How BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES Came Together; Watch the Original Pitch Film
Batman: The Animated Series is considered to be one of the greatest animated shows ever produced. It was just such an incredible show with an amazing art style and engaging stories. So how did this show actually come together? Well, according to co-creator Bruce Timm, the whole thing was “a fluke.”
In a recent interview with Vulture, Timm explained that he has just finished working on the first season of Tiny Toon Adventures as a character designer, and he had no ambitions of being a producer or director. But one day, the President of Warner Bros. Animation, Jean MacCurdy, has big meeting and laid out some properties for possible shows to develop, one of them was Batman, which caught Timm’s attention.
Tim said: “The first Tim Burton movie had come out and it was a big hit. And the minute I heard that, it was like, Pow! That’s what I want to do. So I went back to my desk after the meeting, put all my Tiny Toon stuff to the side, and just started drawing Batman. Within a couple hours, I had this vision of Batman down on paper. It was a new take. Ever since I was a little kid, Batman was always one of my favorite things to draw, but I’d never quite managed to come up with a version of Batman that was completely pleasing to me. Every Batman I had drawn prior to that was always based on somebody else’s Batman. This was the first time I’d ever had a concrete, Bruce Timm–style Batman in my head. It was almost like he was just waiting there to be drawn. So the next time Jean had one of those meetings, I brought my drawings to her and I said, ‘I was thinking this might be a cool way to go with it.’ And she said, ‘That’s … that’s perfect!’
From there co-creator Eric Radomski, who was a background painter on Tiny Toons, threw his hat into the ring and got included. He did some background styling for the potential series. Jean Liked what she saw and brought Timm and Radomski together to discuss the development of the show.
Timm explained: “She put Eric and I in charge of making a short Batman film, like a little pilot film, just a few minutes long. Mostly silent, no dialogue or anything, to kind of show Fox what we were planning on doing if the show got sold.”
Timm and Radomski made a great team and when discussing what the short film should entail, they discussed all the things they liked about Tim Burton’s 1989 film but felt they needed to do something unique for the animation and they had to be able to pull it off! Timm said: “We didn’t know how this was gonna work under the camera in terms of, Is the black in the character going to be too dark? What is this gonna look like? We were more figuring out the guts of the actual technical production of it as opposed to what would it be as a series.”
They eventually landed on the concept, animated it, and scored it with the Danny Elfman score from the first Batman movie and, of course, added some sound effects.
Radomski said: “We never imagined they would hand over the show to us and let us make it. We thought, at a minimum, we might be art directors on it, to have some influence on what it might look like. But I don’t think either of us conceived that they would just hand the keys to the castle to us. But that first minute-and-a-half piece ended up being the confidence that Jean needed to hand the keys off to us and say, ‘You guys know how to make this, so go off and make 65 of them.’ We were both stunned. We were like, ‘How the f**k are we gonna do this?’”
Neither of them produced a series before, so they were n over their heads, and it was kind of a big gamble for WB. But they managed to put a team together and pull it off brilliantly! Timm said: “What we wanted to do was quite a bit more adult than, say, shows like G.I. Joe or Transformers or He-Man. Those shows were deliberately designed for young kids, and nobody else. If you were 13, that was pretty much the cutoff point for a show like He-Man or G.I. Joe. But we wanted to do a show that would appeal to kids and also to adults, as well. Basically, we were making the show for ourselves.”
Writer and producer Alan Burnett was actually trying to get out of animation when Batman: The Animated Series was brought to him. He was tired of making kids’ shows, but he was excited with what he saw in the short film and was happy to be a part of it. He said: “What sold me was the trailer that Bruce Timm and Eric Radomski had done for the show. I’d said to her, ‘Listen, if you’re gonna do Batman, you’re gonna have to have guns and fistfights.’ And that’s when she showed me the trailer. I really didn’t believe that I would be allowed to have guns and fistfights. But she insisted that I would have the freedom, and so I came on over.”
Writer Paul Dini was then brought in, and when he saw what they were doing he started “writing more toward that sensibility, looking at a lot of Hitchcock and film noir, and ways to play it like little mini-movies.”
There were three rules that the creative team had to follow when developing the series, those rules were: “No aliens. No ghosts. And no Humanitas Awards — you know, no pro-social stories.” Burnett said: “We were just out to have a good time and to give the audience some fun thrills; some real Batman thrills.”
That’s exactly what they accomplished! It’s pretty incredible what they pulled off! They just don’t make animated shows like this anymore. This was the golden age of animation!
You can watch the original Batman animated short film that Timm and Radomski created below.