ROUND ROBIN CHALLENGE: BEST ADAPTION!

THIS IS MY THIRD POST TODAY 🙀

My other posts today were  the initial challenge post that can be found here!

AND

A random image post featuring me meeting Beetlejuice in 1990, which can be found here!

Now its time for my take on the question that I came up with for this week's
I could take the easy route and say the DC Animated Universe.
The take that was done was so good that it spun into many cartoons. It obviously all began with Fox's Batman: The Animated Series (TAS), then it went away briefly unril the WB network began.
They premiered Superman and the New Batman Adventures, but they did not stop there. 3 other series would air on WB.
Cartoon Network however would get Justice League and its spin-off Justice League Unlimited (which even gave Batman Beyond a true "Series Finale" in the episode "Epilogue" in which we discover that Terry was always meant to become Batman from the day he was born as he was in reality a sort of a clone of Bruce Wayne! How I feel  about that will be handled in a future article.)
WB continued the DCAU during that (as I mentioned above) with the highly successful Batman Beyond,
The less successful Batman Beyond spin-off "The Zeta Project", and
"Static Shock!" Static was shocking because it was based on the DC imprint Milestone comics and not DC proper and we had no clue it was a part of the DCAU until season 2 or 3 when Static teamed with Batman!
However I am not choosing the DCAU as best adaption. I am choosing the cartoon that started it all: Batman. I feel that it was true to its source material  more so than any other cartoon or tv series that came before it (except maybe the b & w series as I never saw that one so I cannot speak abut it). Also everything else has tried (and in most cases failed) to repeat it.
Unlike the other shows in the universe, Batman stayed on its course as it was the only one at the time. In fact with the exception of the Grey Ghost (Adam West) and Jonah Hex there were no guests that were not Batman related until the "New Adventures" began and even then we only saw Superman and Supergirl!
We did not see Robin until well into the series and when he did come it never felt forced. Even Batgirl felt organic (although she only appeared in a handful of episodes in TAS). I will say that the FOX era episodes (BAtman: TAS, Adventures of Batman and Robin) felt much more like the source material and in fact once we got to The New adventures, it began to feel forced and less "adult" like. I loved how TAS felt dark and that was something that at the time was unheard of in a kids cartoon. In fact Batman: TAS did not just pave the way for the DCAU, but also many non DC cartoons that would come long after it!

Comments

  1. I was never a big fan of DC but I loved their storytelling and writing versus anything Marvel released cartoon wise.

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    1. I preferred Marvel in comics, but the DCAU was so much better than the marvelverse. Even now the Arrowverse beats Shield anyday (I am not a fan of Arrow though).

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  2. Now i may have to go look into that. I have largely skipped the animated stuff, both Marvel and DC, in favor of the movies, but this sounds intriguing. I did watch a couple of the DC animated movies,,, Crisis on 2 earths and justice league DOOM and was impressed

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    1. The DCAU is well worth your time. It was also one of the first times that a "shared universe" was attempted (marvel tried to but DC did it better as Marvel kept contradicting themselves and dc only did that with Aquaman and GL in JL, as they appeared in Supes differently!), something everyone does now.

      One thing to keepin mind, those movies that yu mentioned were made for older audiences and the DCAU was for kids but they still were great as they were made as cartoons that parents could enjoy with their chidren hence the dark stories in Batman. Also a fun fact, Bruce Timm, the guy who is currently doing the DC animated films, was one of the two guys who created Batman TAS and the DCAU as a whole! (The other I believe was Paul Dini.)

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  3. Batman: The Animated Series was AMAZING! One of the best depictions of Batman and his Rogues Gallery. I remember it was such a big deal that Fox would run it in prime time!

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    1. Yep, in fact the first ever televised episode of Batman was on Sunday at 7PM I believe (this is when Sunday prime time began at 7PM and not 8PM!) O still remember it and although it is not technically the first episode, to this day I still think of "On Leathery Wings" as the pilot as it was the first televised ep, and it is my favorite episode of the whole series and where my love for the MAN BAT began! That was on September 6, 1992. They did air many more in prime time, very few other Fox Kids shows ever did that (Power Rangers did with the 3 part season 2 premiere - I remember this as part 1 aired on my birthday that year.)

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