My Review of The New Batman Adventures · 10:15pm Sep 1st, 2022
My TV Show Rating Score:
5/5: It is an awesome show!
4.5/5: it is a great show albeit not perfect
4/5: It’s a good show with minor flaws
3/5: It’s overall okay/guilty pleasure
2/5: It’s bad but not awful
1/5: Look, up in the sky! It’s super bad!
0/5: MY EYEEEESSS!!!
Greetings, Batman Family! This is Mr. J back with another TV show review for tonight! This evening, I will be reviewing a follow-up animated series called The New Batman Adventures of the DC Animated Universe. Now, just like with the previous series, TNBA does a pretty solid job in continuing Batman's adventure and crusade within Gotham City as well as bringing in a few new characters in the DCAU who could not show up in "Batman: The Animated Series". Nevertheless, there are a lot of heavily obvious issues that a lot of Batman fans have been complaining about ever since its release--the new character designs being one of the prominent ones.
Just right off the bat (no pun intended), I will say that I wasn't entirely pleased with how they handled Batman's character in this show. Remember how in the original series he used to be not only serious and stoic but also caring and considerate with a heartwarming personality? He was the type of guy who you wouldn't want to mess with and also be friends with at the same time. But in this show, he is stone-cold in demeanor and tone with zero personality. He often acts so callous in non-serious situations which puts him at odds with his original characterization. Secondly, his Batman voice is literally the same voice for Bruce Wayne. In the original show, his voices for both men were distinct and clear so you can tell they are two people. Here, it's the same voice which makes me question how people wouldn't recognize Bruce's voice as Batman.
Andrea Romano is such a great voice director in these DC animated projects, so why the hell did she give such a poor voice direction for Kevin Conroy?
Now to address the elephant in the room, I do have to admit that some of the animation designs for the returning Batman villains have been overall...questionable. Joker himself is the primary character who had possibly the most odd design of them all. Although his black eyes do look fine, I hate that he has no red lips and no green hair. Heck, he barely has yellow teeth! But still, Mark Hamill didn't lose his touch in voicing the Clown Prince of Crime which is enough for me.
So while the show had some bad decisions made thereof, it did a great service in expanding the universe the original series started. "Never Fear", "Over the Edge", and "Mad Love" are my absolute favorite episodes of the show. Scarecrow had the best design out of everyone and provided a unique challenge to Batman which nearly drove him to breaking his code (if you don't count killing crocodiles). Then he later on gave Batgirl a horrible nightmare via fear gas about her fear of dying which would lead her father to declare war on the Dark Knight. That was a bold move but a genius one at that. "Mad Love" provided a pretty solid origin story for Harley and explained how Joker became her puddin' in the first place. That relationship is both tragic, sad, sick, twisted, and insane altogether. It's brilliant!
If there are some episodes I didn't like, it would be "Cold Comfort" and "You Scratch My Back". The former episode was the worst one of the entire show, in my opinion. It completely ruined Mr. Freeze's character development and unnecessarily prolonged his agony for no reason whatsoever. He already had a perfect ending to his character arc in Batman and Mr. Freeze: Sub-Zero, so why did the writers bring him back to being a villain? His wife is healed! She was the entire reason he became a "bad guy" in the beginning ("Heart of Ice")! He went from "I will avenge the loss of my wife on the man who ruined my life" and "I will seek a cure for my wife by any means necessary" to now "Woe is me. I'm gonna freeze everybody because I'm miserable...even though my wife is happy. Whaah, whaah, whaaah." That is genuinely bad writing, and you can't convince me otherwise.
As for the latter episode, I was a little uncomfortable with how inappropriately seductive Catwoman was to Nightwing. She's a fully grown adult whereas Dick is most likely a young adult. You may disagree with me on this, but I prefer for Selina to not be a creep towards guys younger than her. So that episode was a little hard to sit through.
Overall, this series had a lot of issues, but half of them can easily be ignored so that I can enjoy this show for what it is. I will rate this a solid 4.5/5: WARM COMFORT.
P.S. At least Ventriloquist is finally happy; Scarface was no joke.
Man. Judging by this analysis, it seems like this series was too canonically inconsistent to be a continuation of the original. Or be part of the DCAU for that matter.