Batman: The Caped Crusader Is a Striking Throwback With a Few Fresh Ideas

In Episode 6 of Batman: The Caped Crusader, a new animated take on the iconic vigilante, there’s a moment that works as a capable shorthand for this series: while a pair of security guards discuss the declining socioeconomic conditions in Gotham City and how government policy failures have led to increased poverty and crime, they’re suddenly interrupted by a glowing blue ghost horseman from the 18th century who robs them blind with a flintlock pistol before riding off into the distance while cackling maniacally. Much like the rest of the show, it’s campy and ridiculous, but with a hint of introspection toward this dismal city and the people in it.

In this series, unsurprisingly, we follow Bruce Wayne (Hamish Linklater), aka Batman, as he conducts a one-man war against the criminals of Gotham City. As Wayne, he plays the role of the charming socialite, but when he’s Bats, his true self, he’s stoic, cerebral, and ruthless. His origin story—being orphaned and psychologically scarred by a mugging gone wrong—is the same as usual, but this telling does a particularly good job hinting at the unhealthy extremes of his obsession with cracking criminal skulls. While he’s not quite as openly unhinged as The Batman’s portrayal of the character (although that film’s director, Matt Reeves, serves as executive producer here), this take makes it clear that, despite his intellect and physical prowess, this is a person entirely shackled to the past.

While this rendition of Batman is relatively in line with most recent portrayals, the biggest surface-level difference with this version of the story is that it takes place in the ’40s, making its visual inspirations all the more apparent. Much like Batman: The Animated Series, this show draws on noir-inspired touches: this city exudes quiet menace as light trickles through Venetian blinds and shadows creep dangerously around corners. The gouache texture of the background art calls to mind the painted cells of pre-digital animation, while looming art-deco architecture further places us in this heightened setting. The influence of executive producer Bruce W. Timm, who co-created The Animated Series, is particularly felt in this one’s similarly sharp tone and ominous sense of atmosphere. Although the animation can be a tad stiff and doesn’t entirely live up to the strong backgrounds and shot compositions (especially when it comes to facial expressions), overall, this vision of Gotham looks the part.

And much like Timm’s seminal animated take on this franchise, Caped Crusader also generally does a good job with its bad guys, who predominately come in two flavors: dastardly villain of the week, and more complicated, sympathetic foes. As for the former, the show is frequently structured in an episodic style where Batman goes up against a new opponent in each adventure, using his detective skills to piece together a crime or mystery. As the previously mentioned ghostly highwayman implies, these encounters come with a sense of campy charm that captures the gleeful absurdity of old-school comics.

However, across even its most episodic hijinks, the series also builds up overarching plotlines that tie into its greater villains, many of whom are defined by compelling nuances and motivations that distinguish them from other takes on these characters. Some of them are genuinely trying to make Gotham a better place (while admittedly getting a little bit of self-satisfaction along the way), and fan-favorite Harley Quinn (Jamie Chung) is an excellent example of this—here, her personality is reversed somewhat, and she’s lighthearted as a physiatrist, and cold and intimidating when transformed into her alter ego. In some ways, you could argue her actions have more of a positive result than Batman’s (even if her means are much uglier), making it particularly gripping when they trade blows. Harvey Dent (Diedrich Bader) is interesting in much of the same way, a social-climbing District Attorney who, on some level, seems to genuinely want to make this crooked city a better place by running for office against the current self-important mayor (even if he’s very smarmy about it), but finds himself tempted into dubious alliances to win the election.

It’s these types of fresh takes on existing characters and themes that help the series establish its own identity and escape the shadow of its predecessors. Another example is this series’ version of Barbara (Krystal Joy Brown), a criminal defense attorney who butts heads with the old-fashioned sensibilities of her police commissioner father, Jim Gordon (Eric Morgan Stuart), over “tough on crime” policies, a twist that embodies the show’s marginally (and I reiterate, marginally) more thoughtful outlook on these topics. It also helps that the cast is diverse, and there is a cute romance subplot involving Harley and a suitor who isn’t an evil clown.

Yes, Batman battles literal cartoon villains, but it often feels like his biggest adversary isn’t the rotating cast of colorful bad guys but the rotten underlying systems that prevent Gotham from changing. Throughout, we witness an almost entirely crooked police force in the pocket of organized crime (at one point, our hero gets dragged by the media for a photo of him beating up the “boys in blue” who were about to execute someone) and a political apparatus that wields the cops to improve its own image. The show’s best big bads so far, Harley and Dent, overlap with these ideas, making it particularly painful when Batman feels compelled to stop them. The classic screenwriting trick of creating parallels between the protagonist and antagonist is well at work here, but it pays off thanks to building up complex adversaries and a flawed hero. All in all, it makes for a Batman show that maintains the desperate tone of its predecessors while offering just a faint spark of optimism that this metropolis can be altered for the better. It’s not a complete departure, as much as a remix with some novel notes.

However, if there’s a main problem with this first season, it’s that while its one-off episodes are fun (although there is a dud or two), and its overarching narrative mostly lands, it doesn’t have enough time to fully get going because it splits its brief, 10-episode run between these episodic and serialized modes of storytelling. For instance, Harley’s arc ends too abruptly, and while we get some well-articulated glimpses of our hero, including stretches where he loses his cool or is clearly in the wrong, there should have been more time to convey his journey. I don’t need a 65-episode season like the initial run of Batman: The Animated Series, but a handful more episodes would have given its entertaining detours and overarching plot beats room to breathe. And overall, while there are just enough relatively thoughtful recontextualizations in this telling, it feels like this version is just a few twists away from being something fully unique and its own.

Still, although Caped Crusader doesn’t reinvent Batman, it successfully draws from several eras of everyone’s favorite poorly adjusted superhero. Its film noir aesthetics, varied villains, and slightly less fatalistic turns create a series that stays true to its roots while finding enough of its own identity to avoid feeling entirely derivative. This story needed a few more episodes to reach its full potential, but it has me eager to return to the dismal streets of Gotham.

Batman: The Caped Crusader premieres Thursday, August 1st on Prime Video. 

Elijah Gonzalez is an assistant Games and TV Editor for Paste Magazine. In addition to playing and watching the latest on the small screen, he also loves film, creating large lists of media he’ll probably never actually get to, and dreaming of the day he finally gets through all the Like a Dragon games. You can follow him on Twitter @eli_gonzalez11.

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