‘Batman: Caped Crusader’ Is A Stellar Throwback With Some Contemporary Twists

It brings me great pleasure to announce that Batman: Caped Crusader is the best bit of Batman media in ages; at least since 2022’s The Batman – directed by Matt Reeves, who’s an executive producer on this Prime Video series alongside J.J. Abrams – but possibly since before then, depending on your tastes.

Any TV show is a product of many (hopefully) talented people, but Caped Crusader knows how to coast on name value. Much like how Star Wars fans are more inclined to accept something with Dave Filoni’s name attached, Bat-fans know what to expect from Bruce Timm. The co-creator of Batman: The Animated Series and the co-director of Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, arguably the best Batman movie ever made, Timm is royalty in DC Comics animation.

And this is a series clearly meant to evoke the glory days of The World’s Greatest Detective, both by matching the visuals and tone with Timm’s earlier work and by leaning into the pulpy, noirish origins of Batman as a detective in a corrupt gothic city. There’s even a monochrome title sequence with the italicized credits font, like the cover of a Raymond Chandler novel.

The back-to-basics retooling is taken to something of an extreme in the plot, with Batman so early in his crime-fighting career that many don’t believe he even exists. The mythic connotations fit Bats well, and there’s a distinct pleasure in seeing old-timey gangsters in suits pointing Tommy guns at what they think might be a real monster. But across its ten episodes Caped Crusader settles back into the usual rhythms, wheeling out several of Batman’s rogues and supporting characters, though sometimes in slightly new variants.

And this is the other smart touch. Despite leaning harder than ever into a very familiar era of Batman, the show cleverly tweaks many established characters and Bat fixtures with more contemporary touches. Commissioner Gordon (Eric Morgan Stuart) and his daughter Barbara (Krystal Joy Brown) are Black, Harley Quinn (Jamie Chung) is Asian-American and openly queer – though the latter isn’t exactly a new portrayal these days – and Penguin (Minnie Driver) is now a woman.

These might seem like tokenistic changes, and in a way they are, but they add a new vibe to really long-standing characterizations, and the new stuff works well with the Art Deco classicism in so many other areas. And many characters, like Catwoman (Christina Ricci) and Harvey Dent (Diedrich Bader, who has voiced Batman himself multiple times in the past), are very close to their classic interpretations. Nothing, even the gender-swapped Penguin, feels like it’s ill-fitting or has been done in bad faith to antagonize the fanbase.

Batman: Caped Crusader | Image via Prime Video

The only real downside of Caped Crusader is that despite all this it’s still telling what amounts to a fairly run-of-the-mill Batman story. The plot isn’t bad by any means, but it’s not revolutionary and often relies on tension from the audience’s intimate familiarity with the character and his mythology (see the Harvey Dent arc, which has been depicted so many times at this point that it feels like going through the motions.)

Being set so early in Batman’s vigilante days helps because it allows for less-typical relationships with characters like Gordon, who has never even seen Batman at the start of the series. But early-career Batman isn’t a new concept either, especially since stories like Year One are not just popular but widely considered to be among the best Batman stories ever. At this point, we know the deal.

But the nostalgia is undeniable. Caped Crusader doesn’t get near the best episodes of TAS, and it’s no Mask of the Phantasm, but it’s a remarkably solid evocation of those peak periods of Batman storytelling. It finds a just-right balance between silliness and sincerity, understanding which aspects to respectfully preserve and which to cleverly update, and it’s a tremendous amount of fun for as long as it lasts.

With superheroes having fallen out of public favor a little thanks to the implosion of the MCU and whatever it is DC has been doing these last few years, sometimes it’s nice to be able to enjoy an uncomplicated reminder of why these characters acquired so much cultural cache in the first place. Like X-Men ’97, Caped Crusader is a throwback to a simpler age of superhero storytelling, where animation was suitable for kids but engaging for adults, and the cynicism hadn’t set in yet.

Those were the days.