To celebrate Superman’s 75-year anniversary last year, WB/DC put out a new live-action film, Man of Steel, released an animated one direct to home video (Superman: Unbound), and received all sorts of media coverage in relation to the character’s anniversary and release of Man of Steel. They also had Zack Snyder and Batman: The Animated Series/Superman: The Animated Series mastermind Bruce Timm team up to produce a short animated film commemorating each stage of the character’s history.
For Batman’s 75 year anniversary, they have two animated films going direct to video (Son of Batman, Batman: Assault on Arkham), and the hugely anticipated video game Batman: Arkham Knight for the Playstation 4 and XBox One. Plus, they have this fancy new logo, which will be attached to all material tying into the anniversary celebration:
As it turns out, though, they also had Bruce Timm do a special short animated film to celebrate Batman’s origins as a pulp hero, presenting homage to the first appearance of Doctor Strange in the comics.. I must have missed the press release announcing as much because I had no idea this thing was coming until seeing it attached to the end of this Wednesday’s new episode of Teen Titans Go!:
I cannot describe the joy I felt hearing Kevin Conroy’s voice come out of Batman’s mouth at the end. It’s only one line, but it functions like the exclamation point on an otherwise awesome cartoon, as if to validate everything by saying, “With all due respect to Bruce Greenwood and Jason O’Mara, who have done a perfectly fine job voicing Batman in the DC Animated films, you know it’s really Batman when it’s Kevin Conroy doing the voice.”
I wrote an article elsewhere on the site arguing that DC and Cartoon Network should adapt DC Nation Short “Tales of Metropolis”into a TV series to run alongside Teen Titans Go! Well, if they wanted to just turn this Bruce Timm thing into a full series I’d be fine with that. Of course, they kind of already did that: it was called Batman: The Animated Series. Quick, to Amazon Prime for some Batman binge-viewing.
In case you missed it, here’s the Superman cartoon Timm helped make last year:
Source: io9.com