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Sunday, July 14, 2013

Beware The Batman Review Let's Forget Everything We Learned Making Batman Cartoons

Beware the boring first episode of Beware The Batman. I can't remember watching a cartoon so boring in such a long time. Instead of creating something new or even interesting we have a cobbled mess of ideas from executives on what's cool. Where Batman Brave and the Bold embraced the silly nature and even the most outlandish stories of the Bat mythos into an amazing kids show that worked also for adults and long time fans, Beware gives us slow, boring and thoroughly panned writing.

Batman's first enemies are eco-terrorists? Wow, welcome back the 90's. A rich person is bad, because he's rich, wow I've never seen that story before. A Mr. Toad, now a new villain from recent comics, as executives behind this show didn't want to use the iconic villains to be "new" has super powers? The first episode has Batman fighting a super-human with sound blasts, what is the show going for? Realism with how Batman acts, but hey throw in a super-human frog man? You're not defining the world well at all writing team.

Direction has me at a lost as every time we go to a new setting we have an uncomfortable pan of the place eating a few seconds of time, almost as the animators went, "Look we can do CGI, praise us, please praise us". Sam Liu, a veteran now of WB animation directed and it seems like he forgot everything he learned to make a show exciting. Here's a great point to bring up,  the show is new, but the same staff that has been doing Batman for years is still behind it and there is no new vision just new updates from executives.

The guns in the show, now looking ridiculous due to the Aurora shooting, are so out of place with realism needed. The show promised to change them to look less real and they do, they look like G.I. Joe laser guns that come in different colors.

In comparison the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles CGI cartoon succeeds at being new and different enough for fans to enjoy it, where Beware shows nothing like that so far. No sense of humor either, if Professor Pyg was trying to be funny then the writer for the first episode needs to be sacked.

It may take time for the show to develop into actually being good. Batman Brave and the Bold was terrible at the start too, but slowly became a fun show to watch. The problem is when will this new Batman cartoon get good? With the bizarre scheduling of Cartoon Network and previous WB cartoon series it may take a while. Will the show suddenly have a insane hiatus? Yes, no doubt with how WB animation is run, but soon after it may emerge great, where it will then be cancelled like every other WB animation show to run on CN when it gets good.