Batman has been reinvented onscreen more than any other superhero.
In live-action adaptations, the campy Adam West era gave way to the highly stylised Tim Burton films that put the “goth” in Gotham, an aesthetic that evelly became so over-the-top under director Joel Schumacher that producers had no choice but to reinvent the franchise for a gritty, post-Bourne world under Christopher Nolan.
Just as Batman: The Animated Series was designed to complement the Burton-era iteration of the Dark Knight’s cinematic escapades, Batman: Caped Crusader is a more child-friendly, film-noir inspired take on Bruce Wayne not entirely dissimilar to his characterisation in director Matt Reeves’ 2022 film. This is no coincidence – Reeves is an Executive Producer here – as like The Batman, the series aims to show the character is equal parts amateur private detective and against-the-law superhero, even if his inner tortured emo has been toned down.
Many reviews have called Caped Crusader a “reinvention” of Batman, but it’s more of a refining, as it reverts to the tone every Millennial remembers from the Animated Series growing up. Yes, the distinct 1940s setting – instead of the deliberately, ambiguously out-of-time Gotham of the 90s series – is a bold change, as is the way it reinvents the core identities of several characters.
But tonally, it manages to keep the edge of recent Batman films (it’s more violent than the Animated Series) whilst also making the Dark Knight family-friendly for the first time since The Lego Batman Movie.
With The Batman getting a 15-rating in the UK, and Nolan’s Dark Knight and Snyder’s DCEU films criticised for being too violent to justify their 12A certificates, this is surely a relief for parents everywhere; this time, they don’t have to tell their kids that the escapades of a man who fights bad guys dressed as a bat isn’t suitable for them to watch.
A Perfect Reintroduction
This toning down of the grittiness that’s become inherent to any big-screen Batman story is crucial to the way Caped Crusader explores the underlying trauma of Bruce Wayne. The series spares us from seeing the now-cliche flashback of Thomas and Martha Wayne gunned down when he was a wee lad, only depicting young Bruce’s frail responses in the moments shortly after, so we can instead focus on the ways he's become royally screwed up by suppressing his demons decades later.
We all know that dressing up in elaborate fancy dress to fight crime every night isn’t the sign of a mentally well person. But even as nobody but Alfred knows his alter-ego, it feels like everybody in Gotham is aware that Bruce Wayne is suppressing the full weight of his emotional baggage – more so than ever before, when he tries to lean into the manufactured image of a careless playboy, he repeatedly gets told nobody is fooled by that persona.
At a gallery opening in an early episode, where Martha Wayne’s infamous pearl necklace is on display, he’s arrested after punching a fellow attendee overheard mocking it. He’s forced into therapy – which is, unsurprisingly, our introduction to this universe’s Harley Quinn – and everybody in his orbit seems happy that it’s finally come to this.
As the meme goes, men would rather dress up as a bat and fight crime than go to therapy, but Caped Crusader never once suggests that this is therapeutic for Bruce, let alone atoning for his clear survivor’s guilt. His trauma is forever bubbling under the surface, but his well-honed personas here – be they billionaire playboy philanthropist or stern crime fighter – have taken over to the point they’ve become second nature, even as anybody who meets him can see right through these facades.
Back to the 1940s
Creator Bruce Timm, returning to Gotham after his work on the original Animated Series, is uninterested in depicting a historically accurate 1940s; the setting is largely evocative of the noir films it’s influenced by, and it transforms several characters to reflect modern audiences in ways that will make the most boring people on the internet label it “woke”. As always, those people are not worth listening to – Batman fights a ghost in a later episode, the creative team are hardly going for realism here.
However, this iteration of Bruce Wayne is a perfect fit for an era where men were expected to be tough, even if the 1940s did allow men some leeway to be vulnerable; this was a time when millions of Americans would have been exposed to the horrors on the frontlines of the war. It was a cultural context which was happier to condone men discussing their trauma, a brief period before expectations returned to men remaining strong and silent.
Bruce Wayne is an eternally fascinating character because of his inability to confront the scars of his childhood in any timeline, subconsciously using his loss as a motivation to fight baddies who are irrelevant to his own personal origin story. More so than any other Batman story, here he’s offered several chances to open up and save himself, but he’s already too far gone and distant from anybody around him to regard the helping hands he’s being offered (and no, we are not talking about Harley Quinn’s therapy sessions – although she is right that he needs more).
Batman for a New Generation
So, why is this important, when every previous adaptation has used a similar characterisation as a blueprint? Well, with so many recent Batman adaptations being unsuitable for kids, it’s highly likely that, for many young audiences, their only direct exposure to the Dark Knight will have been in The LEGO Movie and DC League of Super-Pets.
Both of those movies parody Bruce Wayne’s status as a tortured, emo hero, who is unable to do anything productive to confront his trauma and achieve closure. Even without seeing any of the movies those films are parodying, kids can look at a poster for a movie like The Batman and understand that he is the eternally dark, moody hero, whose adventures are more “adult” than those of his superpals.
After years of only seeing send-ups of Bruce Wayne, Caped Crusader should be notable as the first time in years that there’s been an introduction to the character palpable to young audiences – and one that doesn’t recount his overdone origin story, offering a unique entry point into his all-too-familiar damaged psyche for returning fans too.
The political intrigue and class commentary found throughout will offer food-for-thought to keep older fans coming back, but the series understands this is very likely to be an entry point to this character (and wider franchise) as something other than a punchline, mocked for how “tortured” he is. After gritty films which have all-but-forgotten that kids like superhero stories too, this is the franchise reset we’ve needed for quite some time, all without compromising on the depth that makes the best Batman adaptations work.
Batman: Caped Crusader is now streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
