It's the 25th anniversary of Batman: TAS, if you haven't heard, and just about every pop culture blog on the web is doing some form of tribute, to which I boldly say: why shouldn't we also do exactly that?
It's really hard to overstate how important Batman: TAS is to comic fans of a certain age. Born in 1988, I grew up in an era where the Batman comics were pretty weird (Jean-Paul Valley, anyone?), and the Tim Burton Batman movies were....unique. As a 4 year old I wore out my VHS tape of Batman 89, but Batman Returns was a weird, creepy movie about a black bile spewing Penguin that featured roughly 11 minutes of screen time for a Batman that does barely anything remotely qualifying as heroic. Granted, I watched it 40 times out of brand loyalty and because we were poor and I owned like five movies total and thus watched them all over and over, but if those two movies had been the only Batman material that young Kyle had to consume, it's highly unlikely my life long obsession with the character (and subsequently comics in general) would have taken hold. Fortunately for you all, later that year Batman: TAS debuted and gave us the best version of the character that has ever been.
Others will go over what made this show great, from the animation style to the outstanding theme and scores by Shirley Walker to the voice acting of Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill, but the key to its success has always been that it is pure, distilled Batman. From the start of the show he's already well established as Batman, he has a Robin, Alfred is forever at his side, and his working relationship with Jim Gordon is the mutually beneficial partnership that it should be, not the cartoonish oaf of Gordon from the Burton/Schumacher movies or Batman '66 whose first response to any problem is to throw up his arms and cry for Batman's help. The show never allows itself to get convoluted by continuity issues or comic book sideplots. Batman fights crime, and he does it well. The show also gives a Bruce Wayne that is haunted by his past and driven by his obsession, yet he dates, has a friendly rapport with both Robin and Alfred, and is an active participant in the running of Wayne Enterprises. This is not the broken psychopath of Frank Miller, just an honest-to-god superhero driven to do good as a response to the evil act that changed his life. In short, this show is everything we love about Batman and it will endure forever because of that. Without further ado, here are my five favorite episodes of Batman: TAS and its successor show The New Batman Adventures.
DISCLAIMER: these are just episodes of the shows, not the movies that are in the same continuity, or else I'd just write Mask of the Phantasm 5 times in a row.
