CliqueClack Kids – The animated incarnations of Batman

I’m going to write a number down for you … forty-one. Do you happen to know what the significance of this number is other than one less than the answer to life, the universe and everything? This number, dear friends, is the amount of years that Batman has appeared on television in animated form.

Starting in the late 1960s as a cheery, non-violent super-hero, Batman has been with us in one show or another for four decades. Sometimes he’s been paired up with his trusty partner,  Robin. Other times he’s been paired up with other heroes or with the Justice League. There were also times that he was just there by his lonesome. Regardless of what version of the Dark Knight it was,  Batman has always been the coolest animated hero. Let’s take a look at his long television history, starting in the heyday of Saturday morning cartoons.

The first animated appearance of Batman was in the fall of 1968 on the Saturday morning series Batman/Superman Hour. The Filmation produced show  introduced us to actors Olan Soule and Casey Kasem – the voices of the Caped Crusader and the Boy Wonder until the mid-1980s. A year later, the show would be given its own 30-minute slot on the CBS Saturday morning schedule.

In the early ’70s, Batman and his trusty partner, still voiced by Soule and Kasem, jumped over to Hanna-Barbera. After a guest-starring appearance on The New Scooby-Doo Movies, the Dynamic Duo  joined the rest of the Justice League on the classic ABC series SuperFriends. By this time in his animated career, Batman forgot how to throw a punch and relied mostly on Bat-gadgets, such as the Batrope, Bat Super Glue, and Bat Ultimate Nullifier, to capture evil-doers that tended to slip through his fingers on a regular basis.

During one of the SuperFriends incarnations a strange thing occurred: Filmation was able to produce a new series of Batman and Robin cartoons under the title The New Adventures of Batman. Premiering in the winter of 1977, New Adventures marked the rare occurrence of two separate studios producing the same characters at the same time. This time around it wasn’t Soule and Kasem voicing their superhero counterparts. Instead that went to Adam West and Burt Ward, who portrayed the Dynamic Duo in the live-action Batman series of the ’60s.Coincidentally, West would replace Soule as the voice of the Hanna-Barbera Batman during the mid ’80s.

When SuperFriends ended in 1986 (in the form of The Super Powers Team: Galactic Guardians), Batman took a break from television to focus on live-action movies (the snob). When he returned in 1992 he took the world of Saturday morning television by storm. Even today, Batman, The Animated Series is still considered one of the best adaptations of the comic books series. With its dark, noirish settings and a Batman who had a pair of cajones, The Animated Series was a hit with both parents and kids alike during its initial run on FOX (actually, it premiered in primetime first before it went to Saturday mornings).

This newest animated version of this hero also introduced us to another voice for the Dark Knight — Kevin Conroy. With a deep baritone, Conroy became the voice of Batman for 15 continuous years. Not only did he voice the character in its various incarnations (like The New Batman Adventures), but he also did so in its direct-to-video releases and its spin-offs. Namely, the WB Kids series Batman Beyond, which featured Bruce Wayne as a much older man mentoring a newer, younger, version of the hero.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaDXVxPYr0k

Conroy also lent his voice to Batman on Cartoon Network’s Justice League and Justice League Unlimited. The version of Bats in this Warner Brothers Animation show was possibly the darkest of animated Dark Knights to appear on television, making it very much like the character seen in DC Comics at that time.

In 2004 Warner Brothers decided to reboot the animated version of the character with the series The Batman. Set in the early years of his career, this was a much younger version of the hero. So, out with Kevin Conroy and in with voice actor Rino Romano. The show remained on the Kids WB! schedule for five years, with the last season having Batman and Robin teaming up with other DC Comics heroes.

The last season of The Batman spawned Batman: The Brave & the Bold, the newest animated incarnation of the Dark Knight. Hearkening back to the more adventurous Batman comics of the 1950s and early 1960s, B:B&B focuses on team-ups between Batman and some of the other characters of the DC Universe that haven’t gotten much face time over the years. It has also introduced us to another voice for the character: former Drew Carey Show actor Diedrich Bader. Surprisingly, this has become quite a hit on Cartoon Network and looks to go beyond just one season.

Clacked by Richard Keller
on Mar 19, 2009 @ 15:30 EST5EDT