. I think people really liked the character. "What's he saying, dork?" Clearly Batgirl is a much more light-hearted character. She's fun, you know, she's got big red hair hanging out of her costume, and, you know, how angry could she be? "Nice guy, but a few bets short of a belfry." With Batgirl, you get a lot of the audience's wish fulfillment that they could be a part of the Batman universe. "I'm sure I'll catch you again [Music]."

Right off the bat with this first episode, we wanted to kind of make a statement, as it were. We wanted to say right away that this is not any other version of Batman than you've ever seen. It's not the Adam West version; it's not Tim Burton's version; it's not, you know, Super Friends, certainly not Super Friends. It was our Batman; it was what we considered to be kind of the best of Batman, you know, we drew from all those different sources, all, you know, from the comics and from Adam West and from, you know, even the movies to a degree, but we tried to do a distillation of what we felt was really, you know, important about Batman. So even with the very first episode on Leather Wings, we felt it was really important to concentrate more on mood, mystery, atmosphere, drama, as well as all the, the super heroic action, um, that's one of the reasons why we chose the Man-Bat character as the first villain that Batman faced. I mean, we got to the Joker pretty quick; I mean, he's in episodes two and three, but, uh, literally the first story that came into our heads was, uh, was this Man-Bat character. He was a Batman character from the 70s, and he became kind of a really important part of Batman's rogues gallery in the comics, but he'd never really been done in animation or in film before, and, uh, he's kind of, uh, I mean, he's literally the opposite of Batman. I mean, he's Man-Bat; he's a man who has turned himself into a bat through this, you know, this weird scientific, uh, um, experiment, and, uh, he's more of a, a monster, you know, more of like an old-fashioned movie monster, and so we felt that would give us a really good opportunity to explore the, the darker, more mysterious, uh, more horror movie kind of elements of Batman that had never really been explored before in any kind of film medium.

The first Joker episode, Christmas with the Joker, was an idea that, um, Paul Dini, uh, was working on with another writer named Eddie Gorodetsky, and Paul just thought it was a kind of a fun way to go with the Joker, which again hadn't really been explored too much in animation or in the movies, um, and the fact that he's literally, he's Paul has always felt that, that one of the things that motivates the Joker is unfair jokes, you know, jokes that are completely out of line, and so he thought, "Well, what better way to do that than, you know, on Christmas Eve to do a parody of, you know, old-fashioned Christmas TV specials, variety shows, and where the Joker is going to basically, you know, find a bunch of innocent people, and we say between the lines that he's going to do away with them on national TV unless Batman can stop him before midnight," and we thought that was kind of a, kind of a sick but fun idea, and, uh, um, there was a lot of discussion internally and as well with the, the broadcast standards and practice department at Fox with how far we could actually go with that story, and, you know, some of, some of the darker elements of the story got kind of toned down, but it's still, you know, it still holds up pretty well. Still, the intent is there, and it's, uh, it's maybe a little bit more of a comedy than a, than a, you know, pitch-black comedy, as it were, um, but, uh, I don't think we actually found the, the true voice of the Joker until, you know, probably, and I don't know exactly which episode, but about halfway through the series, again with the introduction of Harley Quinn character and some of the other, uh, um, ways we went with the Joker, um, these early Joker episodes are a little bit, we still hadn't quite figured his character out yet.

The villain in, uh, Nothing to Fear is, uh, again, he's, he's a well-known character from Batman's rogues gallery going back to, I think, the 40s or the 50s, the Scarecrow, and I'm not sure he'd ever really been done before in animation. He may have been done, you know, as a walk-on character or something in Super Friends, but as far as I know, he'd never really been, you know, a major presence in any of the previous incarnations of Batman, and, uh, so again, we felt, you know, a guy who's, whose motif is, you know, a scarecrow, and he's literally all about, you know, scaring people. I mean, he's this, this, uh, psychologist who's gone off the deep end and who, who literally, um, is studying the effects of fear on people, but to the point where it's, you know, way beyond, uh, you know, any kind of acceptable, acceptable measure of a human restraint, um, and, you know, goes over the edge and becomes a super villain, and we thought that was an interesting character; we could do a lot with that. Um, again, the Scarecrow character was a character who kind of constantly evolved. We, we kept thinking, you know, "There's the characters still not quite right," and every time we do a Scarecrow episode, we'd say, "Okay, let's, let's, let's mess around with a little bit, find out, you know, what makes him tick." You know, even his visual changed like almost every time he saw this character; he looked different in this episode. This is our very first, uh, Scarecrow episode that we did with him. He looks very much like he does in the comics; he's got, you know, like this bag over his head with a jack-o'-lantern type face, and then the, you know, wacky straw hat and everything, but he just didn't look scary enough for a guy who's supposed to be the Scarecrow. We felt he should be really, really scary, and the interesting thing is the, the initial character designs that, uh, one of our artists, uh, Mike Kim had designed, he was not just a scarecrow, but his body was all kind of twisted and kicked, and it gave him kind of a, you know, a loose, you know, real scarecrow type appearance. Um, unfortunately, when the episode was animated, the animators didn't really follow that, so he kind of just moves like a regular human being, even though he's really, really skinny, and so we felt, "Okay, well, that didn't really work." So the next time we went back to the Scarecrow, we changed his appearance again. We kind of made his face a little bit scarier; we put eyes inside his, his eye sockets to kind of give him a creepy stare; we gave him long hair; still didn't work. So I don't think we ever really quite got the Scarecrow right until, you know, in the, uh, um, when we did the, the new Batman episodes, um, for the WB, we actually went back and said, "Okay, you know what, this whole Scarecrow thing is not exactly working; let's completely, you know, rethink the character," and we came up with a, with a really, really frightening look for him and an even more, um, out there kind of origin story for him. We, we, this, this new look that we came, came up with for him was so extreme and so creepy that we felt, "Okay, you know what, this is so good that we don't ever want to see this guy out of costume ever again, because we don't want ever, you know, maybe this guy is literally a ghost or something." We wanted to keep him more mysterious.

Poison Ivy never appeared as a character, as far as I know, in the, uh, I'm pretty sure she was never in the Adam West version of Batman, and I don't think she was ever in Super Friends or the, the Filmation Batman cartoons in the 60s. A lot of the best Batman villains have interesting psychological motivations, and her big thing is that she feels that plants are being mistreated and misused, and, you know, a lot of things that man does in the world, you know, with pollution and things are, you know, harming the environment, so she's, even though she's definitely a villainous, she, you know, she actually has somewhat noble motivations, but she goes about, you know, setting, setting things right in the wrong way, um, so that gave us a lot to work with with her character, um, also she's, she's probably our most blatant example of the old-fashioned, you know, femme fatale, you know, she's the, uh, um, the archetypal, you know, evil woman, if you will, um, we even have her, uh, in this episode, one of our supporting characters is, uh, Harvey Dent, who eventually became Two-Face, the villain Two-Face, um, we hadn't gotten to that point in the series yet. We actually did a whole bunch of episodes with him just as Harvey Dent, the D.A., to set him up so that when we turned him into Two-Face, it would have a little bit more of an emotional impact. In this episode, she's actually engaged to Harvey Dent, but she actually has ultimately evil things in mind for him as well. The actual costume is based very much on what they did in the comics, but one of the interesting things is that, in literally in the comics, her, her, uh, her tunic portion of her costume is literally made out of, you know, hundreds of, of leaves, and that's just way too much line work to animate, so we had to come up with a way of simplifying that for animation, so we kind of came up with just this, this, this one-piece bathing suit kind of outfit with floured scallops on, on the edges, which would kind of give a leaf type motif, and then we put like thorny type protrusions on her gloves and her boots to kind of get the idea that, you know, she's, you know, a dangerous flower as well.

The actual look of the character, um, at the time I was, as we all were, we were all kind of learning how to, you know, design for, uh, for this medium, for, uh, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a straight realistic action-adventure show, but at the same time, it's got cartoony styling, and we were trying to figure out how to, to combine the two, um, so in particular, the women characters were giving me trouble. I was having a hard time, you know, designing the women characters, and they were coming out a little bit too masculine or too stiff, and so there was a, an artist that I had known for years named Lynn Naylor, who excelled in doing real cartoony, but, you know, cute and appealing, you know, women characters, so we actually hired her to do a bunch of different character designs for Poison Ivy and for the Renee Montoya character, who's a Hispanic policewoman, and, uh, the Summer Gleason who's the, the newscaster, and, um, she did a just, uh, you know, just, you know, dozens and dozens of Poison Ivy drawings, and from taking, you know, the best of her sketches, I kind of combined them all and kind of came up with the, the final Poison Ivy model.

Well, again, reflecting the, the kind of, uh, creative differences that were happening amongst our staff, um, this was a story that, uh, some of us were a little bit uncomfortable with because we felt it was a, maybe a little bit more like an old-fashioned Super Friends episode where the Joker really didn't have a real strong motivation for what he was doing, and he was basically just kind of causing trouble but not really for any intent and purpose, and, and, uh, Batman's involvement in the show we felt was a little bit, uh, unmotivated. I mean, you know, obviously the Joker's going to cause trouble; Batman's going to stop him, but we felt it was kind of lacking some of the, the more, the psychological, um, character-driven elements that we wanted to see in Batman. Having said that, uh, working with the writers and, and with the, you know, the director, um, Kevin Altieri of this episode, um, we, you know, tried to, you know, kind of, "Okay, well, let's not worry too much about the story elements that don't work; let's concentrate on the ones that do work and stage them as well as possible," so Kevin Altieri and his crew, his storyboard crew really worked really, really hard to make the action scenes as exciting and as cinematic as possible, and, and I think they did a great job [Music].

One of the great things about Batman is that he does have, like, as everybody knows, just about the best rogues gallery of any superhero, any comic book character. It seems like Batman's villains are all sick; they all have obsessions; they're all interesting, grotesque types. They weren't just guys in suits; they were all as interesting and quirky as Batman himself was. "What you have, who tied up where?" Well, the cool thing about the Batman villains is they all had their own individual fetish and motif. It's once you get to know them, the complexity and their personalities is what makes them really interesting. "Wait, I got a crisis here, my dear." "You don't know the meaning of the word."

As Batman has no true superpowers, few of his enemies do either. It's a psychological need that drives Batman to be Batman, and I think it's a very similar psychological quirk that creates his villains. "I'd like to dislocate them both." The villains give direction to the show; you can even call them the protagonist. They're the ones who want to get to this goal, and Batman's their antagonist, and he's going to stop them. "What say we have a little talk, just like old times?" Did get to spend so much time with the villains; we kind of got to understand, you know, their motivations and their backstory, and sometimes that was the story. "Say hello to your new improved Harley." A lot of Batman's villains, they've planned something out, and it's pretty diabolical, and Batman finds himself caught up in this machine trying to figure out how he's going to end up stopping it and doing so before anybody gets hurt. We all have the good side and the bad side; it exists in every single one of us. "You're breaking my heart." "Sayonara, chumps." And once you can relate to it, it's captivating. The Batman villains always seem like they're having a lot of fun. There was never any shortage of good Batman villains. "You're only as good as the villain you fight, got it [Music] [Music]."

Of all the new Batman villains they've introduced into the comics over the last, you know, 20 or 30 years, the Scarface and Ventriloquist seemed to me the most like classic Batman villains. "Nobody pulls my strings, dummy, especially not you. You're not real." That notion of the Ventriloquist doesn't even know the dummy's calling the shots is fits right into Batman's world. This evil dummy is coming out of his head. The Ventriloquist himself was so demented and yet played so much like your grandfather or your uncle. Scarface and the Ventriloquist are another set of characters where you have the option to hire one actor to do both voices or hire two different actors so that you get completely different sounds. Really good voice actors can do both of those voices. George Sonza did the voice, and it was perfect. He did a wonderful job. He was so great; he was so schizophrenic and wonderful, and people ask, "Is that the same guy?" "Okay, dummy, yank the gag." "Yes, Mr. Scarface." We wanted to make the dummy as live as possible, so we did, we did have scenes where the dummy was by itself; Batman would sneak into the room and look at this dummy, and it seems alive, you know, even startled Batman. The puppet was the real challenge, and yet he had to take care of the guy that was talking, so who does he hit and who does he beat up, and ended up beating up both, which was great. And the reason really is because we can conflict all sorts of hideous violence on the dummy, you know, you can shoot him up like, you know, you can cut him into pieces; you can do hideous things to him then he could never get away with doing on a person. "Would you want to?" I just think Scarface is one of the best, one of the best villains. He's one of these villains that you're horrified and you laugh at the same time, and those are the best villains. "Arnold, don't do this. It's out of my hands. He's the puppet, not you [Music]."

Ra's al Ghul was a big-time member of the Batman rogues galleries to comic book fans, but he had never appeared in any other media, you know, he'd never been in any of the cartoons or the TV shows or anything, so people at home didn't know who the heck he was, but us being hardcore comic book geeks and really loving those original Denny O'Neil, Neil Adams Ra's al Ghul stories, um, we really wanted to do them. He represents a break from Batman's traditional rogues gallery in that he's not really born of Gotham City; he's, uh, from overseas; he's a leader of a global empire of assassins. Nobody really knows his name, or they've heard whispers of it, yet the man is immensely wealthy, immensely powerful. The strange thing about Ra's is he really wants to preserve the earth; he sees modern technology and the way things are going as, as destructive, but he has no problem with, with offing as many people as possible in order to preserve the planet, and Batman clearly can't allow him to do that. We didn't want to do any ghost stories, but, uh, with Ra's al Ghul it made sense because very spiritual guys, guy been living forever; he's relatively immortal; he's lived hundreds of years and has a beautiful daughter that loves Batman, and that makes things tough because he kind of likes it too. It's the ultimate temptation story because by agreeing to follow Ra's, Batman can accomplish everything he set out to do: wipe out crime, restore order, and kind of in a weird way get his father back, but Batman is too clever to see for that; he knows that as, as attractive as a lot of that is, he can't succumb to that, that's truly going to evil.

The Riddler [Music]. "Hey, diddle diddle, time for a riddle, boy." Oh boy, the Riddler. What do we do with the Riddler? Okay, here's this guy who's going to commit all these crimes, and he sends a bunch of clues to Batman, and Batman, bang, bang, bang, figures out the clues and stops the Riddler from committing his crimes and hauls them off to jail. It was hard not to make the show feel too much like the 60s Adam West show where people are standing around trying to solve a riddle. Everybody kind of has in their mind, they

Is not scary. Yeah, I'm not sure how the change came about. Uh, of the look that may have come from Bruce. He wanted to go from just making him a scarecrow to almost appearing like, like a corpse. And he evolved the most of all the characters. We got darker and darker and darker with the character, so we took a really radical departure, and we, we kind of made him look, you know, we put the noose around his neck and kind of gave him like, kind of western preacher clothes and gave him like this, you know, Texas Chainsaw Massacre Leatherface kind of look. And really had nothing to do with being a scarecrow per se, but it was definitely scary. He looked like a hanged man who'd been cut down and, and you know, had gone off to terrorize people. We weren't even sure if there was an actual guy in the suit. When we all saw that model, we went, "Oh, yes, that's it." Fear is power.

On the redesign, I believe we recast him, and Jeffrey Combs did his voice--uh, the Reanimator. We all watched it come to life. We actually saw it come to life and said, "That's absolutely right. That is how that voice should be for that drawing." What's the use of providing me with test patients if you're going to lose them? You should have monitored him more carefully. They just had a whisper, and death's whispery rasp was so scary. Um, they realized, you know, we were trying too hard earlier. Maybe you didn't need that much, just a really scary, dark-looking guy with the noose around his neck and a nice raspy whisper. Yeah, that'll do it. That's pretty scary. [Music]

She's stunning. She's got a waist about that big. She's got a beautiful, curvaceous figure. She's got a great face. Pucker up. But she was also a serious character. Your hyenas have been watering my plants again. One more time in their mulch! In the original Batman series, she was played more human, who had a plant motif. With the New Adventures, it was decided to push her more in the otherworldly territory by making her skin slightly green and making her more elephant-looking. Who told you to do that? The first poison obviously sort of established the kind of character that she was--uh, this vixen who just was plant nuts. While she cares about plants, she doesn't care so much about people. I think the stuff is wearing off. Can't have that. Give him another shot. Trouncing all over men's emotions and controlling them. Time for a good night kiss. A bit more of the plant gimmick got brought into her character--the idea of controlling men through certain lipstick and pheromones and, and basically being the woman that no man can resist. Step lively there, Brucey. About the only human being that she ever shows really any sign of affection for at all is Harley, and that's more just kind of like in a big sister kind of way. Oh gee, Harley, you broke our new toy. There were some really strong episodes where she developed her own offspring. What are you? She actually created a bride for Bruce Wayne. Boy, Bruce, I'm your wife! So you can do really bizarre plant flesh things that are really icky, but they're fun stories to watch. She's an interesting, dark character. Merry Christmas, darling, Mr. Freeze.

Some characters are, you know, there's not a lot there to work with in their original state in the comics. With Mr. Freeze, we had a kind of a cool name and a guy in a walking refrigerator. And thinking about the character, uh, Bruce and I decided maybe there's some great tragedy in his life that basically killed him emotionally, and so he's just a shell of a man, maybe going for, you know, for vengeance because he grieves for a great loss. Our first design on Mr. Freeze, going back to the very beginning of Batman: The Animated Series, I had contacted Mike Mignola, who was a really well-known comic book artist. This was before he became famous for Hellboy, and he came up with this really, really severely retro-looking Mr. Freeze design, which looked like this old-school-looking, you know, almost robot suit. We did the revamp. We wanted to tweak him a bit. Sub-Zero had been done and essentially sort of took away his motivation by curing his wife, so we kind of decided to cut off his head and make him a, a robot. So we thought if we were going to bring Mr. Freeze back again, we had to give him all new motivation. It became about the, the fact that, you know, he's separated from his wife now, you know, she's alive, but he's, he's a monster now, and he can never be with her. So it became all about him just hating everybody and eating everything and destroying everything that everybody loves, you know, so they can feel the same amount of pain that he feels. I thought this was all good stuff. This is all good story material. So then, of course, we had to go back and redesign his costume again, and it's still kind of retro, but it's a little bit slicker, like we did with a lot of the revamped characters. We put a lot more black on it. We're sensitive to him because he had love, he had emotion, he had all these feelings, and they were taken from him, and he so desires to have them back and yet has no capability to actually feel them. Up until the time we were doing Batman Beyond, you know, we were always found a different way of going with him, and uh, it was always fun to revisit Mr. Freeze and see what he was up to. There's no hope for me, for you, or your city. Everyone's going to feel my loss. The Penguin. [Music]

Penguin was always a tricky one. He was one of those characters that again had a really good visual in the comics. The Penguin can be a totally comical character. It's easy because of how he is drawn. He's so round. He's a penguin. He's a tough villain because he's just a chubby guy, and even though he might be great with the umbrella and he might have all kinds of judo moves and all that, you don't feel that he's, he's a great threat against a physical threat against Batman. Well, in the redesign, we went back to the original source material of the Penguin that differed from the Batman Animated Series and from the movie. One of the joys of doing the revamp was finally getting able to, to do the Jack Burnley Penguin design, kind of a 19th-century British gentleman caricature. I'm a legitimate businessman now. I don't want to draw attention to myself. Ideally, you want to get a voice with character, meaning that the actor has a quality to his voice all by itself without putting on a cartoon voice. I've been a huge Paul Williams fan like forever, and he had just exactly the right vocal quality for the Penguin. He was never going to become the dark and scary super-villain that, that someone like the Joker would. So Paul's voice was appropriate for that version of the Penguin. Living well is the best revenge. He's trying to turn over a new leaf, and he's trying to pretend to everybody that he's a respectable gentleman of society now and not really a criminal, and of course, he's doing all kinds of, you know, dastardly deeds out of the back. We kind of felt like, you know, for the new show, because he wasn't the super-villain anymore, it didn't seem appropriate to, uh, uh, to give him all the umbrella stick. My way would have been so much more pleasant, but he's still a thug. He's still a criminal, so he gets to have a machine gun hidden in one. Attention, people of Gotham City! I love to face...

Two-Face was one of my favorite, favorite, favorite villains. He's right up there with the Joker as far as Batman's key villains go. He's a guy that is respected in society and a friend of Bruce Wayne, and he has a horrible accident and becomes a maniacal schizophrenic killer. Alan Burnett did come up with the, the innovation of actually giving him psychological problems before he even became Two-Face. He was already kind of having a Jekyll and Hyde thing even before that, and then the accident that turns him into Two-Face just really exacerbated the problem. One of the things that we took from the more recent comic books was the idea that when Batman started his career as Batman, he had a secret ally in the city that was a Harvey Dent, the district attorney. And so it becomes very tragic when Two-Face is scarred and he, uh, becomes a villain because it's like Batman lost one of the true friends that he had. You're too late, Batman. Better find yourself another mask. It's not any radical departure from what he looks like in the comics. I mean, the one innovation that I've seen other artists, you know, carry on afterwards, which is kind of neat, is half black, half white, you know, it's like that's literally the character. We just basically simplified it. Changed the color of his face, changed some of the features a little bit, but the opposite sides of his personality are represented in color rather than a lot of surface detail. It looked even better in the revamped episodes when it gave him that real squared-off shoulders and the real sharp lines on his suit. I mean, he looked even, even slicker. He still flips the coin. He still has the duality and the crimes based on twos. He adapted the best to the new design, I think, into the new series because he really felt very much like the old character. I just think he's like one of the top 10 comic book villains of all time. Order in the court! In the matter of the people versus Harvey Dent, how does the prisoner plead? Guilty. Guilty. [Music] Guilty.

I was doing a show, a Joker episode, the first one I'd written, and I wanted the Joker to have a gang, and I wanted there to be a girl in the gang. And at first, I was going back and forth on what kind of a girl she should be. Should she be sort of like a tough chick who just sort of took orders and said, "Yeah, boss," or should she have a little bit of pepper to her? And I like the idea of someone who could kind of keep, keep up with the Joker and not only keep up with him but might also get a laugh out of something she said whereas the Joker might not get a laugh, and that would infuriate him. And yet there should be sort of like a Punch and Judy dynamic to him that makes the villain a little more well-rounded. For me, Joker's sort of a hard villain in the fact that he's the least human of all of Batman's adversaries. He doesn't come from a sympathetic background such as Two-Face or Ivy or Mad Hatter or some of the other ones. So you have to look at other ways to flesh out his personality, and we thought, well, it would be good if, if he had somebody to play off of. So Harley came, you know, sort of like a one-shot character. Then people liked her. I liked her, so I would put her in other stories. Bruce would say like, "What, Harley again? We're gonna put the girl in there again?" They go, "Yeah, well, she's sort of cute." And the other directors came to like her, and then Bruce and I sat down over lunch one day, and we came up with an origin story, and we did that as a comic book, and that really sort of grounded the character, the sort of reality of where she fit into the Batman universe. [Music] Give me some sugar, baby.

She just began as a sort of a hench girl. She was never meant to be more than just a one-shot character. Deeney came up with the, uh, um, with the idea for Harley. I patterned her a little bit after my friend Arlene Sorkin, who, uh, TV comedian, and uh, wound up doing her voice also. Ryder Rooney. And outside of Lucille Ball, I don't know who could have played Harley as well as Arlene. Dead look, piano. We thought, wouldn't it be great if, if it turns out she's got a very dark connection to the Joker, in fact that she was his doctor in the insane asylum, and he kind of seduced her and snapped her mind. So I came up with the name Harley Quinn because that seemed very clownish. Holly Quinzell. Rework it a bit, and you get Harley Quinn. Looking at actual harlequins, um, the thing is their costumes are just covered with design work, and uh, but the one thing that I did notice was the diamond shapes that, that they were covered in. So that was something that I was able to incorporate into the Harley design. Harley's look was probably the least changed of all the villains. Basically, she was just slimmed down slightly, but the design in of itself wasn't dramatic. She's someone who kind of loves a little bit too much and too unwisely, and that's her downfall. It's kind of like, you know, the big dumb thug in high school that has the cute young cheerleader, and she just doesn't know how bad this guy is, and you want to kind of rescue her. It's the most pathetic thing, but she works beautifully. You're laughing at her because she has a sense of humor about it. She was the perfect foil for the Joker, where he couldn't resist being without her, but every time she was around, he had to sort of think about her before he would commit his next offense. Somewhere deep down in whatever shriveled up little nut he has for a heart, there might be a little bit of affection for her. I think Harley is a very accessible villain, and I think she's maybe not as dark as some of the others are painted. You immediately gravitate to her because she is, at her core, she's pretty innocent. I think a lot of fans like that. They like that she is someone who can get out of danger with a smile and a little laugh and, and uh, and just sort of somersault away. Face it, Harl, this stinks. You were certified nuts, so wanted in 12 states and hopelessly in love with a psychopathic clown. At what point did my life go Looney Tunes? The Joker. [Music] [Laughter] Let the good times roll.

You know, the thing with the Joker is that in the long comic book history of the character, he started off as pretty much a straight homicidal maniac, and then they kind of made him goofier and goofier, and then he became kind of a joke. Mother always said I had talent. And this time, they brought him back as a serious psychotic killer. The Joker in our show could not kill because it was a children's television show. Instead of him murdering people, we would have him give them that, that hideous Joker grin, which in its own way is almost worse. I really have to congratulate myself on this one. I never like clowns. Yeah, they always give me the willies. Joker's the perfect Batman villain because he's, he's the antithesis of Batman. A bat in the hand is worth two in the belfry. It's anti-matter and matter facing each other. I don't really know why he's such a perfect yin to Batman's yang because the characters are really dissimilar. I mean, there's nothing, you know, historical about clowns and bats. You're losing your edge. Joker is the flip side of Batman. Batman's grim, Joker's happy. [Laughter] The personal hatred that the Joker has towards Batman, the fact that he just wanted the limelight, a countdown of victims that will end at midnight unless our dear Dark Knight stops me first. Mark Hamill just nailed that part perfectly. When, when the second we heard that scary laugh, we knew, we knew we had the Joker. [Laughter] It's actually really fun to watch him perform the character because all of the other actors are all seated, and Mark has to stand to do it, and he gets his whole body into it. You could actually videotape Mark Hamill recording the voice and used some of that for the animation. He is so articulate in his physical acting. What made the Joker so much fun was that he didn't have anything really at stake. He just set out to do whatever he wanted, and it was more of a challenge to Batman to say, "Try and catch me." It's time I capped off our feud with his ultimate humiliation. I don't know if there's another situation in pop culture villains where the villain and the hero are just so white and black. [Music] You