I’m surprised that I haven’t written about this show before, but in all honesty, it has taken me years before I finally found a place that had all of the episodes. This show premiered on televisions back in 1992, and I was in the college at the time. If I had been watching afternoon TV shows in college, I am pretty certain that Batman: The Animated Series would become my world.

The reason why Batman: The Animated Series is so good is because it had the potential to be so bad. After all, Batman in 1992 was in the theaters still with Tim Burton’s not-so-good follow-up to the hit 1989 film with Batman Returns. By that time, the public was beginning to realize that Batman was more than the 1960s series and the character could be taken seriously.

The issue is that Warner Brothers ordered a cartoon series on Batman to be made, and it is actually is good. Like most cartoon series of the time, it could have not been written seriously, the mentality back then was “well, it’s good enough to keep kids entertained”.

Batman The Animated Series (TAS) broke all the rules for a cartoon. Instead of being light and colorful, it is very heavy on black and shadowy backgrounds. This style alone should have been enough for Warner Brothers to reject the concept initially, but am I glad that it stayed.

Speaking of style, Batman TAS had it in spades. The background art is very minimalist with giant blocks of buildings for color. There isn’t much attention to detail on things in the foreground, either, and I think this was done so the animation could be produced faster. This style became known as “Dark Deco”, and it gave Batman TAS a level of uniqueness that no cartoon of its time had.

Not only did this look like it was a cartoon for grown-ups, I was amazed at the mature themes that were handled on this show. It took on drugs, but a lot of cartoons of the eighties were doing that. The show had a lot of human drama as it showed the impact of crime on the common man. Then there is the episode with Two-Face, as the audience can really relate with the pain of Harvey Dent.

There are also episodes that deal with domestic violence. There is an episode where the character of Harley Quinn is introduced as the Joker’s henchmen. This character was created for the show and was so popular that she was added to the comic. Anyway, Harley can take a beating from the Joker, and it is pretty dark, honestly.

This show also really shined in creating stories within the Batman mythos that are beautiful and stand-alone. As mentioned before, Batman had man recurring villains, and what is awesome is how it did the Joker. He was voiced by Mark Hamill, who was only known for being Luke Skywalker, but is now became most famous as being the best voice for the Clown Prince of Crime.

I recently wrote about Batman on The Gospel Herald, talking about the best and worst versions of the Darkknight detective. I put Batman the Animated Series as number one, and it really is showing what Batman is all about. It is a character who is dark, but distributes justice to make the world a brighter place.