Batman: Caped Crusader can’t escape the shadow of nostalgia — or The Animated Series

polygon.com:

It was about 10 minutes into the second episode of Batman: Caped Crusader that I realized something was wrong. Renee Montoya, Gotham police detective and skeptical investigator of both The Batman and his enemies, was piecing together the origins of villain Clayface, a faded Hollywood idol whose features are hideously warped in an attempt to preserve his impeccable appearance. Mind you, there wasn’t anything wrong with the writing in the scene, which was sharply composed by longtime comic writer Greg Rucka, and had enough plucky repartee and hardboiled flavor to do justice to the cartoon’s vintage noir atmosphere. Nor was there any issue with the animation — as smooth as one would expect from the better efforts of latter-day Warner Bros. — or with the largely solid voice acting.

It’s just that every time I thought closely about any of those things, I couldn’t help but be reminded of another, decidedly similar, version of this story: one broadcast 32 years ago during the debut week of Batman: The Animated Series. It was a strange, surreal kind of time warp: the episode was new, but the memories and emotional associations were all plucked straight from my own 6-year-old self, staring wide-eyed as animated thugs poured body-altering chemicals forcibly down the soon-to-be supervillain’s gullet. The scene I was watching was set in the 1940s, but everything about it screamed 1993.

Batman: Caped Crusader is the work of Bruce Timm, the same animator and producer who was the driving force behind Batman: The Animated Seriesthree decades ago. To say that the new series began as a labor of love for Timm would be something of an overstatement: in an interview with Empire Magazine, Timm explained that the project had its genesis with an explicit request from Warner Bros. to do a revival of the ’90s series, a premise Timm initially resisted.

Only gradually, and when Warner proved open to reconceiving, rather than merely resuscitating, the earlier series did Timm become amenable