Old transcript of Bruce Timm and co commenting on BTAS episodes

[The Laughing Fish]

I found this copy-and-paste transcript containing summaries and reviews of BTAS episodes from a magazine called Animato, which was printed during the show's heyday. It contains quotes from Bruce Timm, Frank Paur, Boyd Kirkland, Michael Reaves, Kevin Altieri and Shirley Walker.

https://dcanimated.com/WF/batman/btas/backstage/animato/

Unsurprisingly, a recurring challenge the show had to work with was following censorship guidelines to ensure things didn't go too far. For example, Robin was originally going to be wounded by the Jazzman in the episode I Am the Night, but it was changed to Commissioner Gordon instead because Broadcasting Standards and Practices wouldn't allow any child characters to be seriously injured, let alone shot. And of course, episodes like Be a Clown, See No Evil and The Underdwellers had to tread carefully when it came to child endangerment, as outright abuse was understandably prohibited.

But censorship didn't only focus on child endangerment and violence, the subject of homelessness was seen as a sensitive subject by the higher-ups. Apparently, the episode The Forgotten had to remove any images of homeless families in the background and only focus on homeless men, because as Boyd Kirkland explained, it might have been too unsettling for the young audience to see women and children living in poverty. I personally don't think it makes much sense because the higher-ups didn't kick up a fuss about homeless children getting abused and used as slaves by the Sewer King in an earlier episode, but whatever...

What may be surprising to the unsuspecting audience is the showrunners had difficulty with a lot of storyboard artists and animation studios, with the creators not only unsatisfied but downright critical on several occasions. Timm, whose designs were getting outsourced to overseas animation studios, was particularly critical of AKOM for their efforts, even giving somewhat faint praise for their work on the episode Mad as a Hatter by remarking the need to do "a hundred retakes". In fact, there are over a dozen times that Timm and others have complained about the quality of the animation's final products, including the quality of the scripts for some episodes.

It's a long read, but I think fans here will appreciate the honesty of the creators reviewing their own show.

Here are some of my favourite comments by Timm.

On the episode Pretty Poison:

It wasn't intentional, but the Venus Fly-trap creature looks like a vagina with teeth. Originally, it looked like Audrey II, and I said, 'Naww, let's not do that, what other kind of plant can we do? What if it's like a big snow-peapod?' I started sketching it out, and stopped when I realized what it looked like, but it worked. In a way, it's a very good visual metaphor for what she is, a man-killer.

...I'm kind of surprised that BS&P didn't pick this up. It must've been too subtle for them. Not gonna lie, I didn't pick this up either. 

On Two-Face Part II:

This is such an adult show [he actually means episode here] that I bet kids don't like it. There's not a whole lot of action and Batman's hardly in it. It's a lot of talking heads. But it works on such a powerful emotional level that I'm sure that anyone over the age of six is going to get sucked right into it. It's absolutely compelling. They always talk about the BATMAN films as being oh, so psychological. Bull. This episode is a compelling psychological drama.

I think he underestimates how many kids loved those Two-Face episodes. I know I definitely loved them.

On the emotions while making the episode Robin's Reckoning Part I:

Dan Riba, who was a storyboard artist at the time, was crying in the editing room when Robin says goodbye to his circus friends and the elephant after his parents' deaths. I cried when I heard the score added to the scene by Carlos Rodriguez. The combination of the music and the visuals was just so moving, I started weeping.

It was a touching moment. But I thought the flashback of Bruce hugging a grieving young Dick before cutting off with an older Robin yelling "You deceived me! You can't do this alone, Zucco's mine!" was heavy.

On the score for the episode The Laughing Fish:

I wanted the Joker to be very scary in this show and scripter Paul Dini came through. The Joker is actually threatening. Obviously, we couldn't kill people, but his victims might as well be dead. We put them into comas with this horrible grin on their face. It's one of Paul's best scripts," Timm not only influenced the story, he also shaped the episode on the boards, storyboarding the entire third act himself and most of the rest. Timm also pushed the scariness of the episode during the scoring by Shirley Walker. "When we were spotting the show, I told Shirley I didn't want the Joker theme in it. I wanted it to sound like a horror movie. Not like an over-the-top melodramatic Universal horror movie, because most of our scores are already over-the-top, but I wanted it to sound like ALIEN. She didn't think a cartoon could support that type of score, but I convinced her that we had room to experiment in 65 episodes. It's the weirdest score of any of the shows, with this strange dissident music behind the Joker that builds a weird tension you're not consciously aware of. The first two acts have only this very straight demonic music and I think it helps the show immeasurably. Without it, it would just have been another show."

The theme for that episode was certainly ominous and a departure from the Joker theme we hear in other episodes. But I don't know about the Alien reference. I've always considered the TLF score as something from an old school thriller.

One thing that caught my attention was the episode Off Balance, the one that had Ra's and Talia al Ghul's debut and Vertigo being the main villain, had three different versions going on the air. This is news to me. Is there another version of Vertigo not falling to his apparent death or something? Have I completely been under a rock all this time?

[thecolorsblend]

Here are some of my favourite comments by Timm.

On the episode Pretty Poison:

It wasn't intentional, but the Venus Fly-trap creature looks like a vagina with teeth. Originally, it looked like Audrey II, and I said, 'Naww, let's not do that, what other kind of plant can we do? What if it's like a big snow-peapod?' I started sketching it out, and stopped when I realized what it looked like, but it worked. In a way, it's a very good visual metaphor for what she is, a man-killer.

Yeah, all those years the similarity went right by me. But here, I saw the picture before Timm's remarks and thought to myself "Y'know, that kinda sorta looks like..."

Then I had the same thought process. "Well, for any other character, it'd be a problem. But for Ivy, y'know, it kinda works".

Yeesh!

On the score for the episode The Laughing Fish:

I wanted the Joker to be very scary in this show and scripter Paul Dini came through. The Joker is actually threatening. Obviously, we couldn't kill people, but his victims might as well be dead. We put them into comas with this horrible grin on their face. It's one of Paul's best scripts," Timm not only influenced the story, he also shaped the episode on the boards, storyboarding the entire third act himself and most of the rest. Timm also pushed the scariness of the episode during the scoring by Shirley Walker. "When we were spotting the show, I told Shirley I didn't want the Joker theme in it. I wanted it to sound like a horror movie. Not like an over-the-top melodramatic Universal horror movie, because most of our scores are already over-the-top, but I wanted it to sound like ALIEN. She didn't think a cartoon could support that type of score, but I convinced her that we had room to experiment in 65 episodes. It's the weirdest score of any of the shows, with this strange dissident music behind the Joker that builds a weird tension you're not consciously aware of. The first two acts have only this very straight demonic music and I think it helps the show immeasurably. Without it, it would just have been another show."

Strange, I thought I imagined all that. Like, I was forgetting the Joker theme in the episode or I was projecting my own assumptions about the tone based on my adoration of the comic books. But no, they did all that on purpose and it plays like gangbusters. I wouldn't want that for every episode. But you can't deny how well it works here.

Also, I think he means "dissonant".

One thing that caught my attention was the episode Off Balance, the one that had Ra's and Talia al Ghul's debut and Vertigo being the main villain, had three different versions going on the air. This is news to me. Is there another version of Vertigo not falling to his apparent death or something? Have I completely been under a rock all this time?

I've been asking myself the same question. First I'm hearing of that.

[The Laughing Fish]

One thing that caught my attention was the episode Off Balance, the one that had Ra's and Talia al Ghul's debut and Vertigo being the main villain, had three different versions going on the air. This is news to me. Is there another version of Vertigo not falling to his apparent death or something? Have I completely been under a rock all this time?

I've been asking myself the same question. First I'm hearing of that.

I don't know about you know, but I somehow missed Timm's explanation of what the changes were in that very same paragraph. 

"The distortion vertigo sequences weren't disorienting enough so we did retakes," said producer Bruce Timm of Sunrise's animation. "While we were waiting for them, we did effects in video with a computer that were real wobbly and quite nauseating. It worked great, but, we did that to just get the show on the air. When we got the retakes back, the film editors cut them into the episode, but dropped the video distortion effects on the whole sequence and that ran. We told them to put the effects back in, which is the version now airing.

There you go. Apart from changing effects for each episode repeat, everything else in Off Balance stayed the same.

[The Laughing Fish]

I found a good extended interview with Alan Burnett. Here are some of my favourite comments he made when discussing BTAS.

https://dcanimated.com/WF/batman/btas/backstage/interviews/burnett.php

Two-Face, Part One features a heavy psychological storyline, practically unheard of in animation at the time. The episode in question is considered by many to be a huge turning point in the medium. Was there ever any initial resistance to the story from outside or even inside sources and do you additional comments to make about the episode?

There was no resistance whatsoever. Our crew and Fox network wanted to push the envelope. I have always loved Two-Face. I think he's on the very top tier of villains in comic books, even though the number of stories you can tell about him is probably limited. I always thought that it was wrong that the accident that scarred his face created his split personality. He had to have been that way before the scarring. So that was the idea I was working on. I thought it was an original idea for Two-Face, but I found out later that Andy Helfer had written a comic story with that very same notion.

I consulted with a child psychiatrist to come up with a kid-understandable reason why Harvey Dent developed a split personality, and was surprised to find out that it doesn't take much to start that sickness going.

We didn't want to reveal Harvey's scarred face until the end of the show, which presented the challenge of holding our audience's attention with a villain who had no costume or special accoutrements. He was just a Suit, albeit a crazy one. Fortunately he was well acted in the animation. Also, the director, Kevin Alteiri, bless his heart, figured out a way to foreshadow the scarred face with lighting effects in a scene in a psychiatrist's office.

That scene with the psychiatrist was central to me. It was the reason I wrote the story. I had Zelda Rubinstein, the clairvoyant in Poltergeist, in mind for the psychiatrist when I was writing, and our voice director, Andrea Romano, brought her in to do the original recording. When she hypnotizes Dent and releases the monster, I wanted that moment when you're thinking, "How the hell is she going to get out of this?". And she simply snaps her fingers. It was a Hitchcock moment.

I'm a big Hitchcock fan, by the way. Big. There's a picture of him in my office above my desk. So it was a real kick to have John Vernon playing Rupert Thorne. Vernon was Castro's man in Topaz, and even though the movie isn't perfect, Vernon is. I can still see him shooting Karin Dor and her dress billowing out over a checkerboard floor like a fallen queen. Every once in a while we'd get a Hitchcock player for a Batman recording, Roscoe Lee Browne, Tippi Hendron, and for me that was always extra special.

I had always assumed that the writers must've read Andrew Helfer's The Eye of the Beholder as an inspiration for their version of Harvey Dent and the whole Big Bad Harv personality. The fact they weren't aware that the comic existed proves one thing, both Helfer and the BTAS showrunners knew they had to make Two-Face a more psychologically grounded character than simply turning to the dark side only after getting disfigured. A very mature approach from both parties.

Yourself, Randy Rogel and Paul Dini wrote "Riddler's Reform." What are the positives and negatives of working with so many writers on a single episode? The Riddler himself is often described as a difficult nut to crack - what are your thoughts on the prince of puzzles?

I don't remember what the credits were on that show, but I think Paul came up with the original notion, which he and I worked out in story, and then Paul had to go on to something else, and Randy wrote the script. But Randy could have been in at the outline stage, too. Who knows? It all overlaps and melds after awhile.

Usually when one writer has written the story and another, the script, it's because the first writer had to go onto something else. It's rare when you have to switch writers because you don't trust that the guy who wrote the story can do justice to the script, but it happens.

As for the Riddler, he might be the worst Batman villain for TV, because you always have to go through three steps with him. He presents a riddle, the heroes have to solve it, and then have to stop the crime, at which point usually another riddle pops up. And another solution is discussed. And another crime is resolved. And it just goes on and on until you catch him in the end. It's redundant. And the riddles are usually a play on words, so it gets talky, too.

Riddler's Reform worked the best of all the Riddler stories because it broke that chain. Riddler was giving riddles without even realizing it, so the first step - presenting a riddle - was hidden. And most of the riddles turned out to be visual. He wasn't yapping his head off, like he usually does.

I understand Burnett's point about the Riddler and the difficulty in keeping him fresh. As good as the episodes What is Reality? and Riddler's Reform are, you can be forgiven for thinking either episode as being the definitive end for the Riddler. What is Reality? shows Riddler deleting all traces of his true identity and getting his mind trapped by his own virtual creation in the end, whereas Riddler's Reform shows him hanging up his criminal identity for good but his own hubris getting the better of him yet again. In terms of continuity though, it gets difficult to put them in chronological order. Riddler was left incapacitated in one episode, but recovers and would've changed his life around as a successful toy making businessman if it weren't for his obsessiveness. Biggest failure was creating that radio toy which was used to incriminate him in the end. Ouch.

Cartoons were still very much a children's medium at the time the show originally aired - a few years prior, networks rarely allowed superheroes to make a fist, never mind actually punch someone with it. How was BS+P on the show and are there any occasions you recall that especially hindered the show?

The head of BS&P for the Fox network was a lovely woman named Avery Coburn, who is the unsung hero of Batman: the Animated Series. She knew what we were going after and gave us a lot of leeway, and when we crossed the line, she helped us figure out solutions.

I'll never forget - we had a story called Perchance to Dream, in which Bruce Wayne realizes he's trapped in a dream induced by the Mad Hatter, and the only way he can get out of it is to startle himself so strongly that he wakes up. To do this, he jumps off a bell tower in his dream (and if the tower reminds you of the one in [Alfred Hitchcock's] Vertigo, you now know why). In essence, what Bruce has to do is commit suicide, which I dare say is something rarely advocated in children's programming. We were okay up until the storyboard, which was pretty blunt about him jumping off a building. (So was the script, but when you actually see it drawn, ay-yi-yi!) Avery sat down with us and edited that section of the board so that the jump became very abstract. Adults could easily read into it what was happening, but to the little ones, it was as if he was leaping into a cloud. We were extremely relieved to save this story, because it was one of the best scripts of the run (written by Joe Lansdale).

And while I'm praising Avery, let me also give a big nod to Sidney Iwanter, the Fox programmer at the time, who fought hard for serious, realistic, dark stories. Early on, he and Avery both told me that the upper hierarchy of Fox Television was expecting an Adam West-like television series. They had no idea what they were in for. The result was that Fox Children's Programs created a new demographic for their advertisers, 9 to 14-year-olds, which they continued with X-Men.

I don't know about anyone else, but when I was a kid and I watched Perchance to Dream, the suicide angle in that nightmare did cross my mind. Come on, Bruce stares down at the ground from above, and then rushes towards the edge of the belltower? If that was meant to be subtle then BS&P would be horrified to learn that they failed.

[thecolorsblend]

As a kid, I never thought that moment was anything other than Bruce "committing suicide". I was impressed by Bruce's balls of solid rock for taking the plunge. But the idea of him doing it wasn't disturbing to me in any way. Kids are more resilient than the censors seem to realize.

Of course, the censors set policy based on a worst case scenario. So, there's that.

[The Laughing Fish]

Here are some of my favourite comments by Timm.

On the episode Pretty Poison:

It wasn't intentional, but the Venus Fly-trap creature looks like a vagina with teeth. Originally, it looked like Audrey II, and I said, 'Naww, let's not do that, what other kind of plant can we do? What if it's like a big snow-peapod?' I started sketching it out, and stopped when I realized what it looked like, but it worked. In a way, it's a very good visual metaphor for what she is, a man-killer.

Yeah, all those years the similarity went right by me. But here, I saw the picture before Timm's remarks and thought to myself "Y'know, that kinda sorta looks like..."

Then I had the same thought process. "Well, for any other character, it'd be a problem. But for Ivy, y'know, it kinda works".

Yeesh!

If the episode wasn't enough, the vagina-looking Venus Fly-trap monster was adapted as a stage boss in the SNES video game adaptation of The Adventures of Batman and Robin.

The nineties was a strange decade. You get lots of parent groups freaking out over explicit content in BR and even in Power Rangers, yet it seems this imagery was too subtle for a lot of people. But the fact that some of us still didn't notice the metaphor even though we're older, I guess you really have to give credit to Timm and co for their creativity.

And let's face it, it does make great video game content.

[Catwoman]

Seeing them talk about their battles with Standards and Practices, I can't help but wonder how in the world they snuck "The Ultimate Thrill" by. I get Kids WB was apparently a lot more relaxed than Fox but my gosh. They had to be giggling like school boys the first time it aired.

Two things stick out. Batgirl's "sources:"



And then Roxy just...um...yea....

[The Dark Knight]

As a kid, I never thought that moment was anything other than Bruce "committing suicide". I was impressed by Bruce's ball of solid rock for taking the plunge. But the idea of him doing it wasn't disturbing to me in any way. Kids are more resilient than the censors seem to realize.

Of course, the censors set policy based on a worst case scenario. So, there's that.

I appreciate the theme greatly but the severity of the moment is reduced somewhat as Bruce knows he's in a dream world. However, I build that theme back up by arguing Bruce would still rather die than live in a world that does not contain Batman, even if it means his parents are alive. Reality is reality, and it's all he's known for the majority of his life, regardless of how nostalgic he is for childhood. Batman is someone who makes pain and his enemy his energy. It's become a drug now, and I don't think he'd give it up. If his parents came back to life tomorrow their presence would be contrary to his current day existence. Bruce's power comes from the past. He is who he is now. I don't think he really wants them back.

[The Laughing Fish]

Seeing them talk about their battles with Standards and Practices, I can't help but wonder how in the world they snuck "The Ultimate Thrill" by. I get Kids WB was apparently a lot more relaxed than Fox but my gosh. They had to be giggling like school boys the first time it aired.

I've read that Fox wouldn't even permit an underage Robin in BTAS. They were a bit sensitive about certain taboo subjects such as child endangerment, death, bleeding and sexual references. So yeah, history shows us that Kids WB were much more lenient in comparison.

I wonder if Fox ever used the exact same excuse as DC did when they objected to Batman doing something they thought was inappropriate? 

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/batman-oral-sex-catwoman-harley-quinn-1234968296/

Can you imagine Alan Burnett pitching the end of Mystery of the Batwoman to Fox if they were producing the movie?

Alan Burnett: "Batman's great fun to tease. He's been such a monk all his life - re-channeling his sex drive to fight crime - he has no idea what do to when a woman attracts him, even when she's crawling all over him. This is why Catwoman is his most enduring romance - she's a criminal, so he knows there's no chance for a relationship. He really is nuts, you know. When I let him win the girl at the end of Mystery of the Batwoman, it was like a gift. "Here. Take her. Have sex. Get a life".

Fox: Heroes don't do that.

[Catwoman]

That was so ridiculous. So heroes don't do that but they do this at least.