Beyond Batman Beyond

 Since I watched Batman the Animated Series on HBO Max, I figured I might as well watch the sequel series Batman Beyond.  This follow-up series takes place about 30-40 years after BTAS.  It starts out with an aging Bruce Wayne in a new suit that augments his strength and has wings and jet engines and neat stuff like that.  He goes to rescue a woman taken hostage but suffers chest pains and to escape he grabs a fallen gun to threaten a criminal.  In doing so, he realizes he can no longer be Batman and retires.

Twenty years later, 17-year-old Terry McGinnis's father uncovers some dirt on his boss, Derek Powers, whose company merged with Bruce Wayne's a long time ago.  After being chased by a gang of "Jokerz," ie a gang that dresses up like clowns ala the Joker, to Wayne Manor, Terry finds the Batcave.  After his father is murdered, Terry steals the Batsuit Bruce wore for his final outing and goes out to get justice.  Reluctantly, the elderly Bruce agrees to work with Terry as sort of his Alfred--only without the butlering.  

At the end of the first two-part episode, Derek Powers is exposed to some radiation or toxic waste or whatever and becomes basically a radioactive skeleton that he covers with fake skin to hide what happened to him.  Terry stopped Powers's scheme but couldn't actually bust him, so Powers or Blight as he becomes known is the main villain for the first season.

Since this takes place in the future, they don't really use any of the traditional Batman villains except Mr. Freeze, who was revived after almost 50 years in cryostasis.  He's given a new body, but when it breaks down, he starts going on a rampage.  In another episode some athletes are using Venom so Terry tracks down Bane, who has become a scrawny, comatose husk.

The show introduces new villains like Inque, a woman made of an inky black substance allowing her to change shape; Shriek, who manipulates sound; Spellbinder, who manipulates images; Curare, a deadly assassin; and a new generation of the Royal Flush Gang, including "Ten" a girl named Melanie who is like Terry's Catwoman.  Then there are one-off episodes like where a guy who was buried with toxic waste becomes sort of a Clayface/Swamp Thing hybrid and tries to get revenge on the guy who killed him.

Besides Bruce Wayne, Barbara Gordon appears on the show as the police commissioner who resents the new Batman.  There seemed to be an implication in one episode that after she broke up with Nightwing, she and Batman might have partnered up for more than just fighting crime.  Ick.  But in the present of the show she's married to the DA, a black guy.  Terry's girlfriend is Asian so this show was kind of ahead of the curve in having interracial relationships.  Though probably since it was on in the kids block they didn't really have any gay characters.

For the most part the animation and storytelling are like BTAS, where while it aired in a time slot for kids, it was aimed more at adults.  The thing that occurred to me pretty early on is that since Terry is seventeen and still in high school and lives with his mom and tends to crack wise, what they did with this show was to combine Batman and Spider-Man.  I mean, Terry is pretty much like Peter Parker, only less of a science geek.  So if instead of being bitten by a spider, Peter had found the Batcave and put on a Batsuit that augmented his strength and allowed him to fly around, that's basically what this is.  I'm not saying that's a bad thing.  People love Batman but he can be kind of aloof and for younger viewers he's kind of old, so this makes Batman more fun and relatable to younger viewers.

While the first season had Blight as the central villain, the second season--the longest of the 3 at 26 episodes--used a lot more episodic structure.  There was no central villain throughout the season.  It was pretty much a different one every week.  I kept waiting for Blight to come back, but he didn't, which seems odd considering most of the other villains from that season did at some point in the future.

The second season ends with the secret origin of Bruce Wayne's dog Ace.  (There was a real "Bat-Hound" named Ace in the Batman comics, probably starting in the 50s when they did all sorts of things to stay relevant.)  Ace was adopted by an evil breeder to be trained to fight and experimented on, which was prescient of the Michael Vick dog fighting ring.  Only in the episode Ace escaped his captors and wound up in Crime Alley when Bruce went there to visit where his parents died and together they took down a petty criminal and became besties.  The sad thing is the dog is the only one Bruce allows himself to love at that point.

The third season was only 13 episodes like the first season.  There was a kind of creepy episode where Talia al Guhl visits Bruce on his birthday and offers to take him to the Lazarus Pit to become young again.  Bruce agrees and gets younger but then hears the voice of Ra's al Guhl and finds out that he is in Talia's body!  Ra's as his own daughter tries to put his mind into Bruce's body until Terry stops him.  After that is a two-part episode introducing the Justice League of that time, led by the original Superman who is older but not old.  Someone has been injuring members of the League so Superman recruits Batman, but then it turns out that Superman has been the one behind it all as he's controlled by a Starro, which is like an alien starfish.  Starro has shown up in the comics including I think the most recent run of Justice League and Justice League 3000.  It was also in the second Robot Chicken DC Comics special.

There was another two-part episode that was kind of neat for GI Joe fans.  In a previous episode there was a ruthless terrorist organization called Kobra introduced.  In this two-part episode Kobra has a plan to rule the world by creating dino-people and raising the world's temperature.  Terry inadvertently meets their leader, who was artificially created and taught by a mad scientist.  It was very similar to the origin of Serpentor in the GI Joe TV show and comic book, especially when he wears a costume with a cape and snake headpiece.  I checked and while BTAS and BB co-creator Paul Dini wrote an episode or two for GI Joe, he didn't write those episodes.  Still, maybe that was in the back of his mind.

Like BTAS, the last episode is mostly a flashback as Terry tells his friend Max a story about a kid he showed his face to.  That kid became a target of the aforementioned Kobra, who tried to access the kid's memories to see what Batman looks like.  But of course they fail.  The moral of the story is why it's so important not to let anyone know his secret--anyone who hasn't already figured it out.

I think probably between seasons 2 and 3 was a straight-to-video movie The Return of the Joker.  I think I had read about the plot before but never actually seen the movie.  It's kind of a dark movie as it's revealed about halfway in that a long time ago the final Robin (Tim Drake with Jason Todd's backstory as noted in the BTAS article) was captured by the Joker and Harley Quinn and Jokerized into a mini-Joker.  He revealed all of Batman's secrets to the Joker, who then lures Batman and Batgirl into a final showdown at the now-closed Arkham Asylum.  When the Joker gives Tim Drake a gun to shoot Batman, Tim shoots the Joker instead.  Afterwards Bruce forbade Tim from being Robin ever again.  

Only later in the movie do we find out that somehow the Joker implanted his consciousness in Tim's brain so that years later he could return without Tim knowing it.  And since the Joker through Tim knows Batman's secrets, he's able to ambush Bruce in the Batcave and nearly kill him with Joker toxin.  And so Terry is pretty much on his own to fight the resurgent Joker.  The one strange thing in the movie is that Tim's friend Maxine (who by then I think knew Terry's secret identity) never makes an appearance.  Her computer skills could really have come in handy after Bruce was incapacitated in the Batcave so it seems weird she wasn't there--or even mentioned.  Otherwise while not as good as Mask of the Phantasm, it was a better movie than Subzero in terms of straight-to-video animated BTAS universe movies. 

After watching the whole series there was one thing that occurred to me:  they never really got back to Bruce's quitting as Batman.  Early on there were a couple of times Terry asked him about it and Bruce blew him off.  You would have thought at some point they would have gotten back to that, where Bruce tells him the story of how he picked up a gun and was so ashamed that he quit.  Like maybe an episode where Terry would pick up a gun and Bruce would  have told him that story.  Maybe they were saving that for a season 4 or something.  It feels like a loose end.  I'm just saying.

Of course for a show that's supposed to be in the future, they didn't really nail the future thing very well.  We still don't have flying cars, but in other ways our technology is better than what they use.  I mean our cell phones have screens and we don't need huge computer terminals in schools.  They still mostly use discs for music, video, and computer files.  The "credits" they use aren't that different from debit cards, albeit I think they have some that are far more disposable.  The ridiculously biased newscasts that seem to make light of everything aren't really that different from Fox "News" or other right wing sycophant networks.

While I compared the main character to Peter Parker, the grungy industrial rock soundtrack is a lot more reminiscent of The Crow.  It would have been a lot more at home in 1994 than 1998.  They probably should have gone with something poppier.

Fun Facts:  Like BTAS they got a lot of actors you might have heard of from other things to do voices on the show like Stacy Keach, Stockard Channing, Linda Hamilton, Robert Patrick, William H Macy, Stephen Baldwin, Terri Garr, George Takei, Patton Oswalt, Tim Curry, John Ritter, and Henry Rollins as "Mad Stan," a ranting anti-government guy who would have fit in perfectly at the Capitol on January 6.  Terry is voiced by Will Friedle of Boy Meets World and the underrated 1997 comedy Trojan War, where his quest for a condom leads to all sorts of mayhem.  Checking out his IMDB page, pretty much since this show most of what he does is voice work for DC, Marvel, Transformers, Thundercats, and other stuff.  Nice work if you can get it--probably.  It's funny to me that Seth Green voices the jock/bully Nelson since in real life he's the complete opposite of that physically.  Michael Rosenbaum did a couple of voices in the series and then a year or so after it ended went on to be the live action Lex Luthor in Smallville--and then went back to doing animated voices I think.

Another Fun Fact is in the second season episode "Rats!" there's a rat-looking guy who lives in the sewer with huge mutated rats sort of like the Sewer Rat in the Scarlet Knight series.  Except in the episode he basically goes Phantom of the Opera on Terry's girlfriend while if you read the Scarlet Knight books you would know the Sewer Rat turns out to be a good guy and even the father of Emma's daughter.  So we kind of both took the same starting point and went in different directions--mine is better.

The show ended in 2001 after three seasons and one straight-to-video movie but it has been kept alive in comics.  The Future's End story in about 2014 had Terry go back to "five years from now" to try to stop the destruction of the world only to be killed and replaced as Batman Beyond by former Robin/Red Robin Tim Drake until they rebooted it in the Rebirth reboot.  When it was announced Michael Keaton would be reprising his Batman role, a lot of fans began agitating for a live action Batman Beyond with him as the elderly Bruce Wayne.  I'm not sure if that will happen or not.  If it does, they'll probably fuck it up and let Zack Snyder make it.