The Dark Herald Does Not Recommend: Batman The Caped Crusader
I knew it was going to be bad but I didn’t think it could be this bad.
Between the years of 2015 and 2021 a wave of stupidity unlike anything that has come before swept over Hollywood. Largely it was Bob Iger’s doing. Disney was the industry leader, largely because Bob had bought successful franchises and hadn’t ruined them… Yet. Although he had totally trashed Disney Live-Action but Hollywood preferred to ignore that due to the size of the box office Juggernaut that mid-2010s Disney was. Mickey’s the Great and Terrible’s standards and practices became the industry standards and practices.
Disney went super woke. The rest of Hollywood said to itself, if Disney is doing it then it’s the smart thing to do, and followed suit. Overlooking the fact (and it was well known at the time) that Bob didn’t really care about Disney at that point. He cared about becoming president of the United States and all of his reforms were geared toward supporting this objective. In order to realize this dream Iger began a frantic hiring spree of people with strong connections to the Democratic party but no connections to the entertainment industry.
At least Iger had an excuse.
Warner owns the DC and Ann Sarnoff appears to have had the brilliant notion of hiring JJ Abrams to do for DC what he had done for Star Wars. If this was right after The Force Awakens it would have been an understandable error, but this was after The Last Jedi! It was known that he’d destroyed the fandom and she hired him anyway.
Abrams set about doing his usual sleight-of-hand routine. All of his characters would be 25% different and therefore lock up his cut of merch sales as being legally distinct from the mainstream DC characters. If you remember all of the silly shit about Black Superman written by Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Black Hellblazer written by who cares, that was what that was about. There were a whole bunch of other race and gender swaps planned. Any character that JJ took an interest in was now locked out for other creators. Which is why Matt Ryan got fired as John Constantine.
Sadly, there was trouble on the horizon for the DC Abramsverse.
Warner had been bought up by AT&T for a price that was so stupid it made Disney’s purchase of Fox look fiscally timid. The difference being that AT&T could afford it. To a degree. However, when it became obvious that HBOmax was never going to take any kind of significant market share away from Netflix, the AT&T board shitcanned its CEO and then started the merger that would saddle Discovery CEO David Zaslav with the rolling disaster that was the DC cinematic universe.
Zaslav took one look at what JJ Abrams had planned, and asked the one question that the auteur genius lived in secret terror of, “What the fuck are you doing?”
His deal wasn’t quite canceled but it was almost completely defunded, the character lockouts were lifted and James Gunn was handed the reins. If anybody else wanted to fund Abrams they could go ahead and do it but Zaslav wasn’t going to spend a dime on it.
The shine was off of the “New Spielberg.” Of all of his projects the only one he’s been able to get off the ground is Batman: The Caped Crusader.
Now you know the background.
This series is a nightmare version of the classic Batman: The Animated Series. It was originally based on this short:
Golden Age Batman in the 1930s, black and white artwork, you get the idea. The problem was they didn’t stick with the concept. Once they added color it looked pretty much just like Batman the Animated Series, except it was a revolting pastiche of that brilliant love letter Gotham’s Dark Knight. This show Stuka-ed itself into the ground on the first episode.
You could tell Abrams had only ever watched the Tim Burton movies. The first hint of the many, many horrors to befall the scion of the Wayne Family was Alfred. He was hyper-obese and Bruce called him “Pennyworth.” I know there is some comic book nerd out there who is going to point out that Golden Age Alfred was fat, come on Dude, you know Abrams didn’t do that kind of research, he just wanted a 25% different Alfred.
Commissioner Gordan is now black…in the 1930s. Meaning Barbara is also race-swapped, she’s also a public defender, and she’s about 30 years too early to be one. They didn’t exist before Gideon vs. Wainwright (1963).
Penguin is a hyper-obese woman… I think. Could be a drag queen, and almost certainly was at one point in the development process. The truly mind-boggling thing is that we are honestly meant to accept that men, normal men find Oswlada Cobblepot deeply sexually desirable.
Harvey Dent is a white man, which of course means he’s a completely corrupt and utterly sleazy DA. What then is the point of Two-Face, the man who is torn between morality and iniquity, you ask? I’m sure JJ Abrams gets that confused look that everyone in Hollywood gets when you mention morality in his presence. He race-swapped and gender-bent all of the characters, that’s Tinsel Town moral, isn’t it?
Indeed it is and there was so much more to come. Harley Quinn is a fat Asian, lesbian (the lesbian part is nothing new by now but I doubt if Abrams knew it). Detective Montoya is also a fat lesbian. Granted DC dragged her through the mud a while back. I’m not sure there are any straight women left in DC Comics. If there are they’re either racist caricatures or just overlooked.
Bruce Timm who did the art-design for Batman: The Animated Series was brought in to paint a veneer of authenticity over this Dollar Store knockoff version of the original. They were so enraptured by the multicultural 1930s Gotham City they mostly forgot to put Batman in the series at all. It was pretty much the Barbara Gordon Show, The non-Batgirl Barbara Gordon Show
Paul Dini who wrote and show ran the OG series only wrote one episode of Caped Crusader. It was the only decent one. Batman was in it for almost a fifth of the runtime.
I wish I could guarantee that this thing won’t get renewed but at least it seems unlikely. Amazon gave this thing zero hype when it launched. I wouldn’t have remembered it if it wasn’t for Nerdrotic.
If you had some idea about this being a revival of the classic 90s series, let me drive a stake through that hope now. It’s awful in every way available to it.
Classic JJ Abrams
The Dark Herald Does Not Recommend Batman: The Caped Crusader
