An Oral History of Batman: The Animated Series

As the 1990s dawned, television audiences weren’t used to a dark version of the Dark Knight. America had briefly gone crazy for the 1960s series Batman, starring the late Adam West and an array of over-the-top character actors, but that had been camp at its most frivolous. Oddly enough, it took a kids’ cartoon to show TV-watchers the emotional and visual weight of the Caped Crusader. Debuting on Fox Kids as an after-school show in 1992, the Warner Bros.-produced Batman: The Animated Series changed the titular character’s mainstream profile forever. It consisted of 110 episodes (the latter 25 of them billed as The New Batman Adventures), spun off into a theatrically released film called Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, and is now regarded as one of the greatest collection of superhero stories ever told. Here, 25 years after it debuted, is the history of the show in the words of its creators and stars.

The show began development in 1990, largely with staff who had been working on the Steven Spielberg-produced Fox Kids cartoon Tiny Toon Adventures.

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