This is gonna be a hot take but I actually love Batman Beyond more than BTAS and it's my favorite DCAU show.
I recognize btas is the better show, but everything about Batman Beyond is just so fucking cool
Batman Beyond
That's not a hot take, every fucking millenial who grew up with this show praises it and talks about wanting a Batman Beyond movie and how great Terry is.
Agree and not sure how this property has been neglected so long. Hollywood doesn't want it, video games barely want it, comics rarely touch on it...
Everyone just wants to suck Bruce's cock forever I guess.
My last DCAU rewatch, I was kinda floored by how much I enjoyed Beyond. It... kind of 'mogged' as the kids say, all the other DCAU shows to some extent. BTAS still has its beautiful artistry, but I've seen that. Superman is still excellent popcorn and great characters that never betray their truth, and Justice League has a lot of complex ideas and shit, but... Beyond just.. works. Every episode slides right through your brain's digestion unimpeded.
When it first came out, I thought it was fucking dumb. RotJ and especially Epilogue fixed that, but even tossing that all out, the PACING is just so nice. It's like they found that perfect balance between the overly detailed BTAS stuff that wins awards, and the cheaper TNBA way of doing things, so it's still artistic in a minimalist way. Neo Gotham is kind of baffling, and piecing together the worldbuilding is a joy in and of itself. We get little snippets here and there of how differently the world works, just enough to make it a pretty unique and instantly-dated future.
uhh no. everyone hated Terry, nobody our age says 'millennial,' and the only reason we wanted a Beyond movie was so Kevin could finally play him live action... yknow, outside of being an eeevil rich white man for a young brown woman to beat up.
the only weird thing about the show is how it tosses out any semblance of "villain has a complex psychology behind him" in favor of "it's the future. people want creds. they're gonna find a way to use hi-tech stuff to do it" and instead of like, monstrously ugly and based on an old silent film or 19th century book illustration, the villains are just regular joes, but ugly. One of them is literally just some guy's fat, beady-eyed dad.
Terry wouldn't understand deep cerebral stuff anyway, so it works. but it's different. Also he has one hell of a body count, because his villains typically make it impossible to do otherwise.
. everyone hated Terry,
Where the fuck are you from? Yeah maybe some older guys hated it, but keywords were "who grew up with it"
It's set in the future but they're still using CDs. Fucking kek.
And with ChatGPT and AI wouldn't the Batcomputer be pointless? The Joker could just ask his cellphone on how to kill Batman.
Dude everybody felt hugely patronized having Batman replaced with a juvenile delinquent who was barely a minor, just because they thought that's what we wanted. Everyone was like "Psh, he's just Spider-Man with bat ears. Which isn't terrible, but it sure aint Batman" and "look at that weak chin. and the blue eyes and visible lips, fucking gross, why. is he supposed to be johnny depp?"
older guys
I mean yeah I was just short of adulthood when this came out. little younger than Terry. So that's fair, but.. who else's opinion would you be talking about? little kids dont have opinions. I could type walls of text about the dumb shit I watched as a kid because I had no taste yet.
Even BTAS struggled with that. You'd have a villain debut episode where they were sympathetic, then they were back after a few episodes and a total bad guy with nothing sympathetic about them. It's very noticeable binging the show, though of course these shows weren't made with that in mind.
Batman's tech is always slightly better than what other people have available, and Batman is smarter than someone who would ask Grok or ChatGPT to think for them. Even Terry's street smarts should trump that, for a satisfying story.
microCDs were the "this will be the future" thing for a while, it's kinda funny how it would have worked if the internet hadn't made it redundant
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dude what's wrong with you
You know, I do remember back in the day, thinking it'd be interesting to have a meme-based villain, at a time when internet culture did NOT get referenced in ANYTHING (nowadays, that would be fucking cringey and terrible, panderiffic) and it would have felt so refreshing like, having him really piss off the Joker by actually being funny and having routines younger than 80 years old.
Plus you'd have Batman not knowing any of that shit, and Robin having to explain it.. but.. it's a good thing that didn't happen.
Oh indeed. I'm not sure whether Beyond tossed it out because it's hard, or just because it's sort of unnecessary. In Beyond, the future IS the villain. People are just assholes, they don't need to have been made fun of as kids or have some congenital deformity anymore. they're just not fun to look at. lotta big nostrils and gross mouths, or Inque with her beaky nose.
No one was caring about a teenager's opinion on a Saturday morning kid's show back then anyway. And the kids who watched it have now grown up, many soon to enter middle age because it was 26 years ago...and they've had plenty of time to think about it and how they like it.
everyone hated Terry
Terry was based. You hate him because you can't be him.
No one was caring about a teenager's opinion on a Saturday morning kid's show back then anyway.
indeed. fucking sucked. And they never did, either. Rest of my life, people my age were not being listened to. I basically had Turtlemania and Power Rangers and that was the extent of anyone caring what I was into.
and they've had plenty of time to think about it and how they like it.
of course they like it, but we're talking about -at the time- what -people with developed opinions- though.
you said 'millennial' meaning Gen Y except as spoken by a homosexual. Nevermind Millennial meant Gen Z back when this show was out, whatever. So we did not 'grow up with it', we were grown up already. and when we, yes you were right about this one, raved about a Beyond movie, it was purely for Bruce.
"villain has a complex psychology behind him
It help when you have a competent commissioner that had personal experience with these kinds of villains and took care of them immediately.
and talks about wanting a Batman Beyond movie
Fuck you no. I don't trust anyone working on Beyond at this point. Its either Bruce Timm or nobody else.
I didn't hate him at all. I thought he was cool when I watch him as a kid.
Replace Batman with a younger guy that 80% of everyone watching who missed the first episode where his dad was shown mistakenly thought was Asian and his sassy black sidekick with short cut hair
Everyone loves it
Replace the three fat white guys and a Christian black guy with a Irish Cripple, black cuck, goth Jew, and rude Mexican
Everyone loves it
They just knew how to do things BETTER back then
I'm joking but I would actually be interested in knowing if 40 year old nerds of the day who read Batman in the 1940s got mad at Batman Beyond, you see posts of proto internet people arguing about like fucking Star Trek and Eva as it was airing after all
Ghostbuster in a wheelchair
Extreme had a lot of potential, but ffs
remember when Paul Dini and a pre-insanity Kevin Smith used to dick around on podcasts about Batman and came up with some really good ideas for how shit could be done.. their 'Gotham' was way better than the Gotham we got..
and Dini said he kept trying to pitch a Beyond movie live action but they wouldn't go for it.
... you know a lot of blue-eyed asians. anon?
three fat white guys
who?
anon you're kinda weirdly fixated on race, and it's not healthy. ESPECIALLY if you have trouble IDing race.
You say that, but it lead to the infamous moment where Edward kicks him out of his wheelchair to shoot at a clown ghosts
He really was just treated like everyone else, getting rid of "everyone is the same" mentality fucked up the world.
Fixating on another anon talking about race to comment on them fixating on race
Don't go throwing stones in that glass house
it tosses out any semblance of "villain has a complex psychology behind him" in favor of "it's the future. people want creds. they're gonna find a way to use hi-tech stuff to do it"
In some cases yeah, but there's plenty of villains where the psychology/motivation aspect is important. Not nearly as much as BTAS where it was the primary focus, but it does exist.
The fact that a non-trivial amount of the villains were Terry's classmates, or at least around his age, kinda held it back in that aspect, as there's really only so many motivations a highschooler is gonna have to become a supervillain (that are appropriate and tonally consistent with what is ostensibly a kids' show, anyway) and a lot of them are pretty cliche.
It's just a weird choice for a job that requires a lot of running, stair climbing, and general mobility. Stuff like that makes writing a pain in the ass because now you have to account for wheels and how he gets around basic shit.
MicroCDs were fucking dumb because they're honestly too small to be convenient. In reality we ended up with DVDs and then Blu-ray which were the exact same form factor but with more storage because CDs were already fine.
but we're talking about -at the time- what -people with developed opinions- though.
No I was talking about now.
Nevermind Millennial meant Gen Z back when this show was out, whatever. So we did not 'grow up with it', we were grown up already. and when we, yes you
You are probably a few years older than me.
They lean into that. It's not a job per se, it's Egon just putting together the small class made up of the few people that applied to it to work. This wasn't an open call to the job but basically an internship and Egon using what little people he had.
Garret's limitations played into the episodes and he didn't just have a rocket wheelchair or anything, he's into it because he's an adrenaline junkie but has to deal with not being able to keep up with everyone else.
I will admit that I am quite fond of Beyond. The setting's aesthetic is top-notch, a particular kind of 90s Cyberpunk that nobody does any more because they keep putting in too much glowy shit and overinvesting in the punk part.
Also, nobody can get that damn suit looking right these days. They always make it too wide, too muscly, too textured... it's supposed to be lithe and look like it is actively absorbing light, a deep black that no other Batman has.
There was a point in time where people were obsessed with making everything smaller, regardless if it was a good idea or not.
"Damn you got Mario Sunshine on this?"
We still use cds.
They're best exterminators
If Peter was there he would be suing people for not having their places wheelchair compliant
I really like this guy. Was he just doing his best Christopher Walken impression?
Batman Beyond gets a lot worse when you remember it's supposed to be an sequel to stuff like JLU. Then Bruce's fate feels a hell of a lot worse.
The Near-Apocalypse of '09 really did a number on the guy. It must have been pretty bad if decades later the justice league was still just a couple people rather than the hundreds it was at its peak.
Yes, story on the BB movie commentary goes that Michael Rosenbaum(who did a few voices of characters-of-the-day in the show) was joking around in the recording studio durring a session and did a Walken impression which made them crack up, and they asked him to use it for the character.
I genuinely believe that the events of Savage Time resulted in a timeline split, with the 'original' timeline before Savage fucked everything up continuing on towards Beyond, while the 'new' timeline where the Justice League went to WW2 goes to JLU and Batman generally has a better time of it. No Joker Jr and so on.
I am willingly and actively ignoring Epilogue because that was shit.
I am willingly and actively ignoring Epilogue because that was shit.
Why do people hate Epilogue so much?
It sort of tracks. Waller would do some twisted shit to make another batman.
the idea of a random street kid becoming Batman feels more triumphant than him being predisposed to be Batman all along.
Also Terry seeing Bruce as a surrogate family member feels less eerie than him literally being his son. There's something genetically disturbing about the implication of Warren's genes being overwritten in a way that rubs people the wrong way.
You should just be happy Return of the Joker failed so they didn't do the second movie where it's Epilogue but with Catwoman
Was the Terry clone plan going to be in that one too? I know it was going to be Catwoman cloning a bunch of Bruces at least(including one she had an implied incestuous relationship with, having raised him like a son)
I honestly would've been interested in seeing Terry face off against a proper clone of Bruce in his prime. thematically would've fit with ROTJ being him beating the Joker, to beat a mimic of Batman himself next
I know people here hate Watchtower Database a lot, but they do have interviews with the people who worked on the show, and yes, it really was gonna be Catwoman who cloned a Terry and there was gonna be a clone Nightwing too
Who would be Terry if we had a BB LA movie? Tanner Buchanan, perhaps.