Batman: The Animated Series is considered one of the greatest animated shows ever produced. It was just an amazing show with amazing art style and gripping stories. So how did this show actually come together? Well, according to the co-creator Bruce Timthe whole thing was “a stroke of luck”.
In a recent interview with Vulture, Timm explained that he had just finished working on the first season of Tiny Toon Adventures as a character designer, and had no ambitions to be a producer or director. But one day, the president of Warner Bros. Animation, Jean McCurdyhas a big reunion and pitched some properties for possible shows to develop, one of them was Batman, which caught Timm’s eye.
Tim said: “The first Tim Burton the film was released and it was a great success. And the minute I heard that, it was like, Pow! That’s what I want to do. So I went back to my office after the meeting, put all my Tiny Toon stuff aside and started drawing Batman. Within hours, I had this vision of Batman on paper. It was a new take. Ever since I was little, Batman has always been one of my favorite cartoons, but I had never really been able to find a version of Batman that I completely liked. Every Batman I’d drawn before that was always based on someone else’s Batman. It was the first time I had in mind a concrete Batman à la Bruce Timm. It was almost as if he was just waiting to be drawn. So the next time Jean had one of those meetings, I brought him my drawings and said, “I thought that might be a cool way to go with it.” And she said, ‘That’s…that’s perfect!’
From there co-creator Eric Radomsky, who was a background painter on Tiny Toons, threw his hat in the ring and was included. He did some background styling for the potential series. Jean liked what she saw and brought Timm and Radomski together to discuss developing the show.
Timm explained, “She commissioned Eric and I to do a short Batman film, like a little pilot movie, just a few minutes. Mostly silent, no dialogue or anything, to show Fox what we intended to do if the show sold out.
Timm and Radomski were a great team and when discussing what the short should entail they discussed all the things they liked about the 1989 Tim Burton film but felt they had to do something unique thing for animation and that they had to be able to pull it off. ! Timm said, “We weren’t sure how it was going to work on camera in terms of, is the character black going to be too dark? What will it look like? We were more figuring out the innards of the actual technical production of this one as opposed to what it would be like as a series.
They finally landed on the concept, animated it and scored it with Danny Elfman’s score from the first Batman movie and, of course, added sound effects.
Radomski said, “We never imagined that they would hand over the show to us and let us do it. We thought, at a minimum, we could be art directors on it, to have some influence on what it might look like. But I don’t think any of us imagined that they would just hand over the keys to the castle. But that first minute-and-a-half bit ended up being the confidence Jean needed to give us the keys and say, “You know how to do this, so go ahead and do 65.” We were both amazed. We were like, ‘How are we going to do this?’
Neither of them have produced a series before, so they weren’t in over their heads, and it was kind of a big gamble for WB. But they managed to put together a team and pull it off brilliantly! Timm said, “What we wanted to do was a little more adult than, say, shows like GI Joe or Transformers or He-Man. These shows were deliberately designed for young children, and no one else. If you were 13, that was about the cutoff point for a show like He-Man or GI Joe. But we wanted to make a show that would appeal to children and also to adults. Basically, we were doing the show for ourselves.
Writer and producer Alan Burnett was actually trying to get out of animation when Batman: The Animated Series was brought to him. He was tired of doing children’s shows, but he was excited about what he saw in the short and was happy to be a part of it. He said: “What sold me was the trailer Bruce Timm and Eric Radomski made for the show. I said to him, ‘Look, if you want to do Batman, you’re going to have to have guns and fights.’ And that’s when she showed me the trailer. I really didn’t believe that I would be allowed to have guns and fights. But she insisted that I would have freedom, so I came.
Writer Paul Religious was then brought in, and when he saw what they were doing, he started “writing more towards that sensibility, looking at a lot of Hitchcock and film noir, and ways of playing them like little mini movies” .
There were three rules the creative team had to follow when developing the show, those rules were: “No aliens. No ghosts. And no Humanitas Awards – you know, no pro-social stories. Burnett said, “We were just there to have a good time and give the audience a thrill; real Batman thrills.
That is exactly what they have accomplished! It’s pretty amazing what they’ve achieved! They just don’t make anime series like this anymore. It was the golden age of animation!
You can watch the original Batman animated short created by Timm and Radomski below.
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