How the Mr. Freeze episode “Heart of Ice” for BATMAN: THE Animated Series was born

One of my all time favorite episodes of Batman: The Animated Series it was “Heart of Ice” which beautifully reinvented the classic Batman villain Mr. Freeze. The version of the character in this episode is the best version of the character I’ve seen.

Thanks to the series breakdown we have some interesting details about how that fan-favorite episode actually came to fruition. Co-creator Bruce Tim he explained that he brought up the character in one of their development meetings describing him as “just kind of a throwaway character in the comics”.

Timm continued, “He wasn’t really considered one of Batman’s best villains. And I thought, well, if we can take a character like Mr. Freeze and give him some gravitas, that’s what we should do with all those supporting characters. I specifically said at the time, “What if the ice is not just a tune, but it’s also an emotional thing with him?” For example, if his wife died tragically, and then his response is that he is emotionally closed; he is emotionally frozen.’ And Mitch and Paul are gone [snaps fingers], ‘It is something!’ So we had written it very quickly as a note.

writer Paul Dini he was actually looking to leave Warner Bros. and move on to the next thing when he was a writer and producer Alan Burnett sat down with him and asked him to do something for the series and asked him if he had any story ideas he’d like to do, and he said, “Well, yeah, I’ve got this idea for a story about Mr. Freeze,” and Burnett told him to write it down.

Discussing his initial idea for the story, Dini explained, “I came up with an image of him sitting in a cell, crying, and his tears become snowflakes. I thought, that’s kinda cool, it gets your heart pumping. I thought, let’s work backwards from that. How do I get it to that point? Alan, Bruce and I talked about horror films – we are big fans of classic horror Hammer and Universal horror. There’s probably some Dracula in there, there’s probably some Dr. Phibes in there, there’s some Edgar Allan Poe. Lost love that is dead but maybe not quite gone, and that sadness. So we wove that all together, and that became Mr. Freeze.

You can definitely see all those influences! It’s probably one of the reasons I bonded so much with the story, because I loved those horror films from Universal and Hammer as well.

Burnett went on to share his experience reading the story for the first time: “I sat down and I’m reading this — it was a two or three page story, single spaced [outline]. And I remember just being knocked out by it. And I called the network. I said, ‘I have a great story and Dini wrote it and if that’s not what you’re looking for, forget it. This is what I want to do.’ I called Paul too and said, ‘You have to feature this on the show.’ This is a fabulous story. You have to stay on it!’

Timm added, “This is a good model of how to treat these characters. Even goofy characters, like the Mad Hatter, if you add a little pathos and some genuine human emotion to that character, then suddenly they’re going to be a little more interesting than they were before.”

And this is one of the many reasons why Batman: The Animated Series it was such a great show and the stories were so well done! The creative team knew how to handle these characters properly.