In the third of our three-part “rejected pitch” series, the story of the proposed anime-influenced Batman series that almost played a part in the character’s 75th anniversary celebration.
Oh, to be a fly on the wall at the executive offices of Kids’ WB! back in the day. Obviously they had some good sense—after all, they did greenlight Superman: The Animated Series, The New Batman Adventures, Pinky and the Brain, and other classics—but over time the creative pool shifted, and those innovative ideas began to falter. In a 2012 interview with Kevin Smith on his Fatman on Batman podcast, former producer, writer, and DCAU alumni Paul Dini characterized the Kids’ WB! execs in the following manner:
PAUL DINI: Part of the reason we did Batman Beyond was we had this slew of executives who came in, y’know, [and] we didn’t have Margaret Loesch, God bless her, at Fox Kids, who just said, “I want Batman, I want X-Men, I want Power Rangers, I want the most kickass superhero shows.”
KEVIN SMITH: So, wait, what is this dear woman’s name? Because I remember that line-up—I mean, for me, I was tuning in, naturally, just for Batman, and I did watch some X-Men, but I remember that powerful line-up, and it’s developed a generation of children that talk about it as religiously as we talk about the cartoons of our childhood. It’s that block that you just described: some Batman, some Power Rangers, some X-Men. Fox really put it together. And what was her name?
PAUL DINI: Margaret Loesch. She had Tiny Toons, Animaniacs, Taz-Mania. She just said, “Do your best.” And that is what Jean MacCurdy said, you know, “Go out and do your best.” Then, when the Kids’ WB! started, we got these executives who’ve washed out from other places that I felt were kinda…
KEVIN SMITH: C’mon, you’re doing your best. Because you’ll fail upwards!
PAUL DINI: They acted like they were brain damaged! They come in, and they would go, like—one guy came and goes—[STONER VOICE]—“What if we take ten minutes of Superman, and then cut in ten minutes of Batman, and then we cut back to Superman, and then we cut back to Batman?” And this is, like, the head … one of the guys who’s head of the network!
KEVIN SMITH: [LAUGHS.]
PAUL DINI: And we’re going, like, “Well, the audience won’t know where they are. The kids will be confused.” He goes, “Yeah, they won’t know where they are! It’ll be a mystery! And that’ll keep their interest!”
KEVIN SMITH: Oh, lord. These are the people that are in charge of the programming.
PAUL DINI: Yeah! And one of their ideas, you know, that they kind of went along with, was, like—and these guys who are obsessed with being young, hip, and fresh, you know. They’re actually none of these things themselves, but they know that the audience they’re going for is young, hip, and fresh. And so, you know, a Batman who’s thirty-two years old is not gonna fly with these guys, so a Batman who’s, like, seventeen [or] eighteen, that’s a lot better. So, you know, they wanted, well, “Can we do young Bruce Wayne, young Batman, young everything?” And so, you know—young, young, young—kids won’t watch adults. You know, that’s their philosophy. And that’s something that kinda pervades today. You know, “We’re going a little younger.”
KEVIN SMITH: ‘Cause Robert Downey, Jr. is, like, eighteen, or something like that. He’s an adult kids will watch.
PAUL DINI: Yeah, yeah. It works in some cases, and in some cases, you know—there are adults out there that kids will watch. But the guys at this time were really obsessed with it. And so, they “young” it up.
NOTE: Margaret Loesch is a television executive and producer who was president of the Fox Children’s Network from 1990 to 1997. Jean MacCurdy is a television executive who was president of Warner Bros. Animation from 1989 to 2001.
Considering some of the executive decision made towards the end of the network’s tenure, it kinda explains a few things. Of course, what should we expect from a network whose initial mascot was a frog that only entertained one person at a time?
Anyway, as previously stated, towards the end of 2000, Batman Beyond was ending, and the Kids’ WB! network was looking for another project from Bruce Timm’s creative team. Interested in keeping the production team together in some capacity (Gross), Timm and company presented the network with at least three potential projects: Batman on Mars, Justice League with some kid heroes thrown in, and a project alternately called Batman Anime or Batanime (I prefer the latter). Developed by Timm, Glen Murakami, Alan Burnett, and [artist] Adam Warren [Dirty Pair, Empowered] (b.t.), it was described by then director and storyboard artist for Batman Beyond, James Tucker, as similar to Murakami’s Teen Titans series (2003-2006; Gross). Timm explained the proposal in a February 12, 2005 post on the Toon Zone message boards (later Anime Superhero):
When [Batman Beyond] was originally coming to a close, Kids’ WB! asked us if we had any ideas on how to do a more “kid-friendly” Batman show. […] So, Glen and I were mulling it over and took it as a challenge. Was there a way to give [Kids’ WB!] exactly the kind of show they wanted but still make it something that was freaky enough to be fun in its own right? We thought, “Okay, rather than doing something that’s just a ‘baby step’ away from our previous shows, still tied to our direct continuity, etc. what if we do something that’s really whacked that takes place so far in the future [that] it’s barely related to what we’ve done before.” “Plausible deniability” played a factor here too.
Pokémon was still super-hot at [Kids’ WB!], so we tried to combine elements of it and other “collect ‘em all” anime shows (Cardcaptors, Digimon, etc.) with traditional Batman elements. We brought Adam Warren in to help develop it with us (he ended up doing most of the art for the pitch too). It took place hundreds of years from now and revolved around the adventures of an all-new Batman, Robin, and Batgirl, all in their early teens. There was some kind of nano-disaster that rewrote reality, recreating the old Bat-villain archetypes as nano-based monsters. The kids had a butler A.I. named “Alpha-Red” (that one was just so tacky, we had to do it) who also powered all their vehicles. Kenner had been urging us for years to put a talking vehicle a la “Knight Rider” in one of our shows (they originally wanted us to put a “Jor-El” voice chip in Clark Kent’s sports car in STAS, so he could converse with Clark, Brando-style), so the talking “Alpha-Red / Batmobile” was a no-brainer. Do I have to go on?
Anyway, Kenner loved the whole pitch [and] wanted to get started on the toy line “yesterday!”, but [Kids’ WB!] thought it was still too “traditional,” it wasn’t “out of the box” enough. “Batman’s still too reactive; does he have to fight crime?” I pointed out that he would be fighting monsters, not criminals. “What if, instead of three kids who fight monsters, what if the three kids compete about who gets to be Batman?” After a long moment of stunned silence, I pointed out that if Batman’s not protecting the weak from the bad guys, be they monsters or criminals or aliens or what-have-you, then fundamentally, it just isn’t “Batman” at all. They allowed that there was probably some truth to that, asked us to give the whole thing some more thought and invited us to come back and re-pitch it then. The next day, I called Mike Lazzo at [Cartoon Network], pitched [Justice League], he said, “hell yeah!”, and that was the end of Batmanime. (b.t.)
NOTE: As of July 2024, I cannot find any samples of Adam Warren’s concept art for Batanime. To compensate, the images used in this essay are from Jeff Matsuda’s anime influenced The Batman series (2004-2008).
And so, like Batman on Mars, the proposal for Batanime would fade into entertainment history arcana … until it almost gained a reprieve fourteen years later.
The Dark Knight's Diamond Jubilee
In 2014, DC Comics, Warner Bros., and DC Entertainment celebrated the 75th anniversary of Batman with a year-long celebration that included a pair of new DC Nation animated shorts that aired on Cartoon Network. Working with Peter Girardi—currently the executive vice president of Blue Ribbon Content and alternative programming at Warner Bros. Animation—who developed the DC Nation material, the first one, a 1940s noir short titled “Batman: Strange Days,” aired April 9th:
And the second, an unnamed Batman Beyond short, aired April 23rd:
Featuring Timm’s classic animation style and voice work by Kevin Conroy and Will Friedle, the shorts were a welcome return to the DCAU of old. However, as revealed by Timm in an August 26, 2020 post on the Anime Superhero message boards, the shorts were originally conceived as a trilogy:
Is it public knowledge that Peter Girardi and I were planning to do a third “Batman 75th” short, and that it was actually going to be set in the Batanime world? It was originally supposed to be a trilogy—my retro [black-and-white] short (the past), then Darwyn’s Batman Beyond short (near future), and then Batanime (far, far future). But we ran out of time and bandwidth. Alas. (b.t.)
The following day, he elaborated on his planned third short in an additional post:
Did I ever publicly mention that Hugo Strange was going to be the recurring villain in all [three] shorts? Unfortunately, I don’t remember what Strange’s deal in the Batman Beyond short was originally going to be. It was all pretty vague—it’s possible we didn’t have any firm idea what the main storyline was going to be before we brought Darwyn onboard to write, storyboard, and direct it.
For the Batanime short, the idea was that Strange had become some kind of cyber-god, kinda like Thanos after he’d absorbed the Cosmic Cube in Jim Starlin’s early Captain Marvel run and visualized as an enormous “solarized” face in the heavens like Rama Kushna in the JLU episode “Dead Reckoning.” Don’t think we ever got much further than that thumbnail idea.
But then I got swamped boarding an art directing the [black-and-white] short, realized that Batanime was going to [be] a bear to do without a full-time, dedicated crew, and as Darwyn and I started hashing out the [Batman Beyond] storyline, we felt that it would work just fine without forcing Hugo Strange into it, and at that point I talked Peter Girardi into just focusing our energies on the first two [shorts] and abandoning the third (it wasn’t hard). We talked about doing the Batanime thing a few times since then, possibly as a Showcase short, but the stars never seem to align. (b.t.)
And, later that day, a final post:
“Strange Days” was meant to be an umbrella title for the entire trilogy (makes sense now, right?). I never would have picked a 1969 Doors reference for such a retro-looking short; [I] would have called it something that leaned more […] “pulp / serial chapter” like “Night of the Monster” or somesuch. You’ll notice that it doesn’t actually have an onscreen title, but somehow “Strange Days” got attached to it as a working title and stuck. Shrug.
Y’know, now that you mention it, I think the original idea was that Strange’s voice was going to start coming out of the TNBA robot’s mouth during the fight—“We meet again, old foe, bwahahahaha!” etc. He was still alive, just old and kinda decrepit like Bruce, controlling the robot from a remote location like [J. Jonah Jameson] and one of the Spider-Slayers. But as I said, once we realized that there wasn’t going to be a third chapter where the character ascended to digital godhood, it felt weird and almost anti-climactic to have him in the second short.
So, that streamlined the story a lot, but [it] left us without a punchy ending. Darwyn had been excited about the idea of classic Batman fighting Terry Batman the minute we pitched it to him, so he and I started riffing off of that. I came up with the twist of all the alternate Batmans showing up at the end (honestly, I nicked it from Warren Ellis and John Cassaday [probably from 2003’s Planetary / Batman: Night on Earth one-shot], and Darwyn instantly said, “Hell yeah, baby, we are totally doing that!” I accidentally plagiarized my own work by suggesting Terry and Bruce’s last exchange, but I said it out loud only as a placeholder, as words to that effect. Darwyn said, “Why don’t we just use that?,” and I said because it’s a direct quote from one of our Justice League episodes [NOTE: he may be referring to Superman and Wonder Woman’s exchange in “Starcrossed, Part 3”], and he said, “I don’t give a [shit], it’s [fucking] badass coming from Old Bruce; we should just use it,” and so we did. He added that great touch of Bruce buckling on the robot’s utility belt like an aged gunslinger strapping on his six-guns. (b.t.)
And there you are. It’s interesting how such an unusual, out of the box concept like Batanime could survive the network it was originally pitched to. It goes to show that even whacked out ideas can have merit, ignoring—of course—the idiocy of others who desperately try to put their mark on them.
Works Cited
b.t. Comment on “Justice League Kids: The DCAU Show That Could Have Replaced Justice League.” Anime Superhero. XenForo Ltd. 12 Feb. 2005. <https://animesuperhero.com/forums/threads/justice-league-kids-the-dcau-show-that-could-have-replaced-justice-league.3815571/#post-57116291>. Accessed 19 Sept. 2023.
---. Comment on “Justice League Kids: The DCAU Show That Could Have Replaced Justice League.” Anime Superhero. XenForo Ltd. 12 Feb. 2005. <https://animesuperhero.com/forums/threads/justice-league-kids-the-dcau-show-that-could-have-replaced-justice-league.3815571/#post-57116401>. Accessed 19 Sept. 2023.
---. Comment on “Who Would Have Been Alfred Beyond in Batman Beyond?” Anime Superhero. XenForo Ltd. 26 Aug. 2020. <https://animesuperhero.com/forums/threads/who-would-have-been-alfred-beyond-in-batman-beyond.5787786/#post-87721853>. Accessed 8 Oct. 2023.
---. Comment on “Who Would Have Been Alfred Beyond in Batman Beyond?” Anime Superhero. XenForo Ltd. 27 Aug. 2020. <https://animesuperhero.com/forums/threads/who-would-have-been-alfred-beyond-in-batman-beyond.5787786/#post-87721943>. Accessed 8 Oct. 2023.
---. Comment on “Who Would Have Been Alfred Beyond in Batman Beyond?” Anime Superhero. XenForo Ltd. 27 Aug. 2020. <https://animesuperhero.com/forums/threads/who-would-have-been-alfred-beyond-in-batman-beyond.5787786/#post-87722024>. Accessed 8 Oct. 2023.
Gross, Edward. “Justice League: The Making of the DC Tooniverse.” RetroVision CD-ROM Magazine. N.p. n.d. Web. 01 Apr. 2022.
Smith, Kevin, host. “The Dini Dossiers, Part 3.” Fatman on Batman, featuring Paul Dini. SModcast. 13 Dec. 2012. MP3 file. Created 24 Dec. 2012.
Images courtesy of Warner Bros. Discovery, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment, and DC Comics. YouTube videos courtesy of WB Kids and DC channels.
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