All 10 episodes of Batman: Caped Crusader Season 1 will stream on Prime Video beginning Thursday, August 1.
The first name on the screen says it all. Before the marquee talents who led the headlines about Batman: Caped Crusader’s development and eventual migration to Prime Video, before the title Batman: Caped Crusader, even, there it is in elegant, elongated Art Deco lettering: Bruce Timm. Not that you’d need his executive producer credit to know it: The lush orchestral score, retro-cool designs, and shadowy urban environments all point to Timm, one of the chief architects of 1992’s Batman: The Animated Series (and the celebrated roster of DC cartoons that followed in its wake) revisiting his greatest televised triumph. But he’s not just playing the hits here: Between one-off face-offs with the deepest, most colorful ranks of Batman’s reimagined rogues’ gallery, Caped Crusader tells a tightly focused, slightly more mature story of Bruce Wayne and his alter ego learning that they’re not so alone in this crazy, mixed-up world.
It’s a tragedy worthy of Crime Alley that Caped Crusader must forge ahead without the late, great Kevin Conroy voicing the main character. But there’s an able successor to Conroy’s definitive portrayal of Bruce and Bats in Hamish Linklater. The Midnight Mass star matches the rich timbre of Conroy’s performance while finding an amusing zest to the playboy doofus that is his other disguise, faithfully tended to a more youthful, less physically fit, but just as endearing version of Wayne family butler Alfred Pennyworth (Jason Watkins). Linklater and Watkins strike a conspicuously formal dynamic in these roles, but there’s a good reason for it. As the season progresses, we’re clearly meant to wonder why Bruce insists on addressing his closest confidant and surrogate father by his surname.
As Caped Crusader’s title indicates, there’s a curiosity here about the costumes, literal and figurative, all of these characters wear – and why they wear them. It’s an emotional complexity suited to a show with the visual sophistication and realistic violence of B:TAS’ feature-length spin-off, 1993’s Mask of the Phantasm – it’s not for nothing that Bruce winds up on the couch of psychiatrist Dr. Harleen Quinzel (Jamie Chung) by Episode 3. Every depiction of this character has been badly in need of a shrink, but this is one of the few times we see him actually interact with one.
Caped Crusader doesn’t make any introductions on the level of the makeup-wearing moll otherwise known as Harley Quinn, who was an original creation that broke out on B:TAS long before Margot Robbie or Lady Gaga played her on the big screen. Instead, it builds on the earlier series’ foundation, roping in another Timm/Paul Dini/Mitch Brian creation: Gotham City police detective Renee Montoya (Michelle C. Bonilla). The studio backlot whodunit in episode 2, “And Be a Villain,” is practically a Montoya solo crime-and-corruption-fighting mission. That might seem a little early for taking the spotlight off of Batman, but it’s perfectly in line with Caped Crusader’s mission: This first season is all about Batman learning who he can trust – and showing Montoya, police commissioner Jim Gordon (Eric Morgan Stuart), and idealistic public defender Barbara Gordon (Krystal Joy Brown) that they can trust Batman.
The trade-off for this emphasis on casework and relationship-building is a Gotham that feels more like Smallville with skyscrapers than a bustling Metropolis. The point of view rarely ventures beyond that of the main characters: When we’re not in a squad car or police-precinct bullpen, we’re at some fancy soiree or in the Batcave. It’s smart to go modest in scale – “modest” being a relative term for a show where the Penguin runs a floating nightclub topped by a giant umbrella – when you consider Caped Crusader only has 10 25-minute-or-less episodes to endear its characters to us.
But that time limit also makes it disappointing that there’s some repetition in the figures Bruce rubs elbows with: Both Harvey Dent (Diedrich Bader, himself a former animated Batman) and Selina Kyle (Christina Ricci) come from money in this telling – and you’d better believe they each form a different (yet troublingly similar) mirror image of our hero by season’s end. Catwoman goes one step further in the franchise’s usual game of “Which came first: The chicken or the egg(head)?” proudly showing her cowled foil the cape-and-mask combo, gizmos, and souped-up ride she’s modeled after his. Pity that her 3D-rendered Catmobile glides as awkwardly down Gotham’s 2D streets as the Batmobile (and every other car on screen) does – chase scenes in the 1992 show look far better.
At least her purple, clawed roadster fits within the playful, comic-book sensibility of Caped Crusader. The show may share The Batman’s interest in the Dark Knight’s detective side (that film’s director, Matt Reeves, is an executive producer here) but its vision of Gotham is more endearingly fanciful. The reference points reach even further back than B:TAS’ vintage inspirations: The ears on the Batsuit extend to Detective Comics #27 length, cutting a more intimidating, devil-like silhouette in the moonlight. It goes with Caped Crusader’s dips into the occult and the supernatural, as well as visits from gimmick-centric villains like Firebug and Onomatopoeia. Not an episode goes by without some form of hard-hitting gunplay or fisticuffs, but the action never gets better than the bit of swashbuckling Batman does with a suspect and a pair of prop swords.
This can’t help but invite comparisons to the nocturnal majesty of Batman: The Animated Series. Frederik Wiedmann’s score does so much to enhance the mood of the investigations, but his muted theme song is a far cry from its rousing, Danny Elfman-composed B:TAS counterpart. Caped Crusader does itself no favors when, say, an airborne Batman looks like he’s being clicked-and-dragged out of frame on a Windows desktop, or when a drunken Harvey pukes into a toilet, then stands up to reveal he got none of it on the bandages covering half his face. (To be fair, given the inconsistency of B:TAS’ outsourced animation, this could be read as homage.) And while it can’t match the expansiveness of B:TAS’ Gotham, Caped Crusader can better reflect the makeup of a city that size: The Gordons here are Black, and played by Black actors; there’s also a screwball flirtation between Harley and Montoya. (And before you cry foul at any of this, remember: Before Bader, Tommy Lee Jones, or Richard Moll, the first onscreen Harvey Dent was Billy Dee Williams, and Jeffrey Wright is Commissioner Gordon in the Reeves-run continuity recently christened (sigh) the Batman Epic Crime Saga.)
It all speaks to the flexibility of these characters – which Timm and team took advantage of then (does the name Nora Fries ring any bells?) and continue to today. The surfaces can, and should, change in any retelling in order to give new life to old tales – what’s important are the essential characteristics, and what they stand for: Batman as vengeance, Commissioner Gordon as integrity, Harley as maniacal devotion. Few people have understood this as well as those who were responsible for Batman: The Animated Series. Fortunately for us, that hasn’t changed with Batman: Caped Crusader.
