New Prime Video TV show Batman: Caped Crusader follows in the footsteps of the beloved Batman: The Animated Series in many ways. Creative animation? Check! Iconic villains? Check! Brilliant voice actors? Check! Exciting stories? Check! An impressive theme? Check!
With the two sharing the same DNA, you may be wondering why the new chapter isn't simply a continuation of the legendary '90s show? For showrunner Bruce Timm, who was also a co-creator of Batman: The Animated Series, this was one of the earliest and most important decisions that was made when developing Caped Crusader as it allowed them to focus on doing something different rather than repeating what has come before.
As Timm tells SFX magazine in the new issue, which hits newsstands on August 7 and features Alien: Romulus on the cover: "We decided early on that we didn’t want it to be a continuation of Batman: The Animated Series. We wanted to use a lot of the same building materials but do something different with them, so that we weren't just doing remakes of the old shows or sequels to the old stories."
Continuing, Timm adds that he did want to nod to the original show with a period setting, although he didn't quite get his way: "The decidedly period nature of it is something that I really wanted to do, going back to the beginning of B:TAS. If I’d had my way, I would have set that show directly in the ’40s, but during the development process it became apparent that would probably have been a sticking point in terms of all the different people we’d have to get approvals from, like Fox Kids and the toy companies."
Although Caped Crusader couldn't be directly set in the '40s due to the reasons above, the team wanted to ensure it felt like it was made during that decade, as executive producer James Tucker emphasizes: "We wanted this to feel as though it was made in the '40s, whereas B:TAS didn’t feel like that. It had a '40s milieu, if you will, but it’s still very much a '90s show."
Agreeing, Timm concludes: "James [Tucker] and I definitely wanted to lean much more into the period of it both in terms of the technology and also the cars and the fashions and the hairstyles. I’ve always been a fan of that era in terms of the movies – the monster movies and the serials, the fi m noir and stuff like that."
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Fede Alvarez is going to make sure everyone in space hears you scream when #AlienRomulus bursts into cinemas on 16 August!Check out our exclusive interview with him and much, much more in the new issue of SFX, on sale 7 August. pic.twitter.com/qXBXBk1Ad4August 1, 2024
All episodes of Batman: Caped Crusader are out now on Prime Video. Read more in the latest issue of SFX magazine, which features Alien: Romulus on the cover and is available from Wednesday, August 7.
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