Batman the Animated Series

 

Turn on the signal light!

Got the blu-rays for Batman the Animated Series last autumn and decided to check them all out after the Bond-marathon. Watched it originally on the Swedish channel 4 back in the 90's as it was first released. I was in a bit of a Batman phaze, watched the cartoon and my parents got a friend of there's to record Batman and Batman Returns from channel 3 (which we didn't have) on VHS. Yeah, I'm that old. Still loved watching it again. First season phenomenal, I can watch episodes like On Leather Wings and Hearts of Ice over and over again. The animation, the music and the voice acting is superb. A bit sad there isn't the Swedish voice track, but what are you gonna do? The behind the scenes commentary was also interesting with the animators pointed out that they didn't like the animation due to some of modelling and I can't see that, well, maybe how the batmobile curved itself traveling along some cliff

Compared to season 2 where I think they felt the modelling got better, but at the same time, there's fewer episodes I like to watch again. The Ra's Al-Ghoul episodes are probably the only one I can recall at the moment. Then again, I'm the weird one that really liked episodes like The Forgotten and It's Never To Late. Maybe not as a kid, but now I do since I get the symbolism. Then we have season 3 and the redesign... not a fan of it. I've seen people mentioning ScareCrow as a good redesign, but he's hardly in it and the original design scarred me a kid. The animators mentioned they really liked it, and I get since it was easier to animate and didn't get off-model whatever, but there's hardly any other episode I want to rewatch. 

There was also two movies in the collection. The Mask of the Phantasm and Sub-Zero. Never watched these as a kid. Phantasm, it looks great, and is a bit scary at times. It's a bit of a prequel to the whole series, but as someone pointed out, was it necessary to end with the Joker? Also, no commentaries or anything? A pity. Sub-Zero another Mr Freeze-story. Nothing much to say, it pretty much wraps up his story until the Batman Beyond episode. It's funny they got all Mr Freeze episodes on the blu-ray, even though 3 of them already is in this collection. Hearts of Ice is always watchable though. I'm missing one movie though, Mystery of the Batwoman. Don't know why that wasn't included. 

Update 2024-08-17: So a couple of months ago Netflix added the first season and they also had the original Swedish dub. So I watched that... well, the english original voices clearly is better. There is like 5 guys and two girls doing all the voices in Swedish and when Jim Gordon, Joker and the Pinguin have the same voice it gets kinda weird. A pity the trail episode was here with them all gathered. I gotta give them credit for the Ninja episodes where they speak Japanese and it's still the Swedish voice actors making it very coherent. No, I will probably watch the english dub forever onward, and there is something special with episodes like the Grey Ghost with Adam West just because it is Adam West and its so much better (or maybe Adam West is just a better voice actor than the Swedish dub).