After I watched Batman: The Animated Series on HBO Max, I decided to watch another animated Batman series, Beware the Batman. I had actually watched the last seven episodes back in 2014 when Cartoon Network unceremoniously dumped them out in the Toonami block from like 11pm-6am. It was a strange, disappointing end for a series that really wasn't that bad.
Unlike most other animated Batman series this was computer animated in the same style as the Green Lantern series of that time. Like The Clone Wars series also on Cartoon Network (and later Netflix and even later Disney+) while it was animated on a kid's network it was not necessarily aimed at kids.
The premise of the series was similar to Batman Begins in that it takes place when Batman is just starting out, though it's a little after his origin. So instead of Year One, it's more like Year Two where he's got the costume and Batmobile and a lot of the kinks worked out. And also like Batman Begins, James Gordon is initially a lieutenant, not the commissioner. Unlike the movies he has a teenage daughter, Barbara, and apparently no one else.
The major difference from other Batman shows to that point is that besides being a butler, Alfred is an ex-super spy and Bruce's main teacher. Something similar to this happens in Geoff Johns's Batman Earth One comic, which I didn't particularly enjoy.
Since this is only Year Two, we don't see a lot of the main Batman villains. There's no Joker, Riddler, Two-Face, Poison Ivy, Scarecrow, Catwoman or Bane. (Penguin is shown in a police sketch and Harvey Dent wonders if he's a man dressed like a penguin or a penguin dressed like a man.) There are more recent villains like Anarky, Professor Pyg, and Phosphorous Rex (the latter two created during Grant Morrison's run in the 2000s) and a couple of more well-known ones like Ra's al Guhl, Killer Croc, and Deathstroke. A couple of episodes also feature Metamorpho, who I thought was a Superman villain more than a Batman villain. Instead of some kid dressed in red-and-gold like in the 90s, the Anarky they use is an adult who goes around in all white like Marvel's Moon Knight, which I guess was a little better.
The first villains are Professor Pyg and Mr. Toad, who terrorize rich Gothamites who have in some way harmed animals. Their final target is Bruce Wayne, which is a little awkward for Batman. After being injured while helping Bruce, Alfred decides Bruce needs some help and recruits Tatsu, aka Katana, his goddaughter and the daughter of his ex-partner in MI6. Katana doesn't actually know Bruce is Batman for a few episodes, during which he tests her abilities in a variety of ways.
(I'm not sure if it's intentional or not, but Alfred in his bowler hat and Katana in her black catsuit make me think of The Avengers--the British TV show, not the Marvel franchise. That Katana, an Asian woman, is driving Bruce around and working as his bodyguard is also like Kato in The Green Hornet. Again, I'm not sure if that was intentional.)
During the first fifteen episodes, the main story focuses on the "Ion Cortex," an energy source that looks like the Autobot Matrix of Leadership/Creation from Transformers cartoons/comics. The League of Assassins led at first by Lady Shiva and then Ra's al Guhl wants the Cortex for their nefarious plans.
The second story arc covering the remaining 11 episodes takes place a couple of months later. Gordon has been promoted to commissioner and there's a new DA named Harvey Dent who has a real boner for capturing Batman and isn't afraid to work with Anarky and Deathstroke if it will help him catch Batman and get elected mayor. During a raid, there's an explosion and Harvey's face gets wrapped in bandages and ruins his political career. Meanwhile Batman saves the father of an old girlfriend and she and Bruce start to get reacquainted, which was good since there wasn't much going on the romantic front until then. The end of the series focuses on Batman vs Deathstroke. After Batman seemingly kills him, Deathstroke returns and manages to penetrate the Batcave. So in the grand finale, Batman, Alfred, Katana, Man-Bat, Metamorpho, and Barbara Gordon battle Deathstroke in the Batcave. He's planted a bunch of explosives in the place and they have to find them all to stop him.
A season two probably would have seen more of Batman working with "The Outsiders" or all his allies mentioned above. It's likely Dent would have fully become Two-Face and they probably would have started working in more traditional villains like the Penguin or Joker to go with Anarky. Obviously that will never happen now.
For the most part I enjoyed the series. The tone was grimmer than the previous Batman Brave and Bold series, but it was not all that different from The Animated Series in the 90s. Stylistically it was a lot more in line with the Nolan movies than the Burton ones with Gotham looking more like a real city and the cars and fashions and stuff more like contemporary ones instead of vaguely 30s-ish.
The guns always looked weird, usually sort of squarish and often brightly colored. Checking out the Wikipedia page for the series, I guess it was after the Colorado theater shootings in 2012 (during a Batman movie) the producers didn't want guns on the show to look too real. I doubt it really made a difference, but whatever.
It's hard for me to say why this series failed so badly that most of it wound up getting dumped on Toonami to be shown late, late at night. It might have been that the tone was so different from the previous series. Or maybe that Alfred was different. Or that there wasn't the Joker and other well-known villains. Maybe people just didn't like the look of Batman with the head mostly like the original 1939 costume and the rest more like the Batman Begins suit.
One thing I considered was maybe Katana didn't work as a sidekick. Maybe they should have gone with Robin or Batgirl, someone younger and spunkier. I mean you think of the original Robin. Or Ahsoka Tano on Clone Wars. Or even Grogu on The Mandalorian. They're smaller and cuter, not fully-grown ninjas. Maybe that's what people want. Maybe if they'd gone with Barbara Gordon as Oracle/Batgirl it would have worked out better as she was more the target audience's age. If you're airing on Cartoon Network before the Adult Swim block begins, it might make more sense to have a younger sidekick to relate better, which was really where the idea of the kid sidekicks came from back in the 40s. Or maybe not.
Or since the Green Lantern show that was on a couple of years earlier got cancelled too after the same number of episodes, maybe it was just a financial decision that these CGI shows were too expensive and it was better to go with traditional animation instead. It's hard to say.
What I can say is this show deserved a better fate than what it got. Certainly if you like BTAS or The Clone Wars or the Nolan movies then you'd probably like this.
With BTAS there were a lot of voice actors you might have heard of, particularly a lot who had been involved in Star Trek in some way. Not really the same for this show. Other than Kurtwood Smith as James Gordon there weren't a lot of familiar names. So not much for Fun Facts.
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