An Oral History ofBatman: The Animated Series

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This article originally ran in 2017.

As the 1990s dawned, television audiences werent used to a dark version of the Dark Knight.

Bruce Timm (character designer, director, and show co-creator):It was a fluke.

I had just gotten done working on the first season ofTiny Toon Adventureswhen the president of Warner Bros.

Animation, Jean MacCurdy, assembled a big meeting.

She mentioned some of the properties they were looking at, and one of the ones was Batman.

The first Tim Burton movie had come out and it was a big hit.

And the minute I heard that, it was like,Pow!Thats what I want to do.

Within a couple hours, I had this vision of Batman down on paper.

It was a new take.

Every Batman I had drawn prior to that was always based on somebody elses Batman.

This was the first time Id ever had a concrete, Bruce Timmstyle Batman in my head.

It was almost like he was just waiting there to be drawn.

And she said, Thats … thats perfect!

He had done some atmospheric background pieces that he had also shown to Jean.

But once we were on this Batman project, we really hit it off.

So, it was a really good marriage at that point.

Eric and I sat down and brainstormed this little film together.

ER: We never imagined they would hand over the show to us and let us make it.

We were both stunned.

We were like, How the fuck are we gonna do this?

I mean, this had never really been done before for TV.

What we wanted to do was quite a bit more adult than, say, shows likeG.I.

Those shows were deliberately designed for young kids, and nobody else.

If you were 13, that was pretty much the cutoff point for a show likeHe-ManorG.I.

But we wanted to do a show that would appeal to kids and also to adults, as well.

Basically, we were making the show for ourselves.

There was just too much S&P [standards and practices] for me.

What sold me was the trailer that Bruce Timm and Eric Radomski had done for the show.

And thats when she showed me the trailer.

I really didnt believe that I would be allowed to have guns and fistfights.

But she insisted that I would have the freedom, and so I came on over.

And she was right!

It is a grim being cloaked as much in mystery as he is in shadows.

Like a bat he dives out of the night to feed on Gothams evil.

To some, he is merely a legend.

To others, he is a dedicated, driven avenger.

And to criminals, he is their worst nightmare.

He is … BATMAN.

What if Im borrowing from [Batman: The Killing Jokewriter] Alan Moore?

And its like, All I heard was gunshots in an alley, and somebody falling over.

And its like, Yeah, exactly!

Thats what were supposed to do.

Were supposed to deal in that sort of imagery and that power.

AB:We had these three rules: No aliens.

And no Humanitas Awards you know, no pro-social stories.

So it evolved into what we were calling Dark Deco.

It had this really cool retro, but not camp, kind of sound.

We knew we werent going to be able to get Danny, budget-wise.

I made a note as I was watching it:Who did the music?It was Shirley Walker.

We contacted Shirley and she was happy to come in and do the show.

Back then, it was almost unheard of to score every single episode of a show.

Fortunately, we mentioned it to our boss, Jean, and she said, Oh, yeah!

We should totally have an original score for every episode!

That was a huge plus.

Nothing had been that dark.

What we were doing was literally trying to interpret the night with an impressionist style.

They were trying to impress people with the amount of detail.

Theres no good reason to draw every shoelace on a shoe.

Just make it a simple shape.

That was Erics and my basic idea for the entire series, to simplify everything.

We both were big fans of the Fleischer Studios cartoons from the 1940s.

It was a combination of that and film-noir movies and things likeCitizen Kane.

And we were like, No, its gonna look like this.

And we know this is gonna work.

Hearing Voices

Casting began.

AR:Just for Batman himself, I listened to 500 voices.

Then we did callbacks and we auditioned 120.

We were like, This guycoulddo it.

Yeah, this isokay.

Because we cant find our Batman.

AR:So I asked my roommate he was a casting director I said, Any actors you know?

They want to look beyond that.

Theyre looking at theater actors and film actors, because this is gonna be very dramatic.

Would you wanna go in?

I said, Sure, sounds like fun.

So, amazingly, Batman was the first animated audition I ever had.

All the women in the room were like, Oh, hes dreamy, because hes really good-looking.

We want to play, definitely, a distinct difference between his Bruce Wayne voice and his Batman voice.

KC:I had no preconceptions about the character, either.

Bruce Timm said, What do you know about Batman?

And I said, Well, I know the Adam West show from the 60s.

He said, Oh, no, no, thats not what were doing!

I said, Youre describing an archetypal hero, almost like a Hamlet character.

I was putting it in terms of stage roles that I was familiar with.

I saw them get very excited in the booth.

And we did want there to be a very clear distinction, but we wanted it to be subtle.

We didnt want it to be really overt.

The disguise is Bruce Wayne.

BT: Everyone in the booth looked at each other and went, I think this is the guy.

So I went in and I said, Can I audition for the character roles?

And Andrea said, Do you understand that, if you get Batman, youll be in every episode?

Stop trying to talk us out of hiring you!

They werent treating the character seriously.

All of the actors that we tested were all doing these really silly and bizarre voices.

None of it had any serious threat to it at all.

Tim Curry actually came in and gave us something really close to what we wanted.

It was funny and weird but also definitely had some menace to it.

So we hired Tim.

He did about three episodes for us.

AR:He just couldnt wrap his head around Tims performance.

And the truth of it is, I never would have recast Tim.

Its not that Tim was doing anything bad, it just wasnt quite what we wanted.

I followed the fan press in terms of comic books.

That was their benchmark of quality.

I thought,Oh, my gosh, theyre really going to do this right.

Its not going to be aimed at grade-school kids, like some earlier iterations of the Batman cartoons.

AR:So I found a very nice guest role for him.

BT:Mark came in and played a corporate tycoon who was responsible for Mr. MH:I went in and I just let my geek flag fly.

I was asking them all these questions: Are you going to do Ras al Ghul?

Are you going to do Dr. Hugo Strange?

But I really want to be a part of the series.

I dont want to just come in and do a guest-star and disappear.

And then, coincidentally, here comes the need to recast the Joker.

MH:I got a call saying, They want you to come in and audition for the Joker.

And I said, Oh, gosh, thats a little too high-profile for my liking.

Not only has it been done with Cesar Romero, but its been done by Jack Nicholson.

What can I bring to the table that hasnt been done before?

I said, Id rather play Two-Face or Clayface or someone who hasnt been done.

Comic-book fans are notoriously demanding.

Theyre very opinionated and not shy about letting you know how they feel.

I thought it would be a PR disaster that they would not be able to withstand.

The laugh was cruel, it was funny, there was an undercurrent of terrible sadness to it.

It was a laugh from a destroyed soul.

I played with that laugh a lot.

Id do a little Dwight Frye, Id do a little Sydney Greenstreet.

I love all those old Warner Bros. movies, so I was just slipping people in.

Sometimes Id get notes like, It was a little too Jerry Lewis at the matinee.

What was the process?

How did you know that you wanted me?

And she said, The laugh.

I didnt want to get pigeonholed into a specific laugh.

With the Joker, I said,This is like an artist with a very big palette.

I want a range of laughs.

I said,Oh, thats interesting.

And Mark was crazy good.

BT:It was just like,Hallelujah!Who knew that Luke Skywalker would be our perfect Joker?

Well, Mark Hamill could not be further from that.

He talks a million miles an hour.

His imagination never stops jumping from topic to topic.

BT:Right out of the gate, we wanted to explore the deeper bench of Batmans rogues gallery.

Man-Bat was perfect for us because he was an iconic character from the comics.

It was Batman versus the Monster.

It was very cool as a storyboard.

They pulled it off so well.

We were like, Holy shit, this looks fucking great.

KC: You cant approach it as a silly line.

It was Bruce Wayne talking to himself, reaffirming his own identity.

Its Kevin Conroy saying,Goddamn it, Kevin.

You are an actor.

You are a good actor.

You know this role.

it’s possible for you to do this role better than anybody.

That was what I was imagining the first time I did it.

Hes saying it to himself rather than proclaiming it to the world.

Hes psyching himself up.

Hes going, [enters Batman voice] I am vengeance.

I am the night.

I am and then the Batman just screams out of him.

If you do it like a histrionic speech then it sounds ridiculous.

The 14th episode, Heart of Ice, featured a totally reimagined version of longtime villain Mr. BT:In those early development meetings with Paul and with Mitch, Id brought up Mr.

Freeze as a character.

He was just kind of a throwaway character in the comics.

He wasnt really considered one of Batmans top villains.

And I thought,Well, if we can take a character like Mr. And Mitch and Paul went [snaps fingers], Thats something!

So we had written that down real quickly as a note.

AB:Paul was ready to leave Warner Bros.

He seemed to have one foot out the door.

Dont you have a story that you want to do?

And he says, Well, yeah, I do have this idea for a Mr. And I said, Write up the outline, just write it up, and give it to me.

And he did, in pretty quick fashion.

I thought,Thats kind of cool, kind of gets you at the heart.

I thought,Lets work backward from that.

The lost love whos dead but maybe not completely gone, and that mournfulness.

So we wove that all together, and that became Mr. And I remember just being knocked out by it.

And I called the online grid.

This is what I wanna do.

I called Paul up also and I said, You gotta run it on the show.

This is a fabulous story.

Youve got to stay on it!

BT:Thats kind of a good template on how to treat these characters.

In one episode of that show, she wore a jester costume.

PD:I had a VHS tape that Arleen had given me of her bestDaysclips.

I remember being sick one day and I popped in the tape to alleviate the boredom.

Seeing Arleen in the jester costume around that time just helped fix that image in my brain.

It was just weird.

It had like a 60s kind of vibe to it.

It was just odd.

Charming, but odd.

I read it and I just thought that that was the best voice for her in the moment.

Paul decided to make her Jewish, so I put a little Yiddish sound in there.

At least we know the Joker isnt an anti-Semite.

Its his only good quality.

BT:It was always intended to be just a one-off.

We werent planning on bringing her back.

I would be like, I dont know if thats such a good idea.

But she was really cool and, yeah, she was cute.

So Paul kept bringing her back.

PD: Shes on Pez now!

Theres a Pez dispenser of her!

Im just waiting for the Macys Parade balloon.

We couldnt even show the result of it.

We just had to get the emotion across that his parents definitively died.

But there was no way we could avoid that, because that was what the script was.

BT: We would have problems with [the standards and practices department].

Almost every episode, we would get a huge list of things we couldnt do.

They were constantly trying to pull back on the amount of violence, which I get.

I totally understand that.

But, at the same time, it was really frustrating.

It wasnt that we wanted to make a violent show.

We wanted to raise the stakes and keep the danger real.

So every single action sequence, every single bit of quote-unquote violence was looked at with a magnifying glass.

It was a constant compromise.

Thank God for Shirley Walker.

I think we, as a team, hit a home run with Robins Reckoning.

It was the height of what we could do as a dramatic animated show and still be entertaining.

KC:In animation, you cant actually kill anybody.

Standards and practices wont allow that.

Id land and theyd go, Okay: stay-alive moan!

And Id go,Ahhhhh.

It always sounded slightly sexualized.

It just sounded like the most postcoital moment between Batman and Andrea Romano.

She howled and she said, Okay, Im taking that one home with me tonight.

It got to be kind of notorious.

Kevin has said Andrea in the Batman voice.

The first season featured 65 episodes and concluded on September 16, 1993.

The second season premiered on May 3, 1994, and by then, the show was acriticalandratingssmash.

This homeless guy says, Hey, buddy, you got a dollar?

I just had my mail and I said, Im sorry, honestly, I have nothing.

And he said, Oh my god, youre Kevin Conroy!

I said, How do you know that?

Oh, c’mon do it!

I said, Do what?

He said, You know what I want you to do!I am vengeance…

I said, Okay.I am vengeance…

He said, Oh, yeah, this is so cool!

Come on, keep going, keep going!I am the night …

I said, I am the night …

He said, Bring it home, Batman!

I said, I am Batman!

And just then someone screams out of their window, Hey, Batman, shut the fuck up!

That was the day I realized that we maybe had a cultural phenomenon going on.

AR: I remember working with someone who left Warner Bros. and went over to Disney to makeGargoyles.

And I said, Well, you hireme!

My point is, what we did on Batman impacted how Disney wanted to make one of their series.

It was a benchmark.

As the story goes on, it becomes clear that the two narratives are closely linked.

We should make this a feature film.

Companies were all making major dough on releasing stuff.

PD: That story was really Alans passion.

Alan really did not want it to be a free-for-all.

He wanted it to be a romance, and he wanted it to be a dark story.

He wanted it to be built around Bruce Waynes heart and the choices hes made.

I was like, What the fuck are you talking about?

We designed this to be on video!

That means a whole host of problems in terms of technical and quality!

You guys are out of your mind!

How are we going to finish this movie on time without having to re-board every single shot?

Once it became a theatrical release, suddenly we had a lot more interest from people on the lot.

Get it out there.

But the minute its a theatrical release, suddenly everybody had an opinion.

Somebody at the lot went, Huh, these flashbacks are confusing!

We should re-cut the whole movie so that it all plays in real time.

And, we were like, Youve gotta be kidding me.

Thats going to kill the movie!

That means Batman wont show up until a half hour into the movie!

So we were able to go back and put it back together the way it should have been.

Yeah, it was tricky.

KC: That scene at the grave was probably one of the best.

That was the time I realized fully that you cant fake Batman.

You cant just make a deep, husky sound with your voice.

You have to base it in the pain of his childhood each time or it doesnt sound right.

When I finished recording it, there was just a lot of silence in the studio.

I was crying so hard.

I was absolutely devastated, in a good way, by his performance there.

Ive always said that I will never ask an actor to do something Im not willing to do myself.

I just hit the talk-back and said, I need two minutes.

And I just lost it.

KC: Andrea came into the room and she said, That was beautiful, what you just did.

Because she could see I really, really went emotionally to the place that he goes to.

However, reviews were positive: According to Rotten Tomatoes, ithasan 82 percent average.

It has, in the decades since, been hailed as one of thebestBatman moviesever made.

It certainly made its money back, because we spent next to nothing on it.

PD: Im sorry that it kind of fell through the cracks.

And then about a year later, we were gratified to see Siskel and Ebert review it.

They said, Boy, this is actually pretty good!

The Dark Knight Departs

The shows Fox run ended on September 15, 1995, after 85 episodes.

Much of the team transitioned to makingSuperman: The Animated Seriesfor the WB.

And the WB, they were interested in somehow freshening the show.

They said, What can we do with this show so its not just more of the same?

And to me, it was like, Well, great!

Because I dont want to do more of the same, either.

And so thats when I came up with the idea of making things super-simplified really crisp and angular.

And we liked the show an awful lot.

PD:We would think of it like youd think of a prime-time show that has ongoing relationships.

And the new executives who came in, they said, Were not even thinking that.

That is diametrically opposed to what we are thinking of.

We want to show [a Batman whos the age of] the kids that are gonna watch.

We wanna show that it has a lot of boy appeal.

They said, Put a kid in the Batman suit.

Boys cant relate to Bruce Wayne.

What is he, 30?

Kids cant relate to him.

It was a real primitive mind-set.

And we all freaked out.

But we were all thinking it.

So it was, Well, well think about that!

But they werent having it.

And the more we started talking about it the more we liked it.

We met with Jamie again.

We pitched him our idea on the show.

Then he said, Great!

Youve got a green light.

Now, go make that show.

And we said, But what about this Batman show that were doing right now?

And he says, Well, well cancel that one and now you have to makeBatman Beyondinstead.

And its like, Well, okay.

And fortunately, it worked out.

So something had to give.

They grew up on the show.

That was must-see television for me.

That was appointment television.

Why didnt you want to do it?

And I say, What do you mean, why didnt I want to do it?

OfcourseI wanted to do it!

They didnt ask me!

BT: Theres a whole generation of people who grew up with my version of Batman being their Batman.

They had the same reaction to it that I had with the Adam West show.

And its like,Wow, well, okay.