How BATMAN: THE Animated Series Came Together; Watch the film of the original pitch

Batman: The Animated Series it is considered one of the greatest animated shows ever produced. It was such an amazing show with amazing art style and compelling stories. So how did this show come about? Well, according to the co-creator Bruce Timthe whole thing was “a fluke”.

In a recent interview with Vulture, Timm explained that he just finished working on the first season of Tiny Toon Adventures as a character designer and has no ambitions to become a producer or director. But one day, the president of Warner Bros. Animation, Jean Mac Curdyhe has a big meeting and has exposed some properties for possible shows to develop, one of them was Batman, which caught Timm’s attention.

Tim said: “The first Tim Burton the movie was out and it was a big hit. And the moment I heard that, it was like, Pow! This is what I want to do. So I went back to my desk after the meeting, put away all my Tiny Toon stuff, and just started drawing Batman. Within a couple of hours, I had this vision of Batman on paper. It was a new interpretation. Ever since I was a kid, Batman has always been one of my favorite things to draw, but I’ve never been able to find a version of Batman that I quite like. Every Batman I’d drawn before was always based on someone else’s Batman. This was the first time I had a concrete, Bruce Timm-style Batman in my head. It was almost like it was just waiting there to be drawn. So the next time Jean had one of those meetings, I brought her my drawings and said, “I was thinking this might be a nice way to go.” And she said, ‘This is… this is perfect!’

From there co-creator Eric Radomsky, who was a background painter in Tiny Toons, threw his hat into the ring and was included. He did some background styles for the potential series. Jean liked what she saw and brought Timm and Radomski together to discuss the development of the show.

Timm explained, “He commissioned Eric and I to make a short film about Batman, like a little pilot film, just a few minutes long. Mostly silent, no dialogue or anything, to show Fox what we were planning to do if the show sold.

Timm and Radomski made a great team and when they discussed what the short film should involve, they discussed all the things they liked about Tim Burton’s 1989 film, but felt they needed to do something unique to animation and they had to be able to do it! Timm said, “We didn’t know how it would work under the camera in terms of, would the black in character be too dark? What will this be like? We were more figuring out the guts of the actual technical production of it than what it would be like as a series.

Eventually they landed on the concept, animated it, and scored it with Danny Elfman’s score from the first Batman movie, and of course, added some sound effects.

Radomski said, “We never imagined they would hand the show over to us and let us make it happen. We thought, at the very least, we could be art directors, to have some influence on what it might be like. But I don’t think either of us thought they were just going to hand us the keys to the castle. But that first minute-and-a-half chunk ended up being the confidence Jean needed to hand us the keys and say, “You guys know how to do this, so go out and make it 65.” We were both amazed. We were like, ‘How the fuck are we going to do this?’”

Neither has produced a series before, so they weren’t in over their heads, and it was kind of a big gamble for WB. But they managed to put together a team and pull it off brilliantly! Timm said, “What we wanted to do was a little bit more adult than, say, shows like GI Joe or Transformers or He-Man. Those shows were deliberately designed for little kids and no one else. If you were 13, that was pretty much the cutoff point for a show like He-Man or G.I. Joe. But we wanted to make a show that kids and adults would like too. Basically, we were making the show for ourselves.

Writer and producer Alan Burnett was actually trying to break out of animation when Batman: The Animated Series it was brought to him. He was tired of doing children’s shows, but he was excited about what he saw in the short film and was happy to be a part of it. He said: “What convinced me was the trailer that Bruce Timm and Eric Radomski had done for the show. I told her, ‘Listen, if you want to be Batman, you’re going to have to have guns and fistfights.’ And that’s when he showed me the trailer. I really didn’t believe I would be allowed to have guns and fist fights. But she insisted that I would have freedom, and so I came to myself.

writer Paul Dini he then got involved, and when he saw what they were doing he started “writing more towards that sensibility, looking a lot at Hitchcock and film noir, and ways to play that as little mini-films.”

There were three rules that the creative team had to follow while developing the series, those rules were: “No aliens. No ghosts. And no Humanitas Awards — you know, no pro-social stories. Burnett said, “We just wanted to have fun and give the audience some fun emotions; some real Batman thrills.

This is exactly what they have achieved! It’s pretty amazing what they’ve accomplished! They just don’t make animated shows like this anymore. This was the golden age of animation!

You can watch the original Batman animated short that Timm and Radomski created below.