My (Morning) Bat-Blog

He may be out of town and he may have taken a momentary break from his "Dark Knight" blogging to talk about "Hellboy 2," but before he left Gooch asked me if I could write something on Batman in his absence and I'll be damned if his 12-day streak of Bat-talk is going to end on my watch.

But rather than discuss the cars, the toys, the villains or the heroes, I want to address a specific form of Batman, one that played a formative part in many young adults' lives –– I'm going to talk about "Batman: The Animated Series."

"Batman: The Animated Series" premiered in September 1992 on Fox and ran for six years, counting the show's move the the WB. During that time it spawned two direct-to-video movies, "Mask of The Phantasm" and "Sub-Zero" and a seemingly endless toy line with enough choking hazards to kill a small army of preschoolers.

Unlike other movie-to-TV spin-offs, the animated series stood out for one very big reason –– it was actually good. Rather than be some place for marketers to shoehorn in bad references to future movies or other projects, Warner Bros. intended for the series to stand on its own.

The company hired Glen Murakami as the show's art director and the resultant city and villains he dreamt up were exercises in minimalism, distilled to their key features (Batman's jawline, The Joker's menacing grin, Two Face's distorted face) and the city looked like it walked out of an art deco pamphlet from an unknown year –– every scene teems with hard lines and sharp angles. And Bruce Timm, who cut his teeth on 80s cartoons and Steven Spielberg's "Tiny Toon Adventures" presided over the whole show, controlling nearly every aspect.

Everything you need to know about the show can be seen in its opening:

It was also one of the best written and deceptively dramatic kids shows on TV. Paul Dini, who went on to work with Alex Ross and would later become the story editor for the first season of "Lost" penned more than a dozen episodes and Bruce Timm had his hands in every episode. The show wasn't afraid to get violent, moral and dark:

And the writers also got creative, acknowledging previous incarnations of the Dark Knight:

Anyone who's read "The Dark Knight Returns" will recognize that clip instantly.

Yes, that's the voice of Adam West.

There isn't really any reason for the show to have existed the way that it did. It was subversive, it was smart, it was moral and it was wedged right between "Animaniacs" and "Power Rangers." And like "Arrested Development," "Deadwood," "The Wire" and every other show that manages to sneak past producers and corporate with its heart still intact, I love it, miss it and watch it way more than I have any right to.

Trevan