ITT: characters where BTAS fucked up

ITT: characters where BTAS fucked up

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That's probably the only character they fucked up I can't think of anyone else, not including the redesigns.

To be fair, that was Batman pretending to be Croc. He was actually kind of clever in his other appearances. Because the episode is so popular, however, everyone remembers B:TAS Croc as being a retard.

Catwoman is a more boring version of herself. Hugo Strange is a joke villain compared to the comics. Penguin was kind of bland compared to how he was in TNBA.

>No way fag

To be fair, they referenced that joke twice later with real Croc - in Sideshow when he tried to kill Batman with one, and in Trial.
>Hatter: Hang him!
>Harley: Shoot him!
>Croc: HIT HIM WITH A ROCK!

I liked Selina in TNBA. She was one of the few characters who got a definite upgrade (even if her ghost face was weird)

Hugo Strange.

>TAS Catwoman
>"We have to save the rain forests!"
>"We have to save the endangered wild cats!"
>"We have to save the stray cats from Big Pharma!"

Adrienne Barbeau aside, TAS Catwoman was Captain Planet-tier preachy PSA garbage.

say what you will, but the episode where he met the cast of Freaks was awesome

how about characters that it got amazingly right

Croc is great in BTAS, my favorite villain.

>not even wearing a scarecrow costume anymore

It's spooky looking, but it doesn't fit his namesake.

not every scarecrow looks like the one from the wizard of oz

Perhaps Croc had heard about Batman mocking him, and thought it a fitting end.

Penguin was the only character that actually greatly benefited from the WB redesigns, having gotten rid of the movie synergy look in exchange for something more traditional. Everyone else either got just a few not very noteworthy gains, remained more or less the same, or went tumbling down a staircase of horrible.

Because of that Croc keeps being described as dumb in every bio. Fucking feels bad man...

Why waste the effort making it big and bulky though? Scarecrow is better when he's lanky and looks like he has Marfan's Syndrome, because actual scarecrows are low effort hey filled clothing on a stake.

TNBA made him better.

It's the consequence of B:TAS being more influential than every other bit of Batman media except the movies and the Arkhamverse. It's a shame, because The Batman and Beware the Batman actually portrayed Croc as being clever and pragmatic, somewhat subversive of being a dumb brute.

Why can DC never make up their minds if Croc is some guy with a nasty skin condition or an actual crocodile mutant?

That's because her episodes were literally story-edited by a Captain Planet alumni, Sean Catherine Derek. She only worked on the show in its early years, but she was the one who pushed all the eco-friendly messages.

Poison Ivy wasn't really ecologically motivated in the comics before, so I think they wrote her that way to satirize Derek.

When has he been the latter? Sometimes he looks way more monstrous than he should with a skin condition, but that's an artist thing

Shit man, I didn't know that. It actually makes that portrayal of Catwoman make sense now.

I assume Derek was gone by New Batman Adventures and that explains Catwoman's sudden change in characterization to fit her comics portrayal?

He had a rough start with Batman In My Basement but they eventually redeemed themselves

>Penguin was the only character that actually greatly benefited from the WB redesign
But that was the complete opposite of what it did for Penguin
Fine, everyone has their opinion on Burton's Penguin, a lot of people think it's a disgrace, others like it, etc. The TAS crew had it forced on them by WB and eventually worked with it.
I personally think it works much better for a cartoon and I think Penguin's best episode in the show, Birds Of A Feather, wouldn't work if he looked like just a guy with a funny nose. But even apart from that.

TNBA did absolutely no favors to the character by making him look as humanly bland as possible, removing him of all his dramatic flair and personality and sticking him in the Iceberg Lounge, reducing him to cameos. It's the biggest problem with him in the comics right now. He's a nobody who's doing nothing.
He never made any substantial appearences in TNBA. He never made anything more than cameos where he could easily be replaced by Rupert Thorne. The biggest role he had was being villain in a mediocre movie that no one saw and barely needed him.
When he was a monster and a hoodlum in TAS they could insert him in more stories directly opposing Batman and actually doing something

That ain't no skin condition

I always thought Riddler was fucked the most from the WB redesigns.

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>I think Penguin's best episode in the show, Birds Of A Feather, wouldn't work if he looked like just a guy with a funny nose.
Eh, the idea there didn't seem to be that high society looked down on him for his appearance, he just behaved boorishly at parties.

Indeed. I don't see why they regressed and put him in a leotard.

Even JLA has a design that's basically TNBA, but a little better because of the suit.

It's established repeteadly throughout the episode that people mock him for his funny looks. In fact it's the specific mention of them near the climax by Veronica's friend that makes Penguin realize he's been duped. He even makes his own remark at it
>Did she also mention my fine Roman nose ?

Him being a rude slob only adds to it.
And him being a rude slob also wouldn't work as well with a more traditional design, or the one they went with. The Burton design allows them to make him more expressive, more rude and disgusting, a character who actually looks like he can swallow a fish whole.

One of the things that made TAS Penguin so great is precisely the fact that they struck a perfect balance between the cultured gentleman-wannabe, and the uncouth and weird freak of nature.

Or Bruce was just using a real story where Croc threw a big rock at him.

BTAS scarecrow wasn't what I'd call bulky
broad shoulders, yes. But guy was still skinny

Not only that, but in "Sideshow", Croc actually does throw a rock at Batman...

Mad Hatter really suffered from it is well.

We need a version of that with Baby Doll.

>ventriloquist's head looks like a penis
>riddler's in his gay spandex from batman forever
>mad hatter became a manlet

Like a retard, I forgot to post what I was talking about.

Scarecrow's redesign made me think of Jonah Hex every time I saw him.

I though R'as Al Goul was pretty dope.

Dick is sexier in tnba. Love the mullet.

I get the impression the WB people either did not know what was with Riddler and Mad Hatter or they just didn't like them. Because neither ever really appeared again outside of very short background appearances.

t. faggot who never watched BTAS

Hasn't been a skin condition in a long time.
It's rare genetic atavism.

>rare genetic avatism that turns him into a fucking human-crocodile hybrid

That was probably the DCAU's biggest crime. Both Mad Hatter and Riddler appearances in BTAS were some of the series highpoints. I get that it's hard to write for Riddler without it sounding stupid sometimes, but if they can use Mr. Freeze multiple times, they could give Riddler more love.

Honestly now that you mention it, an old western Scarecrow sounds badass. Going around and gassing frontier towns for their riches or convincing the country yokels to help him get revenge on the big city scientists who called him a fraud.

Honestly did not even like Riddler before BTAS, I liked their concept of a guy who is so smart that he would always get away but leaves clues to actually make the challenge.

Even then he still gets away most of the time.

I thought Riddler before that was just pointless, or just not good for anything.

Because having Ickthyosis while hanging out in a sewer would kill you quicker than it would if you were healthy.

The real reason is there was an artist that just wanted to draw a crocodile man and everyone already thought The Lizard over at marvel was a cool idea. It stuck probably because of the former reason, there is just no way you can have a diseased man endure and even prefer a life swimming through shit and eating people. Now if he was a reptilian mutant it would make sense because he'd have conflicting, inhuman instincts to live in water.

All his out of comic incarnations have given him reptilian traits.

He isn't actually supposed to be a crocodile despite some designs giving him an actual croc head, it's supposed to be reptilian traits already in our DNA being activated.

Because we don't know what the last "reptilian" common ancestor all mammals share DC has room to bullshit.

Either way Croc is still not the most bullshit meta human of Gotham rogues, that title goes to "How am I biologically possible?" Clayface.

Atavism just makes him able to grow scales, have reptile pupils, that kind of thing. When he was in a freakshow he sawed his teeth to further progress that picture of monster.
However, Hush used some kind of fuckery and made him mutate into more of a crocodile and as time passes and the more he abandons human civility the more he mutates.
Personally I prefer the whole Hush thing retconned, I don't like my Croc with snouts much less tails.

>Either way Croc is still not the most bullshit meta human of Gotham rogues, that title goes to "How am I biologically possible?" Clayface.
the 3rd clayface was pretty awesome
basically a guy with a melted face who can melt other people's faces

>that title goes to "How am I biologically possible?" Clayface.

Swamp Thing situation. He's a Clay Elemental that still thinks it's Matt Hagen. He was such a good actor he convinced himself he was still a man.

Well that sounds like a total DC universe explanation. In terms of an isolated Gotham Batman universe they've always half-assed it as some unexplained biological thing.

In the animated series wasn't it some sort of skin ointment?

>In the animated series wasn't it some sort of skin ointment?

In the animated series Hagan was in a car accident that fucked up his face, and he uses some freaky genetic cream to twist it back to normal. When he borrows too much money from the mob to get more cream, and then doesn't pay for it, the mob essentially ties him down and drowns him in it, in a scene that I still find deeply disturbing to this day. That's how his whole body gets turned into the cream and he becomes Clayface.

Atavism is the proccess in which embryos go through ancestral species traits as they develop, such as developing gills.

His condition is described as "reverse Atavism" where traits of ancestral species, specifically reptilian traits are manifesting.

So he's a blob of stem cells then?

yeah none of those three characters there really did anything during the TNBA era, they pretty much exist only as crowd fodder

>Either way Croc is still not the most bullshit meta human of Gotham rogues, that title goes to "How am I biologically possible?" Clayface.
I've always figured Clayface's mutation is similar to how Plastic Man's functions, albeit more flawed

one idea I always thought could work would be to make Croc's mutations explicitly supernatural in nature, like he's basically a Deep One hybrid, except replace the fish man part with a crocodile person

that's one way of describing it

Animated series it was some shady chemical compound that restructured flesh on a cellular level, though it was highly addictive and wore off. Dagget's thugs drowned him in it and the formula ended up completely saturating every cell of his body. Somehow. Instead of DNA that says he has flesh and bones he has cells that say he's a mutant clay monster. His separate creations even gained sentience.

Main DC universe the common explanation is handwaved as a latent metahuman gene. Half the people in the DC universe have the potential to become Marvel style mutants, they just need exposure to some traumatic or lethal yet thematically ironic event to awaken that power.

The definition of atavism is "evolutionary throwback", so snakes with legs, chickens with teeth and so on.
This case would be atavism then.

>Instead of his DNA saying he's flesh and bones it says he's a clay monster

That's some Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs tier understanding of genetics there DC.

Hey man that's comics. Eighty years ago it was sulfuric acid and hard water. Fifty years ago it was radiation did it. Twenty years ago it was genetic engineering. Today it's nanomachines. Who knows what it'll be tomorrow?

Eh, its not that more unbelievable than 'radiocative spider' or 'thrown into chemicals'. Typical comic stuff.

Thrown into chemicals is believable depending on the mutation.

I'm not a fan either of the reboot penguin. Aside from becoming a cameo character they removed any sense of character from the design. How in the hell is this supposed to convey any sort of emotion?

They were probably considered too "cerebral" for the target audience by WB Kids executives; less with the talky talky and more with the punchy punchy.

Bane all the fucking way. Timm admitted that none of them even read Knightfall before doing him. The only decent representation he had was in a nightmare.

How did BTAS fuck up Batman as a character? I thought they did him well enough.

>I don't see why they regressed and put him in a leotard.
Like almost everything about TNBA: Because it's easier to animate.

>Scarecrow's redesign made me think of Jonah Hex every time I saw him.
iirc they were going for a southern gothic preacher look.

I like this explanarion. As far as Clayface is concerned I'd rather they just handwave with magic clay and leave it at that. A mass of magic sentient clay that inherited his acting skills and convinced itself it's the real guy sounds more interesting.

It's a nice look, but she's a weak character.

How many 'save catwoman' episodes were there, again?

>tfw they were going to have either a birds of prey or sirens episode (forget which) in tnba but the executives threw a fucking fit when they asked if tim drake couldn't be in a single episode

Fuck, did anybody actually watching Batman as a kid self insert as Tim Drake? I only liked Robin in Teen Titans. While watching Batman you were focusing on Batman, not the dumb kid sidekick.

Still better than Jim Lee's/Jeph Loeb giant crocodile.

>hard water
That shit will never stop being funny. Mostly because there were just so many failed heroes with that origin.

Magic in batman should be kept to a bare minimum though.

I have a better idea, his mind was synthesized into a single-cell colony organism that lives and germinates within mud. The creatures swim and manipulate surrounding soil with advanced cilia and flagellum.

And that pisses me off

I loved it when Riddler and Mad Hatter actually had an episode cause they may not have been much in the fighting bracket

But they used their brains to get shit done

Explain

I love that they just kinda threw that shit in around the late 80's to explain why there were so many Marvel-esque characters faffing about.

Sometimes I wonder if Return of the Joker wasn't partly Timm and Dini taking out their frustration at being forced to include Tim so much.

The original Flash got his powers from inhaling "hard water vapors."

Like anything successful, this was shamelessly ripped off in varying degrees by other rags. While skimming golden age comics (a whole fuckload of them--especially at Marvel--Are just failed pitches), I ran into variations of Hard Water at least five times.

Exactly. He conveys no emotion or flair, and as a result Paul Williams had nothing to work with so the character sounded bored too.
I get that they were basing themselves off a more classic Penguin who didn't look like a mutant, but that Penguin could convey a great deal of character too. You put Golden Age/Silver Age Penguin next to Burton's Penguin and you get two different takes that, regardless, still let his personality come through.
You put Batman TAS Penguin next to TNBA Penguin, and you get one really expressive and animated character taking the best from both worlds, and one really bland and disinterested one-note caricature.

For some baffling reason, the majority of the redesigns for TNBA just took the worst possible choices for the characters. They struck gold with Scarecrow but everyone else suffered.

>Magic in batman should be kept to a bare minimum though.
I don't know if I agree with this. I think magic based villains fit Batman better than super science ones, provided the magic is kept solely as part of the origin and not the character's whole gimmick. As long as Clayface isn't casting spells, magic clay works fine.

What was so special abou hard water back then?

To me, the perfect penuin design is basically Burton's but with normal hands. Basicall make him as ugly and repulsive as possible, but without anything that's unambiguously a deformity like syndactyly.

The common folk didn't understand it, they just heard from the news that it was dangerous, same as radiation in the 60's.

Like shit man, we used to give cancer patients radium. We would just fucking tell them to hold it all day, because maybe it would fix the cancer. People really underestimate how much medical science has advanced since the 40's.

Well most of batman's successful rogues are really neither, at least of their own physical condition. They do however tend to lead towards the science angle with villains such as Ivy, Freeze, Mad Hatter, Scarecrow, ect.

If Clayface must be magic then you pretty much refrain from explaining it, keeping it as lovecraftian as possible. Guy gets buried in dirt, becomes the dirt, scientists brought into Arkham completely baffled.

>Huge Strange was a joke villain

Your implying he wasn't in Arkham City?

That's basically how he's drawn in All-Star Batman currently.

Something like this, then.
Honestly I'm fine with the hands in their original context. They had a legitimate reason to be a part of his design in the movie, to reinforce him as a "genuine freak" compared to the likes of Catwoman and Batman. And it's a nice visual symbol for The Penguin. Like his nose and body and ugliness, it's something he can try to cover up as much as he wants, but it's there and everyone knows it, especially himself. Plus, it brings him closer to the Nosferatu inspiration.
But it's really unnecessary and tacky when you try and put it on anywhere but the movie. Penguin is already misshapen. An actual deformity is just unnecessary overkill. Same thing with that dumb "broken bottle as an eyeglass" the Arkham series tried to give him.

>If Clayface must be magic then you pretty much refrain from explaining it, keeping it as lovecraftian as possible.
I agree. This is what I meant with handwaving it with magic. No need to explain it in detail. Batman doesn't know what clayface is, clayface doesn't know what he is, he's basically an urban-myth-tier monster come alive in the streets of Gotham.

>mad hatter became a manlet
You can blame Jeph Loeb and Grant Morrison for that one.
In fact you can pin most of what went wrong with Mad Hatter on them

I think the 2nd clayface was basically getting the normal clayface powers from magical pits in a similar manner that Ra's was healing himself

They explain the redesign and idea here
youtube.com/watch?v=owaMoWmD2vE

A scarecrow is just something propped up to look human to scare crows.

>"Scared you, didn't I?"

I always appreciated that Jeffrey Combs read the line almost like Scarecrow was fascinated by the reaction he was getting and expected Bruce to feel similarly, not just jerking off to it.

One thing they got right is not showing Crane at all. Scarecrow is far more effective as a villain without a backstory, beyond being fascinated with the effects of fear, and perhaps implied to involve the scientific method.

Revealing him to be a pasty little redhead who himself is a sniveling coward is certainly cute, but it destroys any story he's in from that point forward. It just becomes a game of "where's the gas?"

Scarecrow is best used as a foil to that aspect of Batman: using fear to control others, just like Harvey mirrors Bruce's dual life, or Penguin his wealth and empire. Honestly, the less nailed down Scarecrow is, the more effective he is. He's the sort of criminal you should never be allowed to catch or unmask.

>A guy dressed as a scarecrow isn't scary.
They didn't try hard enough.

I don't think I've ever seen a comic design of Scarecrow that looked scary. A few are "cool" looking. The lantern design usually gets brought up. But never scary.

It can be done. I mean the redesign featured in that was great in all aspects except the broad shoulders.

The idea should be almost as if you shoved a withered corpse on to a stake, patched it up with some leather or shredded sack and made it into a scarecrow.

I think the problem with the design is they always make him chinless and take the "farm cloths" too seriously. Even Nolan's simplifying it to just a mask was better.

I'm only talking in the context between B:TAS and the comics. He was a goofy, one-off villain. I didn't like that he was punked in Arkham City, but at least he had a good voice actor and better dialogue.

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I feel like Arkham Knight Scarecrow could have been pretty scary, with the idea that his face is so fucked up you can't tell where the burlap mask ends and his face begins and reimagining him as sort of a Mason Verger type of character.
But the general design is way too cluttered, the hoodie kind of obstructs the face, the gas mask elements are too oversized and he looks too much like the protagonist of Dishonored.

I think this artist does my favorite Killer Croc.

yeah. make the scarecrow into the blair witch esque thing seems like a decent path.

More rural american horror. fitting in the the scarecrow name.