"Batman: Caped Crusader (Amazon Prime)" Animated Series News & Discussion Part 2 (Spoilers)

[RoyalRubble]

Have they confirmed that Slam Bradley is going to appear on the show? I figure there's a chance, since Ed Brubaker is writing for the show, but if they've announced that, I've forgotten about it.

No, I don't think Slam Bradley was confirmed since I don't recall his name mentioned for the show before. Just another idea, perhaps a little more plausible than others I brought up previously in the thread.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

No, I don't think Slam Bradley was confirmed since I don't recall his name mentioned for the show before. Just another idea, perhaps a little more plausible than others I brought up previously in the thread.

Okay. The leadup to this show has been so long since it was first announced, it can be tough to separate fact from fan speculation sometimes.

 

[Medinnus]

Okay. The leadup to this show has been so long since it was first announced, it can be tough to separate fact from fan speculation sometimes.

Speaking of baseless speculation... maybe we'll get another incarnation of Sasha Bordeaux!

 

[Karkull]

Got a new article on Aglets Are Sinister where we break down what we already know about Batman: Caped Crusader, and then speculate on what it might mean. Enjoy!

 

[Ethereal]

He didn't say he was trying to follow Kevin Conroy... just that his interpretation was clearly in the back of his mind when the was doing the voice.

It is very evident to me that he IS very much "trying to follow" the Kevin Conroy LEGACY - which is what I had said in the post you were responding to - and this was confirmed in the Instagram story/post that you yourself shared in your reply. Other Batman voice actors, like the one who did 2004's THE BATMAN chose to do their own thing, which I find more admirable artistically speaking than having someone else's interpretation "clearly in the back of his mind" a la Hamish.

I just don't think Hamish is terribly original. Not my kind of artist. I admire ingenuity, and it was Kevin Conroy's INGENUITY that made him so striking.

And you know what... yeah, anyone who voices Batman is stepping into the shadow of Conroy's legacy. And they were stepping into that legacy as far back as B:TAS. He set the bar, he laid the ground work and it was his raw talent that made that interpretation (and all the various iterations that came after) click with audiences.

I respectfully disagree that "anyone who voices Batman" is "automatically" stepping into Conroy's legacy, because there were AT LEAST TWO other actors who voiced Batman/Bruce in Filmation's 1960s and 1970s animated shows. Many fans grew up watching those cartoons over several decades!

To me, that's like saying that any actor who plays Batman in a live-action movie is automatically stepping into the shadow of Christian Bale for instance, even though the Dark Knight was played to great popular acclaim by Michael Keaton and Val Kilmer before (assuming George Clooney is ignored), and has been played by both Ben Affleck and Robert Pattinson since. Each fan may have their own personal presence, but there is room for a wide range of interpretation!

Frankly, I suspect the reason Hamish Linklater is going out of his way to link himself to Conroy and pay tribute to the Conroy legacy is in the hopes of getting B:TAS fans to rally around him and champion him as some sort of "successor to Conroy". I personally think it's better to let your voice acting speak for itself, without going out of your way to keep dropping names and devoting entire social media posts to "the most popular" Batman voice actor as Linklater has been doing. To me, it makes him appear very insecure, even though he seems like a nice guy.

I also don't think we can say that Conroy "set the bar" and "laid the groundwork" at ALL, considering the two men who voiced Batman in the 1968 animated series and the 1977 animated series. Those men were not just cut glass or chopped liver. I understand how monumental B:TAS was in the 1990s, but fans had at least 2 other animated Batman shows to enjoy for nearly 2 and a half decades prior to that - which meant 2 other Batman/Bruce Wayne voices!!

I don't like the way Bruce Timm and co. appear to make it seem like THEIR Batman, launched in 1992, was the Creation of the Cosmos in the Book of Genesis or something! Sorry, Timm, but wrong number. Bruce Timm himself was only piggy-backing off the monumental success of TIM BURTON'S Batman films, starring the brilliant Michael Keaton, which is what inspired and set the tone for B:TAS. There is no way B:TAS would have even existed if it weren't for Tim Burton, and Kevin Conroy almost certainly drew inspiration from KEATON'S PERFORMANCE which was so RADICALLY DIFFERENT from both the live-action and animated versions people had seen before.

If anyone wants to honor the birth of a darker, nittier gritter Batman onscreen, then they need to go back to BURTON AND KEATON - not Timm and Conroy, who were simply doing an animated off-shoot of Burton and Keaton's work in the final analysis.
And by the way, I say this with objectivity. I am not a Tim Burton fan by any means - I think Michael Keaton was the best live-action Batman we had for multiple decades (couldn't stand Christian Bale), but Burton's 2 films had a lot of problems for me and were 50-50 at best in my opinion.

However no actor should ever be beholden to what came before and I hope Linklater doesn't feel the need to compare. He'll grow into this iteration just fine.

I totally agree with your first sentence. Your last sentence remains to be seen. It sounds like they are using DIGITAL ENHANCEMENT to make Linklater's Batman voice sound lower, deeper and fuller - there was a big difference between the voice cast announcement trailer and the actual animated clips that have been released. I am 99.9% sure they are using a pretty generic SOFTWARE to give Linklater's Batman the properties that Linklater himself lacks (but which Conroy was able to generate thanks to his OWN BRILLIANCE).

Nothing inherently 'wrong' with this, because Filmation used to do this all the time on shows like He-Man and She-Ra. But what Linklater did in the voice cast announcement video was his own voice, whereas the voice we hear on the actual show is almost indubitably a DIGITALLY ALTERED version.

 

[Millicay]

I respectfully disagree that "anyone who voices Batman" is "automatically" stepping into Conroy's legacy, because there were AT LEAST TWO other actors who voiced Batman/Bruce in Filmation's 1960s and 1970s animated shows. Many fans grew up watching those cartoons over several decades!

If we're talking modern Batman, I think it's very fair to say that anyone who's voicing the character is stepping into Conroy's shadow, the guy did voice him for the last 30 years after all. And sure, there were two previous actors, Adam West and Olan Soule (and I had to google the second one), but that version of the character is far removed from how Batman is usually portrayed nowadays.

Also, I took Hamish saying that Conroy's interpretation was "in the back of his mind" in the sense that he was aware of it, not that he was copying it. Which, btw, it doesn't sound like he's doing a Conroy impression to me. Oh, so he's doing a deep, husky voice? Yeah, that's pretty much every Batman. If anything, it reminds me more of Jeremy Sisto in New Frontier or Ben Mckenzie in Year One.

If anyone wants to honor the birth of a darker, nittier gritter Batman onscreen, then they need to go back to BURTON AND KEATON - not Timm and Conroy, who were simply doing an animated off-shoot of Burton and Keaton's work in the final analysis.

Don't disagree at all that BTAS owes its existence to Batman 89', but to say it's just "an animated off-shoot" of Burton's movies is just wrong. Yes, Michael Keaton's Batman and Bruce sound different, yet he doesn't sound like Conroy. And Hamill doesn't sound like Nicholson. And for the series itself, it's much more inspired by Bronze Age Batman comics than anything that Burton did in the movies.

It sounds like they are using DIGITAL ENHANCEMENT to make Linklater's Batman voice sound lower, deeper and fuller - there was a big difference between the voice cast announcement trailer and the actual animated clips that have been released. I am 99.9% sure they are using a pretty generic SOFTWARE to give Linklater's Batman the properties that Linklater himself lacks (but which Conroy was able to generate thanks to his OWN BRILLIANCE).

I agree that his voice in the trailer sounds better than in the cast announcement, but this... sounds like a stretch. I really can't imagine them choosing Linklater if they'd have to retouch his voice for every episode.