Batman: Caped Crusader was Bruce Timm’s grand return to the character he reenergized for animation almost 35 years ago, only with a film noir flavor. The Prime Video series takes place vaguely in the late ’40s or early ’50s, and imagines a Dark Knight in the era of his origin. Only much darker than the comics allowed back then, aside from that first year of stories. But as much as Timm’s fingerprints are all over this series, the true heavy lifting comes from showrunners James Tucker (Batman: Brave and the Bold, Justice League) and Geoffrey Thorne (Eyes of Wakanda). At San Diego Comic-Con, Nerdist sat down with the showrunners, along with other journalists, and discussed what makes Caped Crusader so special.
To start, we asked both executive producers about one relationship on the series that has really changed the most from the traditional lore. And that’s regarding Batman’s loyal butler, Alfred Pennyworth. In Caped Crusader, Batman has a very different relationship with his Alfred, who he just calls by his last name, Pennyworth. It’s not a warm relationship at all, but rather icy. What made them decide to do such a different iteration of such an iconic relationship?
James Tucker answered, saying, “Well, here’s the deal. Bruce Timm told me how he was going to have the Batman origin shown in episode three [of season one], the Catwoman episode, where we see that Bruce sees the gunman, and he purposely doesn’t tell the cops. He’s absorbed all the pain, and he’s in a bad way. Alfred, at that point, is like the chauffeur. He’s not the man servant yet. So if Bruce Wayne is 10, Alfred is maybe 21 or 22. He is a young guy. So he can’t be that father figure. And so, all young Bruce has ever known of Alfred is as a servant. And so the trajectory of the show after that is, how does Batman show more humanity as a character growing? He’s going to grow into calling him Alfred. He’s going to grow into confiding in him like a peer.
But right now, he’s in a messed-up place. And so he has closed himself off to all humanity. And like Bruce Timm said in the first season, everyone in his world is a tool to him. He doesn’t see people yet. He sees everyone around him as, “How can I use that person to help me on my mission?” And that’s his journey. Again, if this were a screwball comedy, or a movie set in the ’30s, they always called their servants by their last name. And so, you know, I mean, Bruce was probably 20 before he realized Alfred was a person. He’s just “Pennyworth.” And the thing is, Pennyworth doesn’t take offense to this. But we’re so used to them being a father and son surrogate that it’s like, “Oh, why is he so mean and dismissive to him?” But just wait. Just wait.
So why the darker Bruce? Tucker said, “His roots were in noir, but as the character got more popular, they wanted it to appeal to kids. So that’s where Robin enters, and the stories became lighter. But if you look at the first two years of the comics, they were pretty dark.” Thorne added, “Batman was rough back then! He threw bad guys out of a moving car in front of the police station! He shot people, and he hanged people!” Tucker reiterated, “We were taking our series and jumping off those first few issues where he was more violent. Before Robin. But all of our influences come from what’s going on at that time, the gangster movies, and film noir was beginning. Universal Monsters movies, all those were things we thought we could pull in now to this Batman, that the comic book had a little bit of.
Thorn reminded us, “He also didn’t have all the gadgets that he has now, because even with a super genius, most of it wasn’t invented yet. So there’s no ‘Oh, quickly, send me my robot car, and it will do this for me. No, ‘I have infrared goggles, and I can look through walls.’ None of that. He’s just a guy in a suit with some stuff. And weirdly, it makes him tougher, and it forces you to remember he has a brain in there. Like, he actually has to figure things out.” Tucker added ”He doesn’t have a computer. Unlike B:TAS, where they needed certain things to move the story along. We thought, ‘Let’s really challenge ourselves; this is a world where there are no computers, there’s no software. He’s not “Bat God” in this, right? He has not anticipated everything. Yeah, he gets shot and hurt. Makes mistakes.”
Almost inarguably, Batman has the best villains in all of comics. So when it came to new takes on old favorites, the creators viewed this as a delightful challenge. James Tucker had no problem not leaning on older iterations. He said, “You know, it was easy not to do what we had already done. We just were like, ‘We already did that.’ It was like that Simpsons joke [on South Park]. Simpsons already did it. B:TAS has already done that. And I’ve done every kind of Batman, from Adam West, to Brave and the Bold, I did the movies, the DTVs, and they all have different tones. There was more of a challenge, but it was also more fun.”
When it comes to Batman villains, the subject of the Joker had to come up. In season two, he’s gone back to his roots, in a version voiced by House of the Dragon’s Matthew Needham. Tucker reminded us that this Joker goes back to his roots, saying, “The comic book Joker that first appeared was influenced by German expressionism, silent movies, Conrad Veidt. He was a direct descendant of that. And we went further. What if he was slightly European? What if he’s almost a silent character in that he doesn’t talk a lot, because he’s not Mark Hamill’s Joker. And we make him scarier by making him talk less. And so that’s an instance of reimagining the character with the DNA that they started out with, but not where they ended up, but where they could have gone in another direction.”
Speaking of changes to Batman rogues, one of the big changes was Caped Crusader’s iteration of the Riddler. Instead of a criminal who trades in riddles, he’s a gangster who “riddles his enemies with bullets.” James Tucker revealed that they were inspired by the actor Richard Widmark, as the gangster Udo in the 1947 film Kiss of Death. “You may have seen a guy pushing an old lady in a wheelchair down the stairs. Anyway… That’s the guy. Frank Gorshin based his Riddler [in Batman ’66] on Richard Widmark, his character in that movie. So we were like, “Oh, let’s make Riddler like that character in that movie. That’s the origin.” There are still a metric ton of Bat-baddies that could be reinvented for Caped Crusader. As Geoffrey Thorne said, “We could literally kill every villain, every episode, every season, and have 10 seasons of Good Batman to tell.”
Batman: Caped Crusader seasons one and two are currently streaming on Prime Video.
The post BATMAN: CAPED CRUSADER Creators on Making a New (Old) Dark Knight appeared first on Nerdist.
This articles is written by : Fady Askharoun Samy Askharoun
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