Christopher Nolan ruined my experience of the Batman franchise. He made two amazing movies (with a third on the way) based around the character of Bruce Wayne and his crime-fighting alter ego Batman, and I absolutely loved them, along with the rest of the world. They were such a stunning mix of gritty realism and startlingly good character development that was impossible not to have your entire perception changed about what can — and should — be done with superhero films.
Maybe that’s why I can’t bring myself to enjoy Batman: The Brave and the Bold.
Let’s face it: it’s a children’s show, and shouldn’t have to face the same standards with which we view most other things. But, when you consider what shows like Avatar: The Last Airbender did for the cartoon set, some of that leeway slips. And that loss of footing causes Batman: TBatB to become almost laughable in how two-dimensional it is. Case in point: in the first episode of the season, Batman attempts to convince Aquaman to join him in a mission. Aquaman is reluctant, because he’s just depressed. He sits on a beach and plays a sad song on his horn, and he makes mopey, Eeyore-like comments about life and the futility of being a hero. That’d be cool if he wasn’t so darn one-note, with his every word for the majority of the episode being something too trite to have any emotional resonance. (Of course, the show does seem to balance the bad with the good. Aquaman’s reasons for being so forlorn actually involve a whaling expedition he failed to stop, a surprisingly sad flashback.)
Batman is just as two dimensional. He’s the cartoon version of Adam West’s incarnation; gone is Christian Bale’s gravelly-voiced, conflicted superhero. The Batman we see here is confident… and boring.
The highlight of the set has to be the episode in which Batman meets Sherlock Holmes, if only for the fact that it includes Sherlock Holmes. Of course, the character is reduced to the stereotypical image of the character and isn’t nearly as clever as he should be, but the episode is still fairly entertaining.
If you’re not buying for your kids, I’d say not to buy this at all. It borders on unbearable at points, and though it has a few bright moments (the villain Equinox, created for the show, is quite entertaining), if you’re not a die-hard Batman fan or a die-hard seven-year-old, you’ll have been too ruined by Christopher Nolan’s lush interpretation of the character that The Brave and the Bold will seem like child’s play.
The set, which holds thirteen half-hour episodes over two discs, has no special features to speak of beyond subtitles and various languages. It hit shelves on Tuesday, March 15. You can buy it on Amazon for $14.99.
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