How The Fear Saved Batman The Animated Series | Super Friends | Ft. Ted Kendrick

Batman the Animated Series is widely regarded as one of the definitive and most faithful adaptations of Batman ever it may seem hard to believe now but once upon a time the public perception of Batman was a cheerful campy comedic figure of authority rather than a dark brooding symbol of the night the main reason for this of course is the 1960s TV show starring Adam West the show was a phenomenal success and really ingrained that version of the character into the Public's Consciousness and it may

not surprise you to learn that not all Batman fans were particularly happy about this the Batman comics of the 1970s did everything they could to get away from this characterization focusing on horror stories and Weird Science before shifting to James Bond style Globe trotting Adventures despite these efforts to the mainstream Batman was still a light-hearted figure trapped in Adam West's Shadow at least until 1989 when Tim Burton's Batman film changed everything there had been earlier attempts

to change the world's perception of Batman the one I want to talk about today is of all things an episode of the Super Friends written by name that will be very familiar to fans of Batman the Animated Series Alan Bernett while the Super Friends mostly perpetuated that image of Batman there's one episode that really went all out to make Batman seem like a more sophisticated mature hero that episode is called the fear to help me on this Quest I've enlisted Ted Kendrick of Watchtower database I'm

Ted Kendrick I do I write and produce for the Watchtower database now before we get to the fear I want to set the scene by talking about the state of the animation industry in the 19 70s and 1980s in those days the majority of cartoons were made to fill slots in the TV schedules with inoffensive light-hearted shows that would keep kids occupied maybe teach them a lesson and also encourage them to buy some toys the TV sensors had very clear rules about what wasn't acceptable these shows rarely fe

atured imitable violence outside of the odd Judo throw and never featured any genuine Peril everything was incredibly tame the majority of the shows were inexpensive to make with simplistic animation exaggerated vocal performances and repetitive music the perfect way to illustrate how different things were back then is to look at another Batman cartoon from this era The New Adventures of Batman produced by filmation a studio that was responsible for He-Man and the Masters of the Universe Star Tr

ek the animated series and a whole bunch of other cartoons now lost to the sands of time The New Adventures of Batman tab I'm going to call it tab was in many ways the antithesis of Batman the Animated Series the cartoon leaned very heavily into the style of the 1966 Adam West starring show primarily featuring villains like the Joker the Penguin and Catwoman in a series of fairly simple scripts the show is explicitly linked to the Batman 66 show by virtue of Adam West and Bert Ward reprising the

ir roles of Batman and Robin respectively in an effort to appeal to a wider audience they added Batgirl and batm might to the roster of Heroes Batgirl was intended to be a character for the girls in the audience to relate to while batm might acted as the comedy relief almost every cartoon of the era had some weird little guy that was the butt of all jokes the best way I can think of to compare tab to beats is to look at how they use their villains and one example leaps out of me and that's Clayf

ace I've talked at length about why Clayface is probably the most interesting villain in bass and I have to say that tab's Clayface is uninspiring while beas's Clayface was a disfigured actor who went on a Path of Revenge after his Humanity was ripped away from him tab's clay face is a common Thief obsessed with stealing oil I guess he was still feeling the effects of the energy crisis of the 1970s and randomly teaming up with Catwoman animation is the perfect medium for a shape-shifting charact

er like Clayface artists are able to draw pretty much anything that comes to mind just look at the amazing transformation sequence from the end of feet of clay part two tab clearly had a significantly lower budget as evident by how they handled his Transformations or perhaps it would be more accurate to say how they didn't handle them in the tab episode Dead ringers they were forced to have batm narrate clayface's trans formations essentially telling us about it rather than showing it and then w

e come to performances now not to disparage anyone that worked on Tab but to compare Ron perlman's performance in bass to tab's Clayface who wasn't even credited by the way and I have no idea who played him it's like night and day tab is entirely representative of the cartoons of the era light-hearted lowbudget and mostly forgettable this also includes the Super Friends all the superpowers team colon Galactic guardians but you know they name the superpowers to tie in with the toy line that was g

oing on at the time so having that superpowers front and center and then having characters like dark side and um calac and probably even the penguin would bring in the characters from the toy line into this season of the show so that was all done on purpose Synergy Alan Bernett has spoken at length about his frustrations during this time going as far as saying by 1990 he was considering leaving the animation industry entirely because of the restrictions placed on him while working on the Super F

riends he had written a more mature script that he had thought could be used as a backdoor pilot for a new Batman cartoon the story dealt with Batman overcoming his fears by confronting the trauma of witnessing his parents' murder even by sticking within the established Network guidelines the script was still deemed to be too mature for children so it was reworked into an episode the super the superpowers Team Galactic Guardians I'd love to abbreviate it but ESP doesn't quite flow off the tongue

now even with the episodes being toned down I find it quite remarkable the first thing to LEAP out to me is the fact that they brought Adam West back on board to play Batman again but this time he's in a serious dramatic story with virtually no comic relief in sight and it wasn't always Adam West in the Super Friends Olan Soul was the original one but it's still cool that Adam West came in and did this voice and and so it's like just one of many returns that Adam West did over the years back to

the character of course he did those animated movies in the early 201 ends the return of the cape Crusader and then Batman versus Twoface and so you've got a writer like Alan Bernett who's worked with um Adam West here and brought him back as the Great Ghost in the animated series and there's something fun to see that sort of chain that that connection that brings it threads it all together from the opening moments of the episode we can see some of bass's DNA the very beginning of the fear star

ts with you're at the top of this building and Light strikes and then it pans down to the bottom of the building which is basically the reverse of the end of the Batman the M series theme song and that we pan up at the building and then the lightning strikes so I think I mean there's no way they would have known that they were going to do that theme song back then but I just I find the parallels to be just uh yeah it's it's interesting that that happened another thing that distinguishes the fear

from other episodes is that it primarily features Batman you had a little bit of Wonder Woman I think I think it there was that one scene where you're in the Hall of Justice and you check in with the team for just a second but yeah mostly this was a Batman show and that's because um as we've discovered it was a backdoor pilot for potentially a new animated series for Batman um at the time this was 1985 one stormy night in Gotham City the Scarecrow and his Straw Men I love that name for his henc

hmen by the way commit a robbery which is interrupted by Batman and Robin during the scuffle if you can even call it that can't have the hero hit anyone although he can flip them over the Scarecrow makes his Escape through the back alleys of Gotham Batman pursues but stops dead in his tracks he is consumed by fear and yet the Scarecrow hasn't been able to use his fear Ray on Batman we soon discover that the alleyway was in fact Crime Alley the sight of his parents murder and this is the first ti

me he's ventured back there since that fateful night decades ago and he is riddled with anxiety immediately this reference to the parents murder makes the episode Stand Out people don't die in kids cartoons in fact this was the first onscreen depiction of Batman's origin however they still had to comply with the rules of the time back then they couldn't they couldn't show guns so you have the whole origin story of Bruce Wayne's parents getting murdered and they had to totally just draw around th

e guns the whole sequence there's not a gun in sight except it's still very familiar you know what happens because the you know the origin story of Batman is just so uh prevalent although this even though this being the first time it was ever seen on screen so despite despite that it's still a very familiar origin story everyone knows what happens but yeah they they got around it without showing any guns gunfire you had the sneaky lightning and the the Thunder strikes that happened instead that

kind of disguised the sequence in a really creative way um so that that primarily you know was like it's edgier in that sense that they were able to go there without actually going there while Burnett's original script had called for Vicky Veil to fulfill the support role Wonder Woman makes an adequate substitute outside of a few appearances at the Hall of Justice and a last minute save towards the end of the episode the rest of the super spgg scarcely make an appearance excluding Robin of cours

e Wonder Woman primarily acts as emotional support for Batman encouraging him to talk about his feelings of anxiety it's fairly unusual to see a hero in a cartoon talk about their trauma in such an open and Frank way it's pretty refreshing especially considering that this episode is almost 40 years old on the topic of Batman and Trauma the fear aired in 1985 about a year before Frank Miller's The Dark Knight series was released this was the comic that popularized the idea of Batman being psychol

ogically scarred from witnessing his parents' death previous versions of the character were simply motivated to do good by his loss and were pretty well adjusted broadly speaking it's clear to see that Bernett and Miller came at the character from the same angle it's just the differing restrictions on their chosen form of media resulted in slightly different results Batman's clear trauma catches the attention of the Scarecrow he notices Batman's Terror and spends the rest of the episode trying t

o get to the bottom of what caused The Man Without Fear to cower in distress eventually he adjusts his fear Ray generator to make Batman think he is in Crime Alley and for a time it has the desired effect however Batman is able to overcome his fear by confronting it and by confronting it I mean punching the fear skull smashing it into a million pieces it's a beautiful metaphor not at all subtle by any means but beautiful nonetheless and that's the message of the episode It's Perfectly natural to

want to avoid things that make us uncomfortable or cause us distress but you can't live that way forever to overcome our fears we must confront them it might be quite basic but this is a mature theme certainly far more mature than the other cartoons of this era the same kind of theme we would see rear its head again in Batman the Animated Series now you might watch this video thinking that we're clutching at straws pun intended but through our research Ted found a quote from former DC Comics pr

esident Paul Levitz we found a couple good quotes from uh John Trumble who did a brief chat with Alan Bernett in the the pages of back issue number 99 and in that um Paul Levitz is on record for saying because of Alan Burnett's contributions on this episode it kind of show that he was the guy to to be able to tackle Batman the M series Once they were ready to do that in '92 so yes the fear wasn't a deliberate test run for Batman the Animated Series but it absolutely paved the way this episode sh

owed that it was possible to talk about more mature themes while staying within the confines of the rules and it showed that Alan Bernett one of the key figures of Batman the Animated Series was definitely the man for the job and the whole reason we're talking about this is kind of like a protop pilot for Batman they made series even though it was never meant to be it was and it was made 7even years earlier so it's just spiritually in that sense being an Alan Bernette episode it's interesting th

at how he navigated BMP at the time broadcast um standards and practices yeah so navigating that by showing the sequence and then when Batman the M series came around he's on record uh for saying that he decided in working with Bruce Tim and Eric romsky who are new producers for the show he conveniently decided to forget all the bsmp standards that he had learned in the past just to allow them the wiggle room to kind of push the envelope as far as they could so this is Alan Bernett playing it sa

fe and then the Alan Bernett we get seven years later he's playing it a bit more loose just to see what he can do the early days of Batman the Animated Series were defined by conflict there were two opposing groups in the initial creative team you had the producers Bruce Tim and Eric romsky who were advocating pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable within kids shows and then you had script editor Shan Katherine Derek who was encouraged by some Executives to Reign them back and produce a m

ore traditional show all the Super Friends I'm not saying the superpowers Team Galactic Guardian again sorry this is why some of the early episodes are so different tonally you'd have episodes like heart of ice or feet of clay about tragic figures who resort to villainy after their lives were destroyed by heartless figures of authority and then you'd have I've got Batman in my basement or be a clown that don't really say anything they're just standard kid-friendly adventure cartoons in order to

correct the course Alan Bernett was hired fortunately Allan shared Tim and romy's view that they should ride the wave of Burton batmania to help push the boundaries of American animation and the rest is history if Alan Bernett hadn't written the fear then there is a chance that he may not have been hired to work on Batman the Animated Series a different producer could have come on board one more aligned with the more cautious writers and Executives and I can guarantee if that had been the case w

e would have ended up with more episodes like I've got Batman in my basement and my life would have been very different this video was intended as an April Fool's video of sorts a beat ass Channel praising the Super Friends but both Ted and I are very very sincere in our appreciation of the fear and the work of Alan Bernett the fear walked so that Batman the series could run so instead of saying April Falls let's just say thank you [Music] Alan