With The Batman opening on March 4, this looks like a good time to review DC’s Dark Knight’s history in animation. Just like in the comics, Batman has been interpreted in a wide variety of ways. Sure there is the film noir take of Batman: The Animated Series, which is probably the most popular approach, but at other times, he’s been a smiling Super Friend to all.
Holy Bat-Adventures!
Batman’s first animated incarnation was a mixture of both. After the Adam West live-action Batman series ended, Filmation snapped up the TV rights to the character to create a Saturday morning cartoon to pair with its existing and successful Superman series. Filmation’s program aired as part of The Batman/Superman Hour. During its original run, the Batman segments were labeled as Batman with Robin the Boy Wonder. Behind the scenes, Filmation regarded this show as The Adventures of Batman.
Olan Soule voiced Batman/Bruce Wayne on this series with Casey Kasem as Robin/Dick Grayson. This Dynamic Duo would continue voicing these characters for decades on various projects.
The Adventures of Batman ditched the adult-skewing camp of the Adam West program and was more of a direct adaptation of the Batman comic books of the time. However, comic books of this time were not as dark and gritty as they would become in the ’80s and that was reflected in the cartoon.
The Batman/Superman Hour debuted on CBS on September 14, 1968. Initially, each episode featured two 6½ minute Batman segments, mixed with similarly short adventures starring Superman and Superboy.
Batgirl was included as an occasional guest star. Jane Webb provided her voice along with that of Catwoman. Ted Knight narrated and voiced other characters.
The series included Batman’s most popular rogues including The Joker, Penguin, Catwoman, Riddler, Mr. Freeze, Scarecrow, and Mad Hatter, plus two Filmation-creations, Dollman and Simon the Pieman. The villains also frequently teamed up against the Caped Crusaders.
For most of her career up to this point, Catwoman was drawn in the comics as wearing a purple dress and green cape, but on the Adam West series, Julie Newmar, and later Eartha Kitt, wore a textured black catsuit. In the comics, Catwoman was given a similar outfit, but, I suppose, to make her pop on paper better, her outfit was colored green instead of black.
In Filmation’s Batman cartoon, Catwoman wore a variation of the green costume, but to make it easier to animate, the texture was removed, so she simply wore a plain green bodysuit with white accessories.
Filmation created 17 episodes– 34 shorts– of this Batman cartoon. Toward the end, rather than free-standing 6½ minute episodes, they began making longer stories split into two parts with a cliffhanger at the end of the first, mimicking the format of the live-action Batman show.
The last new episode of this iteration of Batman aired in 1969, around the time that pressure from parents watchdog group Action For Children’s Television (A.C.T.) forced the networks to remove “violent” cartoons from their lineups in favor of more comedic fare.
Holy Scoobie Snacks, Batman!
But thanks to the popularity of this cartoon and reruns of the live-action series, Batman and Robin remained household names and popular characters with children. In 1972, Hanna-Barbera relaunched CBS’ popular series Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? in a new format, The New Scooby-Doo Movies, an hour-long program that had the canine crime solver and his teenage companions teaming up with guest stars in each episode.
Batman and Robin guest-starred in the second episode, “The Dynamic Scooby-Doo Affair.” Soule and Kasem returned to voice their characters. Kasem was also the regular voice of Shaggy on Scooby-Doo at this time. This episode included the Bat-foes The Joker and Penguin. This foursome returned for the second-to-last episode of the first season, “The Caped Crusader Caper.”
These two episodes were among the most popular of this run of Scooby-Doo. Scooby-Doo, in all its formats, has been one of the most-watched syndicated cartoons in history, so these episodes lived on for future generations to enjoy. This led to the Scooby-Doo gang teaming up with the Caped Crusader in future projects.
The Mystery Inc. gang appeared in the opening stinger of an episode of Batman: The Brave and the Bold in 2011, along with real-life musician/comedian “Weird Al” Yankovic. Then in 2018, Warner Bros. (which owns the Hanna-Barbera library) released the straight-to-video movie Scooby-Doo! & Batman: The Brave and the Bold, which once again paired the Mystery Inc. gang with the Dark Knight as well as other heroes from DC Comics.
Going back to the ’70s, the two episodes of The New Scooby-Doo Movies featuring Batman and Robin were so popular that Hanna-Barbera decided to make an animated program that focused on superheroes. Their first idea was Scooby-Doo Meets the Superheroes in which Scooby and the gang would team up with a different superhero from either the DC or Marvel comics in each episode. (Hanna-Barbera had previously animated the Fantastic Four in a Saturday morning cartoon.)
Details on this pitch are murky at best, but it would be safe to assume that neither DC nor Marvel wanted their characters hobnobbing in the same shared animated universe. So that idea was tossed out and HB concocted Super Friends, a loose adaptation of DC’s Justice League of America.
Holy Hall of Justice, Batman!
On Super Friends, Batman and Robin were teamed with Superman (Danny Dark), Wonder Woman (Shannon Farnon), and Aquaman (Norman Alden Season 1, Bill Callaway after that). (The voice cast changed over time.)
In the comics, Robin was not a member of the JLA, but because he was a household name, he was included in the roster of Super Friends. Soule and Kasem reprised their roles as the Caped Crusaders on this show which ran for close to a decade, beginning in 1973 on ABC.
The format of Super Friends changed almost yearly with its run time alternating between 30 and 90 minutes. Other DC characters served as reserve members of the team, including The Atom, The Flash, Green Arrow, Green Lantern, Hawkgirl, Hawkman, Rima the Jungle Girl, and later Firestorm and Cyborg. Hanna-Barbera also created original characters of different ethnicities to diversify the roster — Apache Chief, Black Vulcan, El Dorado, and Samurai.
This was one of the cheerier depictions of Batman in any outside medium. He and Robin were known for their Bat-gadgets that seemed to always fix any predicament in which the heroes found themselves. (I still don’t know where Batman pulled that Bat-Bazooka in that one episode.)
Emulating Burt Ward on the live-action show, the Super Friends version of Robin was known for exclaiming “Holy ____” at various times.
Batman’s enemies Riddler and Scarecrow appeared on this show as members of the Legion of Doom. The Joker and Penguin appeared in later seasons as a tie-in to the Kenner Super Powers Collection toy line.
Starting in the 1984 season, Super Friends: The Legendary Super Powers Show, Adam West took over as the voice of Batman. Olan Soule remained a part of the cast assuming the role of Professor Martin Stein, one-half of the new hero Firestorm.
The Scarecrow was the major nemesis in the 1985 episode “The Fear” which was the first time that Batman’s origin was depicted in a medium outside of comics. Batman and Robin also did not appear in their secret identities of Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson on this series until this episode, although Alfred and Commissioner Gordon did pop up in Challenge of the Superfriends.
Speaking of The Scarecrow and Riddler, those two villains were allowed to appear on the 1978 season, Challenge of the Superfriends, thanks to a legal agreement. That same year, Filmation got the rights to make a separate Batman cartoon for CBS while Batman and Robin were still appearing on ABC’s Super Friends. While the two main characters were able to appear on both shows, their villains were not.
Original plans called for The Joker, Penguin, and Poison Ivy to be part of the Legion of Doom. (There is Alex Toth artwork that indicates that Catwoman was also meant to be part of Super Friends, but there is no info to explain that.) But with Filmation’s The New Adventures of Batman, those characters were suddenly off-limits to Hanna-Barbera.
Holy New Adventures, Batman!
Super Friends (or Superfriends) was allowed to use Riddler and Scarecrow. The New Adventures of Batman got the rest of Batman’s rogues including Joker, Penguin, Catwoman, Mr. Freeze, and Clayface. New original villains included the Moonman, Sweet Tooth (similar to Simon the Pieman), Professor Bubbles, Electro (not to be confused with the Spider-Man villain of the same name), The Chameleon (ditto), Dr. Devious, and Zarbor (a magical villain from Bat-Mite’s home dimension).
Despite the legal agreement with Hanna-Barbera, The Riddler appeared in the opening credits of Filmation’s Batman although the colors of his costume were reversed, with him dressed in a purple bodysuit with green gloves. He did not appear in any actual episodes.
Since Olan Soule and Casey Kasem were attached to Super Friends, Filmation tapped Adam West and Burt Ward to voice Batman and Robin on The New Adventures of Batman. Melendy Britt voiced Batgirl and Catwoman.
Filmation’s founder Lou Scheimer voiced Bat-Mite, a character that, in the comics, was the Mr. Mxyzptlk of Batman. On this show, he was the typical annoying sidekick who had magical abilities and was enamored of Batgirl.
Once again, Catwoman was redesigned for this series. She was given an orange costume and brown hair. This costume is unique to this series and never appeared in the comics.
Filmation used a unique rotoscoping style of animation, having artists trace over footage of actual people to give their characters more natural movements. This resulted in the most acrobatic depiction of Batman so far. Unfortunately, Filmation seemed to have a smaller budget than most other production companies, so they recycled this footage over and over ad nauseum.
Along the same lines, there were only 16 episodes of The New Adventures of Batman but CBS reran them for many years. The first year it was released, it aired back-to-back with Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle, which had premiered the year before. Together this block was called The Batman/Tarzan Adventure Hour. In 1978, both shows were joined by new shorts under the banner Tarzan and the Super 7. In 1980, this series was picked up by NBC after CBS dropped it and it aired as Batman and the Super 7, minus the Tarzan episodes, as that show was still airing on CBS as part of the Tarzan/Lone Ranger Adventure Hour. Batman and the Super 7 consisted entirely of repeats as no new episodes were produced for this run.
Same Bat-Time, Same Bat-Channel
Back on ABC, Super Friends continued to air new episodes until the fall of 1985 with repeats running until 1986. The cartoon got a boost from the release of Kenner’s Super Powers Collection toy line with Kenner pumping more money into the series to increase the quality. For the final season, the show was renamed The Super Powers Teams: Galactic Guardians, and the art style was completely overhauled. The established designs by Alex Toth were replaced with art patterned after that of José Luis Garcia-Lopez, who illustrated DC’s licensing Style Guide. This art was used on the packaging of the Super Powers toys.
As mentioned before, this season marked the first appearances of Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson on Super Friends and also featured the first SF appearances of The Joker and Penguin.
And that was it for Batman in animation for a few years. But the best was yet to come!
All episodes of The Adventures of Batman, Super Friends, and The New Adventures of Batman are available on DVD. For fans of the Filmation cartoons, Figures Toy Company is releasing Mego-style dolls/action figures of characters as they were depicted on the shows. So far, they have produced Batman, The Joker, and even The Riddler in his purple suit from the opening of The New Adventures.
Check back next week for the launch of the DC Animated Universe!
