Return to the complete Batman: The Animated Series index
Written by Mitch Brian
Directed by Kevin Altieri
Animation services by Spectrum Animation
Airdate: 6 September, 1992
I think it would be difficult to make a claim for Batman: The Animated Series that it couldn't live up to. The best animated version of the DC Comics superhero Batman? Obviously, and therefore just as obviously the best animated version of any DC Comics superhero. The best animated version of any comic book property? I can't imagine what I'd put above it. The single best adaptation of superhero comics into any audio-visual medium? Yeah, probably. The most stylistically rich American animated television program of its generation? Depends where exactly you set the boundaries of "its generation", but I think it has to be in the conversation.
I'm not done with that train of thought, but before getting too tangled up in rapturous asides about how Batman: The Animated Series is the culmination of all human graphic arts, or whathaveyou, it would be good pin down just exactly how the thing came to be. Batman: TAS was the lucky beneficiary of a specific confluence of multiple things all happening at once; if any one of them had happened not too very far in any direction, it's easy to imagine it not existing at all. First, there was the sudden and entirely unforeseeable explosion in "quality" television animation in the United States that happened in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Basically for no reason other than because Michael Eisner had a romantic soul, the Walt Disney Company, in the mid-'80s, committed itself to producing animated children's television that would be more than the diseased-looking junk food that had dominated the medium basically since Jay Ward Productions and UPA ran out of gas in the first half of the '60s, leaving American TV animation to be largely defined by the ugly trash being churned out by Hanna-Barbera and Filmation. Since Disney was the most prestigious brand in global animation, went Eisner's reasoning, Disney ought to be in the business of putting really well-made, (relatively) high-budget animation on the small screen. It took a couple of false starts in the form of The Wuzzles (which died immediately) and The Adventures of the Gummi Bears (which trudged on doggedly for several years without becoming a major hit) , but then came the revolutionary success, in the fall of 1987, of Disney's DuckTales, a series that instantaneously re-wrote the rules for how television animation in the United States could be produced. It looked pretty damn good - not up to the standards of Disney's theatrical animation, certainly, but nothing else on TV could match it - and it pioneered an extraordinary new business model, wherein the studio would produce 65 episodes in one huge blast, meaning that show came pre-built with enough material to syndicate for 13 weeks of five episodes each. In almost no time at all, these prestigious-looking 65-episode seasons became the standard for TV animation, a production model that didn't start to run out of juice until pretty close to the start of the 21st Century.
After Disney, the studio with the deepest roots in animation was Warner Bros., the home of the Looney Tunes, and they wasted very little time in capitalising on the new market sector DuckTales had opened up. That company's first show on the DuckTales model, Tiny Toon Adventures, premiered in September 1990, helped out by having the holy name of executive producer Steven Spielberg to hang above the title, and it was an immediate, enormous hit. Its success encouraged Warner's to look for other potential places to sink some money into, much as Disney itself immediately began the process of churning out one new 65-episode block after another. And inspiration came because of the second thing that had to happen around the exact same time, which was that the studio had recently enjoyed one of the most outlandish hits in the history of the Hollywood box office with 1989's Batman. Just like that, Warner's had a bona-fide multimedia franchise on its hands, and with 1992's Batman Returns in the pipeline, it made all the sense in the world to engage in some cross-promotion. This suited Tiny Toons showrunner Tom Ruegger, who wanted to break the mold of brightly-colored adventure-comedies starring silly talking animals that pretty much all of the post-DuckTales American TV animation had been pressed out of; in fact, he had it in mind that the market might be ready for a serious, all-ages animated drama, to be shown in prime time. And so he and Tiny Toons animator Bruce Timm, along with newcomer Eric Radomski began developing just such a program. Batman: The Animated Series didn't quite meet their lofty hopes: while it did air several episodes in prime time, the ironclad cultural norm that animation was for children was still too rigidly enforced for the show to become a serious dramatic powerhouse. Though it does certainly feel like something designed for a more mature audience than its contemporaries; certainly it's impossible not to notice how much better it has aged than Tiny Toon Adventures, and how much more seriously it takes the business of animation as an artform.
Which brings us to the third thing that happened right in the same window: Japanese animation started to become available to Western audiences. Everything I have said about marketplaces and cultural norms is, of course, strictly limited to a Western context; in East Asia, and in Japan specifically, animation had been a well-respected medium for audiences of all sorts of ages for decades. You would never know this from the Japanese animation that made its way to English speakers, which was a combination of shitty redubbed (and often recut) versions of old Japanese shows, and shabby-looking animation that had been outsourced to the cheapest available Asian studios purely to save money. That began changing in the late '80s, largely due to the gorgeous adults-only feature Akira, which introduced to a select Western audience the idea that animation could be... well, that. The extraordinary and highly distinctive aesthetic of Japanese animation immediately found a ready following, and while it take until fairly late in the '90s for it to truly become "hip", it introduced a style that was so far afield from anything Americans were used to that it basically didn't have to do anything but show up to seem utterly groundbreaking and radical.
And so these three things - prestigious American animation, the cultural supremacy of Batman, Japanese animation - all found themselves bound together in the extraordinary body of Batman: The Animated Series, which first showed up in the world on 5 September, 1992, to great popular and even critical success. The first episode to be produced, "On Leather Wings" - hey, look, I got to the episode we're talking about in this episode review after only 1100 words! - was actually the second to be aired, owing to the mystic vagaries of the syndicated animation market, while the first episode to air, "The Cat and the Claw: Part 1" was all the way at #15 in production order. But that episode was never intended as an introduction to the series, while "On Leather Wings" very obviously was. And a splendid introduction it is, at that.
But first, the introduction to the introduction. I said all of those giddy, eager things about Batman: The Animated Series as one of the pinnacles of superhero media, and the thing is, we learn that, like immediately. As in, the very first thing seen in the very first episode of the show is the best it will ever get. And I'm not even really talking about the episode, since what I am actually referring to here is the show's wordless, text-free opening sequence, a one-minute miniature short film in which two criminals skulk around the gloomy streets of Gotham City at night, under the beams of a police zeppelin. They go unnoticed except for the even gloomier figure of the Batman, who chases them to a roof, beats them up, and leaves them tied for the police to find. As the thieves are apprehended, the camera tilts up to show Batman in silhouette against a blood-red night sky, with a single flash of lightning briefly illuminating him. All of this while Danny Elfman's theme music from Batman plays.
It is, I think this is not actually hyperbole but just good honest criticism, the most perfect piece of art ever involving a superhero. It is gorgeously animated, for one thing, fluid when it needs to be and so hyperstylised that it covers up for when it's not fluid. The thieves are thick, angular figures, while Batman is a collection of sleek lines terminating in dagger-like points, and we see all three of them almost exclusively as silhouettes with bright white eyes against the Expressionist lines of the background drawings of the city - lots of canted angles, staggering mixes of purple, red and yellow that have been soaked in the jet-black of a stormy night, every line feels like it was carved into stone. The sequence was animated by TMS Entertainment, one of the most well-established of all Japanese animation studios, and the influence of comic book art so common in Japanese animation but at that time so rare in American animation - and this is the point where I admit that I think Batman: TAS really does feel more like Japanese animation, or East Asian broadly, at least, than it does "American", and the mere fact that the writers, directors, voice cast, and money all came from the U.S. doesn't entirely change the fact that this basically feels like Warners was secretly funding an anime series all along - is present in every sharp piece of graphic design and the incredible richness of the imagery, which feels in virtually every single shot like a self-consciously iconic version of superhero art at its most elemental.
You can tell that a lot of time and money was spent to get it to perfectly set the mood for the show, since it was going to be the inaugural minute of every one of those first 65 minutes: it immediately tells us to anticipate angular, Expressionistic violence, and a simply fearless, radical reliance on dark colors and pure black. One of the most famous elements of Batman's aesthetic is that many of its backgrounds were painted on black paper, giving them a much richer, heavier atmosphere than anything that had ever been seen in animation. I don't know if that had been trotted out yet when TMS animated the opening sequence, but the heavy blackness of the opening is obvious regardless.
There's probably not a single episode of the series where the opening minute isn't the best part, if I am being honest, but the best of them find different ways of living up to the awe-inspiring promise of that little pantomime nightmare of crime and film noir, and "On Leather Wings" is certainly one of the examples of this being done particularly well. The duty for introducing the series and its take on Batman somehow fell to Mitch Brian, a writer who wasn't one anywhere close to the most prolific member of the writing staff: this was. in fact, one of only two scripts he contributed (along with the story for a third). But it largely works at the somewhat mechanical tasks it is asked to do. The script is explicitly designed as a mystery, something that's surprisingly rare for stories about "The World's Greatest Detective" in any medium; something that appears to be both bat and man is terrorising the night skies above Gotham, and Batman (Kevin Conroy, the best actor to ever portray the character - not the last time I'll be using that phrase in this series of reviews) needs to figure out what's up with this, since the Gotham police department, particularly in the form of the hot-tempered Detective Harvey Bullock (Robert Costanzo) is convinced that he, Batman, is somehow the same as the bat-man causing so much terror.
As an introduction of sorts to the universe, "On Leather Wings" devotes a great deal more time to the police subplot than it necessarily needs to, but it's solid enough at setting out the parameters of the show: Batman is quite alone except for his prim butler Alfred (Clive Revill, who only voiced the character in his first three appearances), the Gotham PD is as much his enemy as the supervillains he'll face, and Bullock in particular is going to be a thorn in his side. We do get to see, very briefly, Batman's sometimes ally, Commissioner Gordon (Bob Hastings), but that's really not the focal point; I bring it up largely because in a series full of beautifully angular character designs that feel like they've come right from the squared-off, muscular style of comic book art prominent in the '30s and '40s, Gordon is probably my favorite-looking character in the show's entire run.
Anyway, the subplot is doing what it needs to, but the real focus is on Batman's investigation, which eventually leads him to discover a proper mad scientist, Dr. Kirk Langstrom (Marc Singer), who has taken to transforming himself into a hideous man-bat. The choice was made very deliberately to kick the show off with an obscure villain, and not one who'll be recurring, which is perhaps why the man-bat really only appears for one scene at the end. This isn't a story about Batman vs. a supervillain, is the thing. It's a story about Batman using all of his wits, and presenting himself as both a terrifying figure of the night and the bland, pleasant-sounding rich airhead Bruce Wayne in order to gather information. It is, basically, a story that's being used strictly as a pretext to let Batman sneak around shadowy spaces. The investigation itself is almost beyond question the least interesting part of the episode, particularly a kind of bland scene of Batman using his supercomputer to analyze a piece of fur.
Where "On Leather Wings" soars, if you will pardon my horrible wordplay, is in the atmosphere that the investigation creates, and particularly the atmosphere that comes from choosing such a random villain as Man-Bat. This episode is pitched, more or less explicitly, as real honest-to-God horror, a natural fit for Batman in most of his guises, but one that rarely ever gets used. It's superbly done, particularly in the episode's last third, when Batman actually figures out that Langstrom is a monster, and we get to see him transform in a half-obscured sequence that's partially achieved with silhouettes. The whole episode relies on silhouettes, to be sure, and almost always to great effect, but it reaches a terrifying operatic crescendo here, enough to make the somewhat banal design of Man-Bat land with far more unnerving force than I think it would in a vacuum.
"On Leather Wings" was animated by another Japanese studio, Spectrum Animation, which prided itself on providing the best possible atmosphere for the show, and in fact drove itself to bankruptcy due to the high quality of its work for Batman. There aren't all that many Spectrum episodes, as a result, but all of them rank among the best-looking, and this gets that tradition of quality kicked off in high fashion. Not all of the character animation lands - they completely messed up Bullock, for one thing - but this episode is uniquely good at displaying the smooth, freakishly organic quality of Batman himself, perpetually seen here as a sweeping shape of strong dark curves. And the brief appearance of Man-Bat is superb, not just from that wonderful injection of horror, but from the sense of hulking, dangerous weight in his strong, fast movements. All told, it's an indescribably beautiful half-hour of television animation: this episode is by no means the most ingeniously-told, but its emphasis on atmosphere and tension and the gloomy potency of the animation itself makes it feel very much like a mission statement for what Batman: The Animated Series will be - 22 minutes of beautifully horrid Expressionism for families, five days a week. It's one of the most promising first episodes of an animated series that American audiences had ever seen, and it's gratifying to be able to say that the show often managed to live up to that promise. But even if it hadn't, this would still be a pretty remarkable episode of television.
Grade: A-
Written by Mitch Brian
Directed by Kevin Altieri
Animation services by Spectrum Animation
Airdate: 6 September, 1992
I think it would be difficult to make a claim for Batman: The Animated Series that it couldn't live up to. The best animated version of the DC Comics superhero Batman? Obviously, and therefore just as obviously the best animated version of any DC Comics superhero. The best animated version of any comic book property? I can't imagine what I'd put above it. The single best adaptation of superhero comics into any audio-visual medium? Yeah, probably. The most stylistically rich American animated television program of its generation? Depends where exactly you set the boundaries of "its generation", but I think it has to be in the conversation.
I'm not done with that train of thought, but before getting too tangled up in rapturous asides about how Batman: The Animated Series is the culmination of all human graphic arts, or whathaveyou, it would be good pin down just exactly how the thing came to be. Batman: TAS was the lucky beneficiary of a specific confluence of multiple things all happening at once; if any one of them had happened not too very far in any direction, it's easy to imagine it not existing at all. First, there was the sudden and entirely unforeseeable explosion in "quality" television animation in the United States that happened in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Basically for no reason other than because Michael Eisner had a romantic soul, the Walt Disney Company, in the mid-'80s, committed itself to producing animated children's television that would be more than the diseased-looking junk food that had dominated the medium basically since Jay Ward Productions and UPA ran out of gas in the first half of the '60s, leaving American TV animation to be largely defined by the ugly trash being churned out by Hanna-Barbera and Filmation. Since Disney was the most prestigious brand in global animation, went Eisner's reasoning, Disney ought to be in the business of putting really well-made, (relatively) high-budget animation on the small screen. It took a couple of false starts in the form of The Wuzzles (which died immediately) and The Adventures of the Gummi Bears (which trudged on doggedly for several years without becoming a major hit) , but then came the revolutionary success, in the fall of 1987, of Disney's DuckTales, a series that instantaneously re-wrote the rules for how television animation in the United States could be produced. It looked pretty damn good - not up to the standards of Disney's theatrical animation, certainly, but nothing else on TV could match it - and it pioneered an extraordinary new business model, wherein the studio would produce 65 episodes in one huge blast, meaning that show came pre-built with enough material to syndicate for 13 weeks of five episodes each. In almost no time at all, these prestigious-looking 65-episode seasons became the standard for TV animation, a production model that didn't start to run out of juice until pretty close to the start of the 21st Century.
After Disney, the studio with the deepest roots in animation was Warner Bros., the home of the Looney Tunes, and they wasted very little time in capitalising on the new market sector DuckTales had opened up. That company's first show on the DuckTales model, Tiny Toon Adventures, premiered in September 1990, helped out by having the holy name of executive producer Steven Spielberg to hang above the title, and it was an immediate, enormous hit. Its success encouraged Warner's to look for other potential places to sink some money into, much as Disney itself immediately began the process of churning out one new 65-episode block after another. And inspiration came because of the second thing that had to happen around the exact same time, which was that the studio had recently enjoyed one of the most outlandish hits in the history of the Hollywood box office with 1989's Batman. Just like that, Warner's had a bona-fide multimedia franchise on its hands, and with 1992's Batman Returns in the pipeline, it made all the sense in the world to engage in some cross-promotion. This suited Tiny Toons showrunner Tom Ruegger, who wanted to break the mold of brightly-colored adventure-comedies starring silly talking animals that pretty much all of the post-DuckTales American TV animation had been pressed out of; in fact, he had it in mind that the market might be ready for a serious, all-ages animated drama, to be shown in prime time. And so he and Tiny Toons animator Bruce Timm, along with newcomer Eric Radomski began developing just such a program. Batman: The Animated Series didn't quite meet their lofty hopes: while it did air several episodes in prime time, the ironclad cultural norm that animation was for children was still too rigidly enforced for the show to become a serious dramatic powerhouse. Though it does certainly feel like something designed for a more mature audience than its contemporaries; certainly it's impossible not to notice how much better it has aged than Tiny Toon Adventures, and how much more seriously it takes the business of animation as an artform.
Which brings us to the third thing that happened right in the same window: Japanese animation started to become available to Western audiences. Everything I have said about marketplaces and cultural norms is, of course, strictly limited to a Western context; in East Asia, and in Japan specifically, animation had been a well-respected medium for audiences of all sorts of ages for decades. You would never know this from the Japanese animation that made its way to English speakers, which was a combination of shitty redubbed (and often recut) versions of old Japanese shows, and shabby-looking animation that had been outsourced to the cheapest available Asian studios purely to save money. That began changing in the late '80s, largely due to the gorgeous adults-only feature Akira, which introduced to a select Western audience the idea that animation could be... well, that. The extraordinary and highly distinctive aesthetic of Japanese animation immediately found a ready following, and while it take until fairly late in the '90s for it to truly become "hip", it introduced a style that was so far afield from anything Americans were used to that it basically didn't have to do anything but show up to seem utterly groundbreaking and radical.
And so these three things - prestigious American animation, the cultural supremacy of Batman, Japanese animation - all found themselves bound together in the extraordinary body of Batman: The Animated Series, which first showed up in the world on 5 September, 1992, to great popular and even critical success. The first episode to be produced, "On Leather Wings" - hey, look, I got to the episode we're talking about in this episode review after only 1100 words! - was actually the second to be aired, owing to the mystic vagaries of the syndicated animation market, while the first episode to air, "The Cat and the Claw: Part 1" was all the way at #15 in production order. But that episode was never intended as an introduction to the series, while "On Leather Wings" very obviously was. And a splendid introduction it is, at that.
But first, the introduction to the introduction. I said all of those giddy, eager things about Batman: The Animated Series as one of the pinnacles of superhero media, and the thing is, we learn that, like immediately. As in, the very first thing seen in the very first episode of the show is the best it will ever get. And I'm not even really talking about the episode, since what I am actually referring to here is the show's wordless, text-free opening sequence, a one-minute miniature short film in which two criminals skulk around the gloomy streets of Gotham City at night, under the beams of a police zeppelin. They go unnoticed except for the even gloomier figure of the Batman, who chases them to a roof, beats them up, and leaves them tied for the police to find. As the thieves are apprehended, the camera tilts up to show Batman in silhouette against a blood-red night sky, with a single flash of lightning briefly illuminating him. All of this while Danny Elfman's theme music from Batman plays.
It is, I think this is not actually hyperbole but just good honest criticism, the most perfect piece of art ever involving a superhero. It is gorgeously animated, for one thing, fluid when it needs to be and so hyperstylised that it covers up for when it's not fluid. The thieves are thick, angular figures, while Batman is a collection of sleek lines terminating in dagger-like points, and we see all three of them almost exclusively as silhouettes with bright white eyes against the Expressionist lines of the background drawings of the city - lots of canted angles, staggering mixes of purple, red and yellow that have been soaked in the jet-black of a stormy night, every line feels like it was carved into stone. The sequence was animated by TMS Entertainment, one of the most well-established of all Japanese animation studios, and the influence of comic book art so common in Japanese animation but at that time so rare in American animation - and this is the point where I admit that I think Batman: TAS really does feel more like Japanese animation, or East Asian broadly, at least, than it does "American", and the mere fact that the writers, directors, voice cast, and money all came from the U.S. doesn't entirely change the fact that this basically feels like Warners was secretly funding an anime series all along - is present in every sharp piece of graphic design and the incredible richness of the imagery, which feels in virtually every single shot like a self-consciously iconic version of superhero art at its most elemental.
You can tell that a lot of time and money was spent to get it to perfectly set the mood for the show, since it was going to be the inaugural minute of every one of those first 65 minutes: it immediately tells us to anticipate angular, Expressionistic violence, and a simply fearless, radical reliance on dark colors and pure black. One of the most famous elements of Batman's aesthetic is that many of its backgrounds were painted on black paper, giving them a much richer, heavier atmosphere than anything that had ever been seen in animation. I don't know if that had been trotted out yet when TMS animated the opening sequence, but the heavy blackness of the opening is obvious regardless.
There's probably not a single episode of the series where the opening minute isn't the best part, if I am being honest, but the best of them find different ways of living up to the awe-inspiring promise of that little pantomime nightmare of crime and film noir, and "On Leather Wings" is certainly one of the examples of this being done particularly well. The duty for introducing the series and its take on Batman somehow fell to Mitch Brian, a writer who wasn't one anywhere close to the most prolific member of the writing staff: this was. in fact, one of only two scripts he contributed (along with the story for a third). But it largely works at the somewhat mechanical tasks it is asked to do. The script is explicitly designed as a mystery, something that's surprisingly rare for stories about "The World's Greatest Detective" in any medium; something that appears to be both bat and man is terrorising the night skies above Gotham, and Batman (Kevin Conroy, the best actor to ever portray the character - not the last time I'll be using that phrase in this series of reviews) needs to figure out what's up with this, since the Gotham police department, particularly in the form of the hot-tempered Detective Harvey Bullock (Robert Costanzo) is convinced that he, Batman, is somehow the same as the bat-man causing so much terror.
As an introduction of sorts to the universe, "On Leather Wings" devotes a great deal more time to the police subplot than it necessarily needs to, but it's solid enough at setting out the parameters of the show: Batman is quite alone except for his prim butler Alfred (Clive Revill, who only voiced the character in his first three appearances), the Gotham PD is as much his enemy as the supervillains he'll face, and Bullock in particular is going to be a thorn in his side. We do get to see, very briefly, Batman's sometimes ally, Commissioner Gordon (Bob Hastings), but that's really not the focal point; I bring it up largely because in a series full of beautifully angular character designs that feel like they've come right from the squared-off, muscular style of comic book art prominent in the '30s and '40s, Gordon is probably my favorite-looking character in the show's entire run.
Anyway, the subplot is doing what it needs to, but the real focus is on Batman's investigation, which eventually leads him to discover a proper mad scientist, Dr. Kirk Langstrom (Marc Singer), who has taken to transforming himself into a hideous man-bat. The choice was made very deliberately to kick the show off with an obscure villain, and not one who'll be recurring, which is perhaps why the man-bat really only appears for one scene at the end. This isn't a story about Batman vs. a supervillain, is the thing. It's a story about Batman using all of his wits, and presenting himself as both a terrifying figure of the night and the bland, pleasant-sounding rich airhead Bruce Wayne in order to gather information. It is, basically, a story that's being used strictly as a pretext to let Batman sneak around shadowy spaces. The investigation itself is almost beyond question the least interesting part of the episode, particularly a kind of bland scene of Batman using his supercomputer to analyze a piece of fur.
Where "On Leather Wings" soars, if you will pardon my horrible wordplay, is in the atmosphere that the investigation creates, and particularly the atmosphere that comes from choosing such a random villain as Man-Bat. This episode is pitched, more or less explicitly, as real honest-to-God horror, a natural fit for Batman in most of his guises, but one that rarely ever gets used. It's superbly done, particularly in the episode's last third, when Batman actually figures out that Langstrom is a monster, and we get to see him transform in a half-obscured sequence that's partially achieved with silhouettes. The whole episode relies on silhouettes, to be sure, and almost always to great effect, but it reaches a terrifying operatic crescendo here, enough to make the somewhat banal design of Man-Bat land with far more unnerving force than I think it would in a vacuum.
"On Leather Wings" was animated by another Japanese studio, Spectrum Animation, which prided itself on providing the best possible atmosphere for the show, and in fact drove itself to bankruptcy due to the high quality of its work for Batman. There aren't all that many Spectrum episodes, as a result, but all of them rank among the best-looking, and this gets that tradition of quality kicked off in high fashion. Not all of the character animation lands - they completely messed up Bullock, for one thing - but this episode is uniquely good at displaying the smooth, freakishly organic quality of Batman himself, perpetually seen here as a sweeping shape of strong dark curves. And the brief appearance of Man-Bat is superb, not just from that wonderful injection of horror, but from the sense of hulking, dangerous weight in his strong, fast movements. All told, it's an indescribably beautiful half-hour of television animation: this episode is by no means the most ingeniously-told, but its emphasis on atmosphere and tension and the gloomy potency of the animation itself makes it feel very much like a mission statement for what Batman: The Animated Series will be - 22 minutes of beautifully horrid Expressionism for families, five days a week. It's one of the most promising first episodes of an animated series that American audiences had ever seen, and it's gratifying to be able to say that the show often managed to live up to that promise. But even if it hadn't, this would still be a pretty remarkable episode of television.
Grade: A-
