Batman - The Animated Series: Everything You Didn't Know

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Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of My Heart Radio. Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that brings you the secret histories and little known fascinating facts and figures behind your favorite movies, music, TV shows and more. Where your two dark knights of Dorkery, your vigilantes of verified tidbits, your nocturnal ninjas of nion, incomprehensible minutia. I'm Alex Sigel and I'm Jordan runt Hog. And that is an all time intro for you, my friend. Wow, this is my super Bowls. This is my Waterloo. No, yes, this is my this is my um. What was the one that you probably nerded out the most recently, Revolver? Probably Yeah, this is my Revolver today, Jordan, we are talking about one of the towering achievements of the ever widening gyre of comic book adaptations, the show that provided a valuable waste station for fans, cotton draft of big screen versions and a vision of the titular hero that has outlasted bigger and more expensive versions across the decades. That's right, we're talking about Batman, the animated series. With the recent passing of Kevin Conroy, the beloved voice of Batman and Bruce Wayne on that show and more other Batman related properties, and you could shake a batter rang at, I dug out my batsuit and I quartered Jordan in a darkened alley to force him to let us do this episode. Were you ever Batman for Halloween? I feel like this is gonna No actually I wasn't. No, no, no, no no, well, yeah exactly. I didn't want to steal valor from from Batman. I was spider Man one year. I would describe this is probably one of the big four of sort of animated comic book properties of the late eighties nineties. I mean, obviously we have teenage Mustan Ninja Turtles, which I think everyone forgets was a comic first, but that gets grandfathered in the Fox x men um, which is also Man do that theme song is as an all time banger, and Spider Man, which was I think kind of a bit later, but you know, also long running and kind of in that Fox animated slot. I'm sure people would count Superman in there, but Superman sucks, so we're not going to talk about it. You really don't like Superman? I yes, actually that is probably the dichotomy Superman is the wholesome one and Batman is the dark one, and um yeah, I don't know, dude, Superman's is boring. It's like the kid who like when you're like playing with a kid and they keep like inventing like things that they can do on the fly, like like, well, my guy can shoot lasers and he's also the strongest guy, and also you can fly, and also he can leave both his whole buildings. Yeah, it's just so boring. And he's so you know, he's so I think people have done more interesting things with the character, Like you know, there's like an extended like riff on Superman is like an immigrant, which is kind of interesting, but it's just so deadly dull, like he's virtuous and he has powers and and like he's the most strong guy. Um yeah, just boring and okay, yeah, so there's there's big ones. Um and it's interesting. This series really like picked up the slack between movies because you had Tim Burton doing Batman and Batman Returns, which are like the pious grossing that that original Batman like blew the doors off everything, and then Batman Returns is one of the most like beloved sequels of all time, not even in the superhero genre, just like period it's like the Godfather two of superhero movies, and then there was nothing for a long time. And you know, I think someone will probably correct me on this, but I think Tim Burton was working on a Superman with Nicolas Cage, and you can actually find like shots of Nicolas Cage and a Superman costume out there that are really bad. And then that got derailed, and then we the next one was Batman Forever, and that was the Schumacher era that pretty much killed the French I was dead within two years and two movies, although Batman Forever gave us Kissed by Rose. Yeah, man, I was just a perfect age for this, you know, like the Tim Burton stuff are like it's such a great vision, but it is like it's dark and like not necessarily for kids, and we'll get into like how they show sort of was also pushing the tonal envelope. But yeah, like Danny DeVito is like scary. He like bites the dude's nose and he's like using black ooze out of his mouth all the time. Is just horrifying, and uh so, like the Saturday Morning version of this is so just like what I grew up in, and so like it has such a unique vision of the look. And Kevin Conroy is just perfect, man, I mean he's like, that's like my Batman. I was already like old when when the Christian Bale version came out, And obviously those are great, and Heath Ledger is, you know, incredible in that role. But it's like this was like the Batman I grew up with. And like when I hear Batman's voice in my head, as I frequently do, uh, it's Kevin Conroys. Okay, Um, yes, I'm guessing though that you are disposition lee perhaps a little more predisposed to let's say that Adam West version. I don't mean that is shade because I also grew up on that. I love my my mid century pop art. Yeah, I mean Adam West was really just one of the only Batman Batman's at the plural Batman's Batman, and I yeh Batman. I uh that I can really just name off the top of my head. Um, I don't know something about the movies. They just seem like stunt casting to me, Like that's not Batman, that's George Clooney caused playing as Batman. Oh those the Shoemaker ones, for sure. But but I mean, yeah, well, the backlash to the Burton ones is so interesting because you know he I think he pretty much cast Keating off the strength of Beetlejuice and then but people were like, who's the He's a comedian. Yeah, yeah, Um, my knowledge of Batman and this will become devastatingly apparent very soon. He's non existent. I mean, comics in general sorely lacking. Um, but I'm really excited to learn a lot from you today because I know this is a subject very near and dear to your heart. Um. I'm shocked you haven't mentioned this yet, so I will. Years ago, not long after we first met, high Gold invited me to join his band, not because I had any innate musical talent, he just know that. He just knew I had a base and was available. Uh. And the name of that band was the World's Greatest Detective, which was a phrase that meant absolutely nothing to me at the time. Uh. In fact, I thought you just were really in the Sherlock Homes. I'm serious. Um, But I gradually pieced together that it was a reference to Batman, and it's slowly donned to me what a major figure he was in your life. Well, probably you saw the Batman tattoo that I have. I know, I know, Yeah, I've got a Batman tattoo. I also, I was in the run for an editor job at DC Comics for a few months, and I think that tattoo kept me in the running and sadly I didn't never materialize, but that that was a great interview that I went on, just like ranting to like two d C Comics editors about how much I love Batman. They were like, what about like the other stuff, like our our entire roster of other comics, And I was like, no, probably hurt me a little bit, but I mean, I love talking about this with you because, in a classic hallmark of male friendships, we've never actually discussed your look man Man. Yeah. Also, I'm excited to learn from you and hear what he means to you, because, as I said, this is a huge blind spot for me, especially the animated series really sort of in classic form for me. The only Batman that I actually ever studied up on was the original comic from nine, just because I did a story on it for people a few years back for the eighth anniversary. Um, that's where I learned that d C comics stood for detective comics. Hence the world's greatest detective. Didn't know that. Uh. I didn't know that Bruce Wayne is supposed to be a descendant of the Revolutionary War general mad Anthony Wayne, which rules. Uh. But yeah, that's the level of my my Batman scholardom. So I'm excited to learn. Teach me Zorba Zorba the Greek reference. Yes, it is now in the the Batman Extended Universe orb of the Creek. That's Cannon Well. From Kevin Conroy's youth as a Juilliard trained actor who once roomed with Robin Williams and almost Superman. Uh, to the second act. Yeah, to the second act it provided to Star Wars icon Mark Hamill. To the dizzyingly sophisticated imagery that went into the look of the show. Here's everything you didn't know about Batman the animated series. All right, well, bizarrely enough, but you gotta read the heading. You gotta read the heading. Oh yeah, all of these are Batman refs. This first one is the holy development process Batman that God, have you ever gone through the whole list of all the of all the Robin catchphrases. I think we did on this show once, but I couldn't for the like did. My favorite is the Holy Shark Repellent bat Spray Batman. What episode would that have possibly been for? That was one of the ones I had taped because I remember it. They're climbing a ladder that's suspended from a helicopter. It's actually crazy sequence concerning has been done for a sixties television show, and they're both it's stunted Man, obviously, but they're both dangling on this ladder because they've been hoisted up from the ocean, and there's a shark hanging onto hanging onto Batman's legs. He pulls out the shark repellent, that spray shark explodes. Is kind of great. Zapp pal Bam the BATWATTU. See, Okay, we have to stay on track. Uh. The origins of Batman the animated series lie not with murdered parents, but with tiny tun adventures spect specifically a Batman spoof that was part of that show called bats All Folks, which was a parody that saw the character of Plucky Duck assumed the mantle of Spruce Vane bat Duck medium funny. It was for children, it was a different time. The Warner Brothers Animation television division around this time, Lady Eighties early nineties, was established by w B Animation president Jean McCurdy uh and she brought in a lot of the producer named Tom Rueger, a lot of his staff from Hanna Barbara Productions Scooby Doo series Um Tiny Tune Adventures, which for the uninitiated is like baby versions of the Looney Tunes Babs and Buster Bunny No relationship, and that was a big hit for that was their first big success, and that short contained a number of very loving and deeply specific Batman references, like lines of dialogue that they lifted from the very first comic recreation of imagery from Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, which is very inappropriate for children, but it's probably one of the more iconic images of the series. It's like Batman silhouetted on a like a building with like lightning flashing behind him, which they also riff in the in the animated series and the opening credits, and those were the work of one guy named Bruce Tim who was not one of the show's regular animators, but he was on this on this episode, and he started his career with like stuff like he Man Masters the Universe, g I Joe, And then he also worked for Ralph Bakshi and Don Bluth on Secretive Nim. We really got Slot in a Bluth episode, Um, well they're all too They're all too sad, scary four times too sad. Secret of Nim is too scary. All dogs go to Heaven traumatizing. Uh. He also worked with Future Wren and Simpy Headhan show, John Krick Flucy on Mighty Mouse, and he worked on The Real Ghostbusters. Um, and they enjoy Warner Brothers in eighty nine, which was the year before Tiny Toon Adventures launched, and the Bruce Tim had wrapped the first season on that show when McCurdy called a meeting and she was like, hey, Warner Brothers were gonna be expanding the slate. Tinytoons was a hit, uh, the slate of animated properties, and Tim Burton's first Batman movie had been such a world conquering success in eighty nine and so they were like, we're gonna do Batman, or that's one of the ones we're looking at anyway, And Bruce tim was so excited and he got out of the meeting and went back to his desk and in a fit of peek, swept all of his Tiny Toon Adventures stuff off his desk and started working on Batman. And you know some of the visual influences of this show. He was looking at Sleeping Beauty, the Disney version that's sort of has this pared down, angular, more simplistic style, and then the hand of Barbara sixty stuff like Space Ghost Um, which you can really see the kind of like lantern jaw of the characters, and these trapezoidal torsos that Ruin has. Those backgrounds for Sleeping Beauty are incredible, gorgeous. Yeah, very Disney like. I'm sort of amazed that it's like, way too cool for Disney. I'm amazed that they got away with that. He drew twenty different versions of Bruce Wayne before he landed on the one, and that was a combination of Doc Savage, who's this sort of forgotten comic character from the mid century, and Dick Tracy sense. Yeah yeah, and uh McCurdy loved the designs that he brought to the next staff meeting, and she paired him with a guy named Eric Radomski who had also been working on Tiny Tuns as a background painter, and the two of them didn't really work together. This is Bruce Tim talking to Vulture for this incredible oral history they did of the show in twenty seventeen. He said, we weren't really thrown together a bunch before they were put on this series together. But he said, once we were on the Batman project, we really hit it off. And there was there's another short piece about this in a magazine called Back Issue, uh. And to them, Tim explained that Warner Brothers had been in negotiations with Fox Kids to actually do the show, and the negotiations had been dragging on for a while, and Jean thought that this might be a good way to kind of goose the process, to show them some footage um, And she recommended that they look at the Superman cartoons for inspiration for for the look of the show, and they got to work on this pitch rail, which essentially became the opening credits for the show. UM. But it took them like, uh, you know, ninety days to put this thing together and the show was greenlit in the meantime side unseen so and then she was basically like in a classic case of like, hey, you did this thing, well, now you're in charge of it. Like she was like, you guys are in charge of this show now. And they had never done this before. They were completely new to running an animated show from the top down. Uh. There's a great book on the animated series that I relied on a lot of This has a lot of these beautiful animation storyboards and stuff and um, but things pretty much immediately hit a snag. Tim Wrights in the insure of the book that, Uh, there was a story editor for the show that was initially assigned to them, and they immediately got into battles. Uh. They basically thought the scripts weren't up to snuff, and the story editor uh quite rightly felt that two artists with zero experience should be giving her such strong feedback on her work. Uh, And he wrote, certainly, egos were bruised and toes were stepped on. There's no getting around the fact that we were pretty damn brash and outspoken. I recently came across some old script notes from those days in my files and was positively aghast at how snotty and mean spirit I sounded, which you know who among us um Jim McCarty shut down production, and Bruce Tim told Vulture there was a period in the early couple of months of production were literally Eric and I didn't know if we were going to show up and find the locks changed on our offices. And part of this was that from the beginning that they were aiming for this darker look and tone for this show, more akin to the Tim Burton films than Adam West version. And you know, it's really to her credit that Jean McCarty took this leap of faith on them. But she brought in a buddy of hers, Alan Burnett, who told Vulture that he was basically upset after years of dealing with like standards and practices and networks because he's been working on the Smurfs and Ducktails for years and he was trying to get out of children's animation to altogether. It was just trying to leave the field entirely. But he told Vulture what sold me was the trailer that Bruce Tim and Eric Radomski had done for the show. I said to Jean listen if you're gonna do Batman, you're gonna have to have guns and fist fights, both of which were completely verboten and children's animation at the time. And that's when she showed me the trailer. I really didn't believe that I would be allowed to have guns and fist fights, but she insisted that I would have the freedom, and so I came on over. Sylan Burnett brought in writer producer Paul Dinny, and the team sat down to create a one hundred and fifty page show Bible for the series that laid out their vision. I love show Bible, fun uh didn't was writing with an eye towards like, as you mentioned, the seriously dark Batman stories that had come out in the mid eighties, like Frank Miller's aforementioned The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore is the Killing Joke. And they laid down three ground rules for the series. I love this so much. No aliens, no ghosts, and no Humanitus Prize. And that's an award that was established by a priest with a Catholic production company that recognized the most emotional, heartfelt modeling in other words, storytelling in film and television and just for comparison, mash had won the most of these awards for his preachy later era episodes. Among the additional rules, Batman works alone, although this changed in the second season when Fox wanted to include Robin as a young character to capitalize on the toy market. And also, Batman does not work with the police. Don't go to the police. Hell, yeah, you and I are both silly, and we know this. I mean and I mean, And this is where my little bit that I know about Batman history comes into play here. Uh, Batman initially started off as a detective. I mean because as the world's greatest detective. This was d C comics, detective comics. And uh, they initially brought in the Robin character. The editors were extremely skeptical, but they brought him in just to kind of have a character that could be the kid's point of view that readers kind of glom onto. And in the fifties there was I'm sure you know the name for it. I don't. Offhand, there was basically a big crackdown on comics. Again, this was in McCarthy era, all sorts of comics on everything, the comics code, where basically Batman went from fighting the mob and using guns to fighting these way out characters like you know, the crazy ones that we think of, especially towards the Adam West where it becomes like, you know, real pop art type stuff. So this is sort of more akin to to where Batman started as a detective back in the early comic book era. Yeah, and you know people always think about like, oh, Commissioner he works with Commissioner Gordon and stuff, and it's like, well, not really. He kind of involves Commissioner Gordon when he wants to, and that's what their whole thing with the animals show. They were like, he uses the bat signal when they want to work together. But they were like, it's so funny all this history of animation, like all the really good properties are like adult men who were like, we don't want to make something for children, to make something for ourselves. But that's the thing is that when you don't pander, you create something that's actually good and lives on. And that's what like the unifying theme and all of these different properties that we've talked about, like it's just people working from their gut and there make something that ye trying to make something that's good and doesn't pander. You ever danced with the Devil in the Pale moon Light? I don't know the records. Oh that's what. Okay. So in the original Batman with with the Burton one, that's what, um, the red con it's so that the Joker is the thief who killed Batman's parents, and that's his catchphrase, and he says it right before he shoots Batman's parents, and that's how Batman realizes that the Joker is the one who did it. And it's Nicholson, Jack Nicholson obviously, so it's he really makes a meal out of that line. Um, I was reading today. I'm sorry, I'll probably cut this. Uh Jon Stewart joke where he said, yeah, Hollywood is really just a series of parties with a velvet rope with a smaller party in the back, with another velvet rope with a smaller party, play on that and another velvet rope, and eventually you just get to one room where it's Jack Nicholson sitting by himself in sunglasses, having a party alone. Um. The team leaned into a style of art that they termed dark Decko, which was partially inspired by Burton's sort of like gothic vision. Yeah, it's awesome. Partially inspired by Burton's Gothic vision of Batman. I mean his big thing was German expressionism, like Cabinet of Dr Caligari stuff, but also these like you know, Gotham looks like a cathedral. It has all these crazy spires and it's just ridiculous looking. But they wanted a cleaner look. Eric Radomski told Vulture, we wanted it to be a little more stylish and a little classier. So we leaned away from just horror and gothic and we lean more into the deco elegance in the forties in New York. That birth this timeless feel where it felt very authentic in a forties setting, but it was contemporary storylines that we were telling. We could see mobsters and forties vehicles and dirigibles. Uh, and yet Batman had technology that was way beyond that time period. I don't think there's a bat blimp rule that animated movie from. I think it was based on a Japanese illustrated book and there's a dirigible in it, and the movie is scary as hell. Um. Some of the non comics visual influences that they picked included the Big Sleep noir, detective noir classic, The Third Man Orson Welles non citizen Kane masterpiece, The Night of the Hunter, which is have you ever seen That of the Hunter? A long time ago? Yeah, that's where Spike Lee got the good and evil riff from from. Yeah. Robert Mitchum is the bad guy in that. He's terrifying, and that movie is just, uh has these beautiful, stark black and white shots. I mean it almost looks like kabuki theater or something. It's non It's like there's these scenes where where he's just like holding these poses that are just shot in these beautiful stark uh. There's there's also this horrifying shot where it's spoiler alert. He's murdered this woman and put her in a car that he runs into the bottom of the lake, and there's this horrifying shot of her at the bottom of the lake with her throat cut and her hair waving water and like the fisherman's line going off of it. Yeah, how did you get that in movie theaters at the time? And Fritz Lang's Metropolis, which is always another one people talk about this era of like black and white expressionist influenced stuff. That's another one that always comes up. You've almost certainly seen the shot of the female robot like seated in a big throne with all the crazy lighting and stuff behind it. And then they also liked Akira, which anyone working in animation had probably been fallen under the spell of a kiro which came out in a D eight. It's but probably I mean, there's probably some people who will correct me on this, but I would argue it's like the Citizen Canyon of anime. It's got like one of the broadest cross cultural impacts of any Japanese animation product outside of the Miyazaki stuff. I would say, I'm a bit of a dilettant when it comes to anime. So someone who angrily tweeted us about that, it's interesting to me that. I mean, two things that you mentioned are very big influences on David Bowie Kabuki theater in his Ziggy Stardust era and the cablet of Dr Caligari, the German expressionist film. Uh. He actually used images from that movie in his nineteen seventy four Diamond Dogs Tour, which was his big like basically a Broadway musical style tour that I think only last at halfway through the tour before they were just like this is just too much, and then he scaled it down. But yeah, I didn't so many influences on Batman influence Bowie. We are working towards the unified Bowie Batman universe here. Wow, he should have played Batman Bowie. Oh, he should definitely should have been. I could see him as a pretty good joker, that's true. That's true on in his coke era, not not like not like imbish elder Statesman Bowie, you know, not extra's Bowie. We're talking like, yeah, coked out Bowie. H. As you meditate on that, we'll be right back with more too much information after these messages. The literal fabric of this show was dark, speaking of all the background animation, whereas traditional animation you his white background paper. Radomski, one of the series drawn on true black background paper in order to achieve the darker look they wanted, which kept the deep vibrant tones they used for coloring from looking you know, two cartoonish. He told Vulture, I don't recall anyone ever doing that, other than maybe Mary Blair experimenting with some Disney short films. Yeah, she was a very I think she worked on Sleeping Beauty. What we were doing was literally trying to interpret the night with an impressionist style. That's incredible. If we did it wrong, it was gonna look like the black velvet paintings that were popular in the sixties and seventies. Yep. Bruce Tim added in this Vulture interview, I've worked on a bunch of action adventure shows for TV before, and every single one of them I thought was overdesigned. They were trying to impress people with the amount of detail. On g I. Joe especially, it wasn't enough to draw a belt on a character. The belt had seams and buttons and snaps and pockets. There's no good reason to draw every shoelace on a shoe, just making a simple shape. That was Eric and My basic idea for the entire series, to simplify everything. There's a famous, sort of controversial comics artists from the nineties named Rob Lee Field who is famous for two things. One is his inability to draw feet um and so like all of his characters are these horrifically overmuscled steroid nightmares that don't even have a semblance of anatomical reality, and the women are all like horrific caricatures of femininity with like these tiny wasp waists, and like, you know, seventy percent of his action scenes all have these perspective shots where like the overmuscled torsos and enormous guns are all foregrounded, and then they taper into these tiny little ballerina feet that are more often than not obscured behind like a rock or something, and it's just become like a running rip on him. That's just like he can't draw feet. And his other thing was pouches, exact strainiest pouches, like pouches around the thigh, like not just a beautility belt, but like pouches around biceps and thigh and calves. It's just ridiculous, Uh, that simplicity extended to these shows pitch perfect opening which if you know nothing about this show, just go look at the opening credits. They're gorgeous. Although each episode's title is displayed in these beautiful nineties movie theater style like lobby cards, like every episode title and they're all like pulpy, like the very first episode where Batman fights his polar inverse man Bat which is a half man, half bat monster. It's called on Leather Wings, which is so awesome. But these opening credits, there's no title. You don't see the word Batman or animated or series anywhere. It's just it's this beautiful film to a variation of the Burton theme. And then you get these title cards. And so there's a great article on that opening sequence to the website, the art of the title, and Tim said that was very much by design. He said, we figured anybody in any language would be able to look at these credits and go, oh, it's Batman. We want expository information conveyed as visually as possible, stressing visual shorthand over lazy expository speeches. That's from the show bible. Keep the images and actions clear and vivid um. And then there's a guy who directed some of these and he was a storyboard artist. His name is Kevin Altieri, and he's talking to back issue. He says the real difficulty was in the layouts, because in the character layouts you hire people with experience and layouts, and at that time everyone was just doing goofy, funny, wacky cartoons. If people had drawn action adventure, they hadn't done it for a long time. Part of the reason the early shows looked so good was that we had total control over the layouts. It was done totally in house, and those were the backgrounds were the work of a guy named Ted Blackman, who's a real unsung hero of these shows. And he was also a Tiny Tune Adventure alum. It will never not be funny to me that these guys came over from Tiny Toon Adventures. And the look of the show is again these really bold, striking colors that are done on these dark backgrounds. And a funny thing that once you're cued into the visual language of the show, that you can pick up on is that the shadows move independently of light sources, so like they they're just these enormous like swaths of dark shadow and like spotlight lighting that just do not obey the laws of physics. But they used air brushes to color these backgrounds, and so they're these really oversaturated palette and then that will kind of taper off into the patented sort of airbrush diffuse texture, uh, And then to differentiate the backgrounds versus the foregrounds, they would use like sponges or deliberately get kind of more splatter textures from the air brushes. It's just such a sophisticated visual language. This next section is titled ein klined Bock bat music box music, not like bok but like bat. Get it. That's good. I liked it. Okay, okay. The show's main theme that I sang earlier beautifully is based on Danny Elfman's theme from the Tim Burton movies. But I would like to shine a spotlight on the woman who did the bulk of the work on the show, Shirley Walker. She is a prodigiously talented composer and pianist. She played with the San Francisco Symphony when she was a teenager, and she got her start in Hollywood in nineteen seventy nine playing synths on the score of Apocalypse. Now, um, this is asinine. I didn't know this. This took until damn two for a female composer to earn a solo composer credit on a major Hollywood motion picture, and that was for a depressingly movie. My beloved John Carpenter's Chevy Chase starring Memoirs of an Invisible Man, which is part of Chase's downward slide and carpenters for that matter. Sorry, j C, please forgive me. He would murder me if he heard me say that. I feel like he would agree. No, he's he's I think he's very like. He's very cute into the fact that Hollywood sort of did him dirty. But you know, there's a there's a really funny clip of someone being like at a comic convention of somebody being like, escape from New York was great? What happened with this from l A? And he just gives him the finger and yells you um and And it's funny because Carpet notoriously does a lot of his scoring himself to save at least in the early days, was to save money. But he would collaborate with her again on the aforementioned movie Escape from l A, which is a a film in which Kurt Russell and Peter Fonda surfboard together on a on a tighter way through Los Angeles. Is that how they get out of l A? Or I? I guess, I don't know. If they escape they get through. Yeah, it's bad, dude. It's scored a like ventures like surf guitar. It's so is it meant to be funny. Who's to say, doesn't Shirley Walker like do the scoring by hands? But she does her own engraving. She did her own engraving by hand. Oh my god, wild. I mean, all these people work with teams like that, and there were there were a lot of composers credited on this show, but you know, she did the bulk of this thing. There's an incredible video that everyone should look up where she's exceeded at a piano doing an interview and she plays that that main theme that Dona Na Na, and then harmonizes it and then shows all the different variations that it goes through, like a rise. It's all these like composition terms like you invert it, which means you play it upside down, or you retrograd that you play backwards. And so there's all these rising and falling themes that she harmonizes in different ways or talks about how they would orchestrate like really busy strings running over it, and she's just like sitting at a keyboard like ripping all of this stuff off the top of her head as she talks about it. It's amazing, And she came to the showrunners attention because she was working on Danny Elfman on the TV series The Flash, which is something I know nothing about. I guess there was a Flash TV series that predated the current running one, and she was actually Elfman's conductor on Batman and also scrooged and supposedly this is an interview that I heard. She put this in an interview when they were scoring Batman in London. She said it was a record at the time from the most recording sessions for any score for emotion. Picture was unable to verify that, but I believe her any movie ever, not just her personal best. Yeah. I don't know, because she said the symphony like some of the members like like they cent her a thank you card or something, and it said, here's to another take, which is so great. She worked for Hans Zimmer for a long time and she did all the bunch of the Final Destination movies, which is great. Uh, And this is so wild man. Other studios at the time, especially for kids animation, they were relying on stock music music libraries, and Bruce tim told Vulture again to this woman's credit, that it was Gene McCurdy who insisted that they have original compositions for each episode. Scored directly to the specific scenes of that episode, so surely her team and Bruce Tim would all collaborate on eleven to fifteen minutes of original scoring for these episodes and were recorded by a thirty piece orchestra in scoring stages. And for the future length movie that takes place in the series universe, Mask of the Phantasm, they scored that with a hundred piece orchestra at a twenty five voice corral. It's really funny. People have long wondered what this corral is actually saying, and they are saying the names of the different people and the creative team backwards, Tim Radomski, Burnett and members of her composing team, and you can actually hear it. It's funny, like once you listen to it, you hear like you're like this haying mitt, Yes they are. She won a Daytime Emmy Award for the Music Director uh for the for this um and then she picked up another one two one for Batman Beyond and in ASCAP the American Songwriting and Composers Associated right sounds yeah because ask Cappa and bm I are the two big songwriting composer guilds, or or I should know this. I remember b m I. They inaugurated the Shirley Walker Award to honor those whose achievements have contributed to the diversity of film and television music. But has the Batman Animated series soundtrack been enshrined in the Library of Congress Hygel god willing. If my life has purpose, yes, it will be by mine own hand. Well. With the look in the sound of the show in place, the show's creative team began the unenviable task of casting the new voice of Batman and also the Joker, Catwoman, and the rest of the property's cast of characters. And we say unenviable because bear in mind the series premiered less than three months after Batman Returns it hit theaters, so Michael Keaton's Bruce Wayne slash Batman voice was looming large in the popular consciousness, not to mention Jack Nicholson as the Joker, Danny DeVito as the Penguin, shelf Iffer's Catwoman, and the rest. Voice director Andrew Romano told Vulture for their incredible oral history on the Batman Animated series. Just for Batman himself, I listened to five hundred voices, then we did callbacks, and we auditioned a hundred and twenty Bruce Tim and I narrowed it down to about four or five actors, none of whom we were gaga four. So I asked my roommate, he was a casting director. I said, any actors you know? And he said, you know, there's this wonderful actor who has a lot of stage experience and a lot of TV and soap opera experience. And his name's Kevin Conroy. Kevin Conroy man Long Island native. Kevin Conroy received a scholarship to Juilliard after graduating high school early at the age of seventeen. Had a difficult childhood. His father was an alcoholic I think a pan Am executive. A very commonly repeated part of Conroy's bios that he once shared an apartment with Robin Williams. Uh and yeah. He tweeted in twenty eighteen that he knew Christopher Reeves from Juilliard and that those two even talked about rooming together a Christopher Reaes I guess was living in Soho at the time. And uh. Kevin Conroy said that the two hundred dollars a month it would have cost him to room with Christopher rees was too expensive. And they handed up with Robin Williams where they divvied up their apartment with half height walls to save money. So I guess it would have looked like an office like pubical thing, just like the four foot walls like divvy it up. Um. Yeah, that means that if you abscribed to the multiverse theory, there's somewhere world where Batman and Superman were struggling actors living together, and so wow, that's a sitcom I'd like to see. I've read that Kevin Conroy was also a classmates at Juilliard with Kelsey Grammar too, which is interesting to me for a sad reason. Kelsey Grammar had a younger sister, Karen, who was murdered when Kelsey was about twenty years old, which would have been around when he was at Juilliard, and it's believed that one of the men who was involved with the murder actually got away and was never apprehended. So I wonder if any of this somehow factored into Kevin Conroy's performance of Batman, given that he probably knew Kelsey Grammar around this time and Batman's whole origin story about avenging his parents who were murdered in front of him. I don't I don't know. I just think that's interesting. Did you know that about him about Kelsey Grammer's depressing in life. Yeah, dude, it's it's it's brough. He had like idea her himself. Oh it's terrible. Yeah, yeah, don't google that one for if you see the video where he talks about how he got the voice for side show Bob No. So, I guess he was like a man servant man boy Friday, handyman for this like blow hard stage actor when he was struggling in New York and this guy would like come home and Kelsey would be like painting his cabinet or whatever, and he would just he'd be like, Oh, I forget the guy's name. He's like actually a known guy. But he was like like, oh, yeah, hey man, how's your day. I'm just and up their cabinets or whatever, and oh Kelsey ah and he goes he goes, yeah, I'm going to use that later. He like bookmarked that voice thing low and I do around the house. Kelsey. Wow, that's amazing. Uh. In the late nineteen eighties, Kevin Conroy, who was gay, started in a Broadway production of Eastern Standard, in which he played a TV producer secretly living with AIDS and growing up closeted. But the strict religious family was something that he said he brought to his audition for Batman, the animated series. He said, I began to speak and a voice I didn't recognize came out. It was a throaty, husky, rumbling sound. It seemed to roar from thirty years of frustration, confusion, denial, love and yearning. I think it's beautiful, Kevin said he was isn't even really a span of the comics at the time, and this was his first audition that he went on for animation work, and he said, when I went into the audition, they asked me if I had any questions, and I said something about how I assumed they were doing the show like in nineteen sixties Adam West Batman series. This is him talking to DC dot Com in interview, and of course the response was something like no, no, that's not it at all. And Bruce Tim's talking to Vulture, he said, we had him read both Bruce Wayne Dialogue and Batman dialogue, and right out of the gate, without any direction from us, he just nailed it and this is really interesting to me. Once he looked at the script, I guess Kevin Conroy thought that the supporting character roles like Commissioner Gordon and one of the Gotham PD detectives were meteor and asked to read for them instead, and the voiceover director Andrew Romano, I guess, told him, if you're Batman, you'll be in every episode. Stop trying to talk instead of hiring you. There's a really beautiful comic that they did for the DC Pride anthology Amountain Pride Month in two, and it's um. It just talks about how he was struggling as a closet gayman growing up and working as an actor before he was cast as Batman. And they made it available to read for free online when he died, so it's called Finding Batman. It's really good. Kevin Connery would ultimately voice Batman for three decades in nearly sixty different productions, including fifteen films, fifteen animated series across four hundred episodes, and two dozen video games. Luke Skywalker himself Mark Hamill, who as well discuss in a minute voice Batman's prime foil the Joker for the show, told Male magazine in their oral history of the show's first episode featuring the Joker, Christmas with the Joker, that Conroy's voice is like a massage on the back of your neck. It's so rich and textured. That episode, by the ways, where you get the classic grade schoolers chant of jingle bells, Batman smells, Robin laid an egg, the Batmobile lost to where on the Joker got away. I can't believe that. I just assumed that was something that was around just in schoolyards since time immemorial. I didn't know that that was like, I really didn't know that was something that was from a sanctioned Batman property. First of all, Wow, it's like chaucer uh and that DC interview. Connor explained that since the voice director, Andrea Romano started as an actor herself, she pushed for the voicecast to record together, which they did for almost every episode in a fashion that he likened to producing a radio play. They spent double the amount of money on an episode that was customary. He told Mail Magazine. It was a beautiful show with this timeless noir look to it, which is why it still looks so new today. There's also a big cast with eight or ten people in the recording studio at once and a full symphony to score each episode show, when does that happen in animation? Great question, Kevin. The third episode, Nothing to Fear, features the most famous line of the show, regularly used in the advertising. I am Vengeance, I am the Night, I am Batman. And he told Vulture, you can't approach that as a silly line. It was Bruce Wayne talking to himself, reaffirming his own identity. It was like, if I'm about to go on stage and I'm terrified and i think I'll never remember anything and I'll have a panic attack, it's Kevin Conroy saying, dammit, Kevin, you are an actor. You are a good actor. You know this role. You can do this role better than anybody do it. I love that he approached it like he was psyching himself up. I am the Knight, fat man, but voice so good. There's a Frank Miller comic that where he says, I'm the damn Batman. Just really funny. I don't think they would have got We'll talk about it. They probably wouldn't got away with that. With standards and practices. There's and there's Also, this is probably irreverent an exodan this on, but it's so funny, he said into Vulture. He's talking about recording this. He says, in children's animation, you can't actually kill anyone. So whenever Batman beats anyone up or throws them off a cliff and they hit the ground, there's what they call the stay alive moan, so you know the character is not actually dead. You know, when he was voicing a thug or whatever and somebody got punched off a building or whatever, they go, okay, stay alive moan, and they go, ah, you know, because it's like it's like he was only grievously injured, he wasn't killed. But he keeps Yeah, he says, they didn't they do that. Oh the Ninja Turtles movie when the henchman beats up, Yeah, oh he'll be okay. After he beats a man to death his bare hands, the A D R aligne like, oh, he's just he's just slightly dead. He's just mostly dead. Um, and Kevin Connery continues, it always sounded slightly sexualized. So one episode, I was doing the stay alive moan and I went, ah, Andrea in the place erupted. It just sounded like the most post coital moment between Batman and Drea Romano. She hold and said, Okay, I'm taking that one home with me tonight. It got to be a tradition. Whenever I would get in a fight, it would be Andrea. And then she added to Vulture every session I've done with Kevin, and I believe we're probably into the thousands of sessions I've done with Kevin Conrey. At some point, every time he gives me a level a level reading for sound, he says he ends it with Andrea, and some people who aren't savvy to the joke for from years ago, they're scratching their heads, going like what does that mean? Anybody else who's in there, like, okay, now we can start the session. It's official, Kevin has said Andrea in the Batman voice, We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more too much information in just a moment. Well, outside of Kevin Conroy, the actor most connected with Batman the animated series is undoubtedly Mark Hamill, the voice of the Joker. H Hamill actually originally appeared as an ancillary thug character in the episode Heart of Ice which is the series incredible introduction to the Mr. Freeze character, whom Bruce tim originally wanted Anthony Hopkins because me, Sir Anthony Hopkins the voice. That episode is incredible and it really rehabbed Mr like Mr Freeze. His name is Mr Freeze. It sounds like an ice cream guy. But that episode is so sad. His entire motivation for being a super villain is to cure his wife's terminal disease, and that's how he gets trapped in the Mr Freeze suit, is that he's working on a cure for her. And that's where they got the whole Arnold Schwarzenegger storyline in Batman and Robin. It's entirely down to the animated series version of it. Ah. I mean, it's now like the definitive version of the character. And there's this they wanted this image of the where they were going to end this episode, this whole episode where he's revealed to be this villain who's just trying to you know, sure his wife's cancer and he has to us to get diamonds or something to fuel his machine. Maybe that's in the movie, but anyway, obviously he loses and he's an Arkham Asylum. They were going to close the episode with a shot of him crying and his tears slowly turned into snow flakes and drift away. It's like Holy that is gunning for a children's animated property. And at one one of the at one one of the Emmy's that the show picked up four Emmy's the show one I used to meet you. It's pretty widely known at this point. Even I knew this that Tim Curry was originally cast as the Joker and Bruce. Tim told Vulture everybody who came to the audition for the Joker was doing basically the Adam West era Joker actor sees a Romero, which is really broad. They weren't treating the character seriously. All of the actors that we tested, we're all doing these really silly and bizarre voices. None of it had any serious threat to it at all. Bitch, And then you called Tim Curry. We talked about in Ferngully, who took it way too far Prouce, Tim continued, Tim Curry actually came in and gave us something really close to what we wanted. It was funny and weird, but also definitely had some menace to it, so we hired Tim. He did about three episodes for us, and then Alan Burnett came to me after we did the third one and we listened to the assembled tracks and he said, I think we have to replace Tim Curry. And there have been a bunch of reasons floated for Tim's replacement. There was a claim that his performance was too scary for a children's television show, which, again, given that they said the same thing talking about his original voice tracks for Hexas in Ferngully, extremely plausible. But in speaking at Fan Expo Canada with screen Geek, Tim Curry talked about this himself. He said that the reasoning was a bit more mundane. He said, I did play joker for a while, but I had bronchitis and they fired me and hired Mark Hamill. That's life. I challenged that because they'd recorded a bunch of episodes that they had Mark Hamill do over, so they had his stuff in the vault, so why would they not. This is a real, real you know, pitting mom and dad against each other, like Mark Hamil or Tim Curry? Can you do? Can you do a Mark Hamil? I can't. I mean I didn't I didn't want to do this or Batman because I just like enshrined for me. Mark Camill is genuinely terrifying. Is that I was very unfamiliar until earlier today, and I found some clips on YouTube of him, like in the studio doing the Joker laugh, which he's he's entired me and mean just changes over like as Kevin Conford talks about, it's just like it's like it's really yeah, you don't want to live in that in that space, and it comes from another bizarre place, much like Batman. The animated series sprung from Tiny Too Adventures. Mark Hamill's terrifying performance as Joker sprung from Mozart. He was telling about mag Bazine. After Star Wars, I'd gone to Broadway to take advantage of the character parts that were available there. I did the first national tour of Amadis and then I did it on Broadway. I didn't know that, but he was also a huge comics nerd, and he was reading about the show, the development of this animated series in the Comics Buyer's Guide, that's a deeply nerdy trade publication, and he wanted to be a part of it. So he literally got his agent to call them and was like, Mark really wants to be a part of the show, and so they cast him as this business guy, evil businessman in in the Mr. Freeze episode, and he said he told Vulture, I went in and I just let my geek flag fly. I was asking them all these questions, are you gonna do Rosaul? Are you gonna do Dr Hugo Strange? And then Andrea Romano told them Luke Luke. Mark pulled me. Mark pulled me aside, poor guy man pull. Mark pulled me aside at the end of the session and said, I had so much fun doing this and thank you for bringing me in. But I want to be a part of the series. I don't want to just come in and guest star and disappear. So when it comes time to replace Tim Curry, they call in our Camel And initially he didn't want to. You know, not only was there the season Romero version of the character, but Jack Nicholson had just done this a few years later. People loved um, so he asked to do another more minor villain. He was like, oh, you know, could you guys maybe have me do to Face or Clay Face or possibly a third option also face related bad face um. And he also assumed, what else you gotta keep developing? Uh. He also assumed that there would be a big fan backlash against having, you know, Luke Skywalker play one of the most evil comic book villains of all time. That killing joke the Alan Moore storyline, Joker shoots Charmissioner Gordon's daughter and paralyzes her. That is a plotline in that Mick he's grim um damn. Yeah and uh in uh, I think it's in it's in the Oh, it's in the dark. Knight returns, he frames Batman for killing him by breaking his own neck. Uh. So this is the milieu into which Mark Hamill assumes the mantle of Joker, and so he's like, He's like, yeah, man, I didn't I didn't really think I was going to cast for this. I was going to read for it. I didn't know how people were going to react to Luke Skywalker being cast as Joker. So he says, I went into the audition thinking, well, it's too bad they can't cast me, And then he said, I'm going to make them feel really sorry that they can. One of the notes on the script said, don't think Nicholson, and so he mentions that I had just a Mozart and Amadeus in the tour and on Broadway, and he had this sort of ghastly laugh, is how he described it. That through everybody. There's an uncided quote that made the rounds when the movie version of Amadeus was released in the eighties, and it's supposedly from an acquaintance of Mozarts who said that he quote laughs with an infectious giddy like metal scraping glass. But again it's uncited, so there's a chance that that might be made up. Uh. And then he said in retrospect, after getting that part, I asked Andrea Romano, how did I get it? What was the process? How did you know that you wanted me? And she said the laugh. We gotta punch one of those, Yeah, yeah, yeah, we do. Kevin Connery Towd Mail Magazine. Tim Curry had done the Joker for a few episodes before he was replaced. He's a wonderful actor and I didn't understand why they were replacing him until I saw what Mark Hamill did with the role. Originally I only knew Marcus Luke Skywalker, so when I heard he was coming in as the new voice of Joker. I thought, Mark Hamill, that's gonna be weird. But he would just go to this crazy place with his voice and his whole face became so rubbery. Yeah, listeners, I beg you, I I am not in any way steeped in the bat milieu. I spent so much time this afternoon watching videos of Mark Hamill and the vocal booth, especially doing the laugh, which will haunt my dreams forever. Check it out. It's insane. I love what I mean. Watching the best vocal artists do their thing in the studio is so cool because their whole meatablize changes like it's it's not just something that comes from their throat, like everything about them morphs. It's just it's so wild. I love it. So Mark Hamill had the challenge of working with animation that had been done to Tim Curry's recordings, so he says he wasn't really able to bring his own rhythms to the characters until they ran out of these episodes that Curry had already done. Um, which has gotta be tough. Man, imagine doing recording your own voice. Part two. Lip movements that have been animated around someone else's entire readings. Well, we talked about that in hocus Pocus too, and they they got somebody to do the voice of oh Kid, Yes, y, because they thought the original guy sounded to modern. Yeah, but this is where I think that Tim Curry's excuse about having bron cute is garbage, because he had already recorded a bunch that they decided a junk. So, yeah, I guess that's better than I was too terrifying. Oh, I would own that. You kidding? That's true? And have you all seen Hexes? Yeah, that's why those of you who aren't aroused by the character, we'll have nightmares forever. Uh Conroy continued to vulture. Luke Skywalker is the nice young leading man, and most times in films that's probably the least interesting character. Well, Mark Hamill could not be further from that. This madman came into the recording studio and he was totally eccentric and goes a million miles an hour. The other voice cast for this show is wild Paul head of ASCAP and writer of Rainbow Connection. Williams was the voice of the penguin. Well, I didn't know that he did a lot of weird bit parts he was on He had a bit part in like Mash. I think Adrian Barboa, who's uh genre star. She was also the original Rizzo on Broadway, John Carpenter's ex wife. She's in the swamp Thing movie. She's Catwoman. Roddy McDowell, Um, is he doctors ais or No? He's seen Yeah. In Plan of the Apes, he's a villain called the Mad Hatter. Ron Perlman comes in as clay Face, Big Old Lantern, jaw Rod Perlman, gambled Dotorro favorite friend of the pod, Ron Perlman, Uh, David Warner British Icon, Acting Icon, David Warner's rosal and Ed Asner Perennial New York Times Crossword clue ed Asner as himself and starring at Asner as himself. Well with the conscious attempts to push the envelope in terms of children's animation tone, the show's tone and content got a lot of notes from the higher ups, though Bruce tim wrote in the book on the show that some people Fox were relatively lenient as far as that went. He said one of the unsung heroes of the series was Avery Coburn, Fox's broadcasting standards and practices liaison. He wrote, we were getting in a new territory with this show, and every understood exactly what we were going for. She changed the rules for daytime animated series, which were long overdue for an overhaul. In past Saturday morning shows, the hero wasn't even allowed to make a fist, much less hit anyone with it. Wow. Yeah, Some of these notes that are included in the book are so a quick quick sampling of them, although there were multiple ones I omitted that included the nature of the strikes Batman were allowed to use in dealing with criminals and the points on the villain's body where he was allowed to deliver them. So that's how grand you're like out with this stuff. But here's a here's a small sampling. The network says it is not their practice to show animal excrement hitting anyone on a children's show. They want us to cut the bat guana landing on Alfred's jacket. Network has a problem with Bruce's line I'll see you in hell. That's great. Penguin's joke about picking up all the soap in prison is out. The third thug must be Caucasian. Oh wow, Bs and p s has Bane picking up Robin by the head is too easy for a kid to copy with a pet or smaller kid. It has to be clear through Harley's dialogue, I think I made a mess on your cape that she only barred. There's a lot to read into it, Okay, Sensor wants us to figure out someplace for Catwoman to land other than on her face or breasts. They also pitched the plot line where they wanted to turn Batman into a vampire, but uh Fox put the kai bosh on that. Another of the show's Emmy's came from an episode in which Robin's parents the acrobats are killed in the middle of their act, and they got around this in a really really interesting way. They obviously couldn't show it, so they have this series of shots where they're performing their act silhouetted against the backdrop, just in black silhouette, and they swing out of frame and then the trapeeze trapeeze I trapeezes. They swing back in Batman, they swing back into frame with the rope severed. Just this image of them swinging back into frame emptied, and then they cut to the crowd like the crowd in the in the circus, just like a ghast. It's just so so artful man, just so much they did, They did so much with this show. In other words, it was a delicate bat dance. Batman the animated series premiered on the Fox Broadcasting Companies children's block Fox Kids in September five and aired in that block during weekday afternoons at PM. Christmas Day a very happy one for you, I imagine, because I saw the release of Batman. Mask of the Phantasm scared out of me when I was a kid. I this is the feature length that I say that right, fantastic Okay. It's a feature length film set in the show's universe, and it contains a scene with Batman at his parents grave that moved Andrew Romano, the vocal director, to two full minutes of weeping. When you heard Kevin Conroy recorded, she said she had to leave the room. She was like, uh, like she watched him do the take and then and then was like, I I need some time, and like walked out of the recording studio. But despite the emotional punch that this film delivered, it didn't do very well at the box office and failed to recoup his budget. Did you go see it. He must have been really young. I guess, uh yeah, I was five, so no, but I remember this scaring me. Like the phantasm is like a darker, like a gritty, gritty version of like and it just like it said, it looks like a grim reaper and they have like a site for like a blade for hand, and I remember being like scared of it as a kid. A lot of this show actually did scare me. I remember being like deeply haunted by um clay Face, who is this like act that's the Ron Perlman character as an actor who was like trying to preserve his looks, and so he was he like got this experimental like something done on him, and it turns him into this giant mud monster who can change shape but only for limited amounts of time. And during the his like end scene with Batman, he like keeps changing into his past roles that he's played. It's just it's like a like adult like stuff in this show is And the first episode features a giant bat and monster like again, so good um. The show's original run ended on September after episodes, at which point a lot of the team then went over to Superman. The animated series, which again Superman sucks. So they subsequently retooled the original animated series for the New Batman Adventures, which premiered in September after the aforementioned long national nightmare of Batman and Robin being in the theaters. Um and that film just again just tanked Batman in the popular consciousness until Batman Begins. I was ten years later in two thousand five. Those Nolan Batman's That Man Joel Schumacher, May he Rest in Peace, really did a number, but a New Batman Adventures continue to January when it was replaced by Batman Beyond, which is a show about an aging Bruce Wayne mentoring a new Batman. And even though that show was a hit, it did sort of signal the death knell of of the property. And this is Bruce tim talking to Vulture. He said, we got a call from the head of Kids w B, Jamie Kellner, and he liked what we were doing with the shows, but he wanted to figure out a way to make them even more kid friendly. Yeah, at the time, one of the big shows on wb was Buffy and so everything he was saying was kind of moving in that direction. Literally, at one point in a meeting, he said, what if we made Batman a teenager? And we all freaked out. We tried to keep a straight face because you don't want to say to the head of the WB network that's a really stupid idea, but we were all thinking it. Actually, at that meeting, I threw out the idea of, well, maybe if the original Batman Bruce Wayne got too old to be Batman and he hadn't kind of had to pass the mantel a young kid. And Jamie really liked that idea. And then we walked out and said, God, what the hell are we going to do again? Backed into the backed into the classic corner of pitching something you don't like that your bosses do, Tim continued to Vulture. We met with Jamie again. We pitched him my idea for Batman Beyond. Then he said, great, you've got the green light, now go make that show. And we said, but what about the Batman show that we're doing right now, and he says, well, we'll cancel that one and now you have to do Batman Beyond instead. So but you know, noble end of Batman animated series. But you know, I mean, people really love Batman beyond and it's it's it is good. But um yeah, I mean, they had a great run. Um. And critics always loved this show. I mean, Entertainment Weekly just called it one of the best television series of the year. Um and that was when Wings was on. Uh uh. As the generation who grew up with it have ascended into the ranks of the of the halls of critical power, if you will, that reputation has only grown. I g N listed it as the best adaptation of Batman anywhere outside of the comics, the best comic book cartoon of all time, and the second best animated series of all time after The Simpsons. Wizard Magazine, which is probably the biggest comics magazine, ranked it number two the greatest animated television shows of all time, also after The Simpsons. TV Guide ranked at the seventh greatest cartoon of all time. And you know, it's funny considering that she's one of the biggest figures in the DC Cinematic universe right now. Margot Robbie is Harley Quinn. That character just comes from this show and the Brooklyn and the voice too, that that like sort of New York Jewish Brooklyn accent, that she does is the uh that was a woman on Days of Our Lives And apparently in one of those episodes, she was wearing like a Harley Quinn, like the classical, like Harlequin Joker kind of outfit. And when Tim and Radomski were creating it, they were like, Yeah, let's just bring her in and make her look exactly like that. We'll give Joker a girlfriend. And it became this Harley Quinn. It became one of the most beloved people in the Batman franchise, to the point where she's like a proper heroine now. And it all came from Batman, the animated series, So if nothing else, we got that going for us. And you know, again, Kevin conray Man, what more to say for you know about him? It's just amazing that he was this the voice of that character for so long, for so many people who grew up with it. I don't really think it could be overstated enough that you know, the voice of this very archetypally masculine character was an out gay man, very proud of it, and and just this year has that incredible story about it that again I encourage everyone to go look up and I don't have much else to say other than rest in peace. Kevin Conroy, you were the night, you were Vengeance, you were Batman, well said. Thank you everyone for listening. Thank you Jordan for putting up with this. This has been too much information. I'm Alex Heagle and I'm Jordan run Todd. We'll catch you next time. Too Much Information was a production of I Heart Radio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan run Talk. The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June. The show was researched, written, and hosted by Jordan run Talk and Alex Hegel, with original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Punk Orchestra. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. For more pud Gas and I Heeart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. M